Beautiful Teams

Ugly As Beautiful

Beautiful and ugly are tricky words to apply to groups of people. If I say the Mona Lisa or Mount McKinley is beautiful, I'm claiming it is attractive or well crafted: I'm making an aesthetic judgment of an object we can collectively observe. I can point to it, describe it, throw tomatoes at it, or even allow you to compare your judgment of the thing as seen by your eyes with how I describe what I see in mine. I do believe beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but two people with different eyes are still talking about an object that exists outside of either person. However, to claim that a team, a club, or even a nation is beautiful makes less sense. A team is defined by a set of relationships between people, and relationships don't exist as physical things. Judging the aesthetics of non-physical things stretches the entire idea of aesthetics. It puts beauty not in the eye, but in the mind, where we cannot collectively observe the same thing. Rupert, the team captain, will have one sense of what the team is, while Cornelius, the team mascot, will have another. And certainly, people playing on a competing team will have a third. And none of them can point to "the team" as a point of reference with the same certainty they could about the Mona Lisa or Mount McKinley.

The only use of beauty applied to teams that makes sense is the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi. Roughly, wabi-sabi means there is a special beauty found in things that have been used. That pair of shoes ...