During the years I lived at the Zen Center, I was part of a coterie of ten or so hardcore sport devotees. We were a loosely knit group, and others joined in freely as the spirit moved them. In particular, certain special occasions---a crucial World Series game, the Superbowl---would widen our circle, and sometimes our ranks would swell in number several times over. My most vivid memory of this was when one of our inner circle, Chuck Davis, arranged for the pay-per-view reception of the second Sugar Ray Leonard-Roberto Duran fight. As it happened, the match was to occur on the night of Maezumi Roshi’s weekly lecture. In the upstairs of the building next to the zendo (meditation hall) was a small commons room with a TV set, and on fight night about forty of us crammed ourselves in there like frat kids in a phone booth. Some myself included came dressed---disguised, really---in our meditation robes, so our comings and goings would go undetected. I was later told that Roshi expressed surprise at all the zendo’s empty seats and that he was visibly puzzled by the sound of cheers that, depite our attempts to muffle them, erupted periodically.

...For me, and I think for my Buddhist cohorts, one of the pleasures of sport was that it offered respite from the weighty introspection of Zen training. This is not to say that we rejected the notion that participation in sport could in some way enrich the inner life. But our disinterest, I think, reflected a certain skepticism about approaching sport as Zen by another name. We shared a recognition, intuitive and largely unspoken, that sport has a basis that is intrinsically its own and is distinct from that of a meditative path.

…sports delight us because they are not the Game of Life, because they offer liberty from the encumbrance of life’s practical concerns. Sports are good in themselves. They are natural expressions of the energies native to human life. They need not be justified in accordance with purposes that are not their own. 

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