This is fabulously written piece, from the genre of the tireless reader: Do Sports Build Character or Damage It? by Mark Edmundson. Let me just snip a few seasonings for the fast twitchers:

The first year I played high-school football, the coaches were united in their belief that drinking water on the practice field was dangerous. … Some of us began without proper equipment. I started without cleats. But that was not a problem: Soon someone who wore your shoe size would quit, and then you could have theirs. … I was buttery soft around the waist, nearsighted, not especially fast, and not agile at all. It turned out that underneath the soft exterior, I had some muscle, and that my lung capacity was well developed, probably from vicious bouts of asthma I’d had as a boy.
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One night, scrimmaging, I went head-on with the star running back, a guy who outweighed me by 20 pounds and was far faster and stronger. I did what the coaches said: I squared up, got low (in football, the answer to every difficulty is to get low, or get lower), and planted him. I did that?, I asked myself.
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Mostly, I liked the whole process because it was so damned hard.
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The game was much more about practice than about the Saturday-afternoon contests. And practice was about trying to do something over and over again, failing and failing, and then finally succeeding part way. … I simply never got very good. But I came to see that I was actually quite a success. I was able to show up every day, to work hard at something that was extremely difficult for me, and to improve little by little.

Straight from the dirty Russian school of sports achievement, only this author’s story doesn’t end with a coaching plum.

No one really noticed my improvements, least of all the coaches. But I did, and I took great pleasure in them. Football became a prototype for every endeavor in later life that required lonely, pains­taking work and that was genuinely demanding. Through the game, I learned to care more about how I myself judged this or that performance of mine and less about how the world did.
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After the grand belly-flop [in the postgraduate job market], I knew that I’d have to work on a level far higher than anything I’d approached. … I began living in the library … I built a wall of books on my table, as though to cloister myself, like a medieval monk. Did I call on the old spirit of double sessions? Quietly, I did. I kept it largely to myself, since most scholars don’t see much symmetry between what they do and what runners and jumpers and (especially) blockers and tacklers attempt. … “Diversity of strength will attend us,” Wordsworth says, “if but once we have been strong.”
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Hear the chorus of “amen, brother” reigning down from the old boys lounge.

Sports are many things, and one of those things is an imitation of heroic culture. They mimic the martial world; they fabricate the condition of war. (Boxing doesn’t fabricate war; it is war, and, to my mind, not a sport. …)
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In the Western heroic tradition, the paragon of the humane warrior is Homer’s Hector, prince of the Trojans. … Even on an unexceptional day, Hector can stand up to Ajax, the Greek giant, and trade blow for blow with him. Yet as fierce as Hector can be, he is also humane. … Hector can turn it off. He can stop being the manslayer that he needs to be out on the windy plains of Troy and become a humane husband and father. … In a sense, he is the figure that every fighter and athlete should emulate.
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After Hector kills [] Patroclus, Achilles goes on a rampage, killing every Trojan he can. All humanity leaves him; all mercy is gone. At one point, a Trojan fighter grasps his knees and begs for mercy. Achilles taunts him: Look at me, he says, so strong and beautiful, and some day I, too, shall have to die. But not today. Today is your day. … Achilles is drunk on rage, the poem tells us. His rational mind has left him, and he is mad with the joy of slaughter. … This ability to go mad—to become berserk—is inseparable from Achilles’ greatness as a warrior. It is part of what sets him above the more circumspect Hector on the battlefield. When Hector encounters Achilles for the last time, Hector feels fear. Achilles in his wrath has no idea what fear is, and that is part of what makes him unstoppable.

What was it Bruce was saying yesterday about Anderson and Billy Smith?

They leave the field of combat or of play and are still ferocious, or they can be stirred to ferocity by almost nothing. They let no insult pass. A misplaced word sends them into a rage. A mild frustration turns them violent.
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Some athletes take crude pleasure in dominating others; they like to humiliate their foes, off the field as well as on it. … All too often, the players who go all out on the field but can’t readily turn it off elsewhere are the best players. They’re the most headlong, the most fearless, the most dedicated. … By his own account, [Lawrence] Taylor led the life of a beast—drunk, brawling, high on coke, speeding in his car: He was a peril to anyone who came near him.
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Playing football made me more confident; it gave me powers of resolve that I’d draw on later in life, and I’m grateful for those things. But it also made me more brutal. I came to crave the physical stimulation of the game—I came to like hitting and even being hit. When the season ended, I found myself recreating the feeling of football in a string of fistfights and all-in brawls. … Once the punch in the mouth is part of your repertoire—once you’ve done it a few times as an adult—it never really goes away.
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When males murmurate under dismal drizzle, they often riot like spoiled suburban frat-brats. They appoint by quiet consensus an alpha jock and follow his lead. They become more literal, more obvious; they jostle and compete (ed. and pose for the evening news)
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Sport is also—it almost goes without saying—an intensely hierarchical world. … In sports your identity and prowess are one and the same. When one teammate looks at another, what he sees first is how good the other is. He makes a quick calculation: Am I more or less able than he is? Or are we the same? If we are, what can I do to surpass him?

What was it our ankle-seeing doctor chick was saying the other day about sports ego? Just like a women not to give a man a cinquante chance.

Everyone has a place in the hierarchy, and that hierarchy is constantly shifting. This sense of relative human importance is almost completely unsentimental—there’s an accuracy of evaluation in sports that presides nowhere else in the world. There’s no affirmative action on a football field. Everyone on a team knows who he is better than and who is better than him, and he acts his part.
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Yet a world of omnipresent hierarchy is also, by definition, a world that is low on compassion and kindness. … The world of sports is a pagan world … Professional athletes spend a lot of time pretending that they are part of the compassionate world …

On the whole, hockey players manage with far less pretense, not to exclude any errant ex-pat MBA MVPs.

But there is something in the drive for glory that despises all reflection. A certain sort of glory-seeking must in fact overcome reflection, as Achilles shows, and go headlong.

So there’s my1% extract in the prelude to Wikipedia darkness. It’s a sad world where great writing can’t be admired and distilled for the broader audience. I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s certainly not SOPA.