The old baseball hand Wes Westrum once said, "Baseball is like church. Many attend, but few understand." Apply this point not just to baseball but to sport in general and you have, in a nutshell, the subject of this book.

In framing his analogy, Westrum might well have used another example. Any field of human endeavor requiring sophisticated and loving appreciation would do---Impressionistic painting, jazz, Shakespearean drama---the list is endless. But he chose religion, and whatever his intent may have been, the choice is altogether proper. Although sport is a most secular activity in a highly secularized world, in its ability to provoke wonder, to elicit deep feeling, to grace our lives with glimpses of timeless beauty and freedom---in these and other ways sport is, though not religion, something religious.

***

But, what is it that these athletes are really experiencing? Cooper shares what many athletes feel and intuit:

...For Michael Jordan, "The rim seems like a big ol' huge bucket." According to the New York Knicks' John Starks, "It's like you see something just before it really happens." John Olerud of the Toronto Blue Jays says "When things are going well, there seems to be more time to reach to a pitch. And it doesn't matter what that pitch is. It's just that it feels like you have more time to react." 

***

"Playing in the Zone is a fine essay on the spiritual dimensions of sport, filled with both wonder and discernment. Cooper's love of his subject is tempered by his clarity about various excesses, confusions, and pathologies associated with athletic endeavor, including facile equations of sport with religious practice. Sport cannot equal the sacred traditions as a means of cultivating the inner life. but, as this book makes clear, sport does possess its own unique genius for revealing and opening to people the spirit's 'gem-like' flame."

- MICHAEL MURPHY, author of Golf in the Kingdom and The Future of the Body 

From PLAYING IN THE ZONE by Andrew Cooper.
       (C) 1998 by Andrew Cooper. Reprinted by arrangement
       with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston,
       www.shambhala.com