Alas, probably not, especially if (a) the crowd is very large and (b) your seat would have been filled by another fan, especially if (c) that fan would have been cheering for your team and about as loudly as you. But even if a-c are not true, it's not clear how much the cheering of the fans changes the players' performances and hence the outcome of the game. On the other hand, it always amazes me how significant the home field/court advantage is in every sport, including soccer (I presume that when you said "football match" you were referring to the beautiful game, not American football). What could explain the fact that a team is at least 10% more likely to win at home than away against the same opponent? (OK, I'm making up the 10% figure, but if anything I bet it's low, and Wikipedia says in English Premier League home teams are almost 40% more likely to score goals.)

Well, several things could explain home field advantage other than the crowds, such as familiarity with the environment and not having to travel. And as far as I can tell, contributing to the crowd noise is the only chance we have of influencing the outcome of a game. Hence if a-c are true, it's not clear how you could have an influence on the outcome, barring a belief in weird causal powers (e.g., you can give the opposing players cramps by looking at them funny) or exceptional circumstances (e.g., you are close enough to yell insults at David Beckham which make him perform worse--watch out, they may make him perform better!).

On the other hand, it's kind of like voting. You should vote even if it is unlikely that your vote will make a causal difference in the outcome, because if people stopped voting based on that belief, it would make a difference. If all the fans started thinking their cheers made no difference, the overall silence would make a difference.

Anyway, I still like to believe I can influence the outcome of a game ... even by watching it on TV! Hence, there's no way I'm going to Tivo an important Duke basketball game--they need my magical energy to flow in real time! (Yes, philosophers can believe irrational things, though I'm not sure it's accurate to say I believe something I know is false, but that's a question for another day...)

If Tiger Woods gets a hole-in-one on a rather short hole, he's got lucky. But he is a great golfer. He hit the ball with immensely practiced skill: and it is because he hit it with that practiced skill that he got the ball onto the green and then it happened to go down the hole. Indeed he can, let's suppose, get the ball from the tee onto this green nineteen times out of twenty. That's not luck at all but the result of a finely honed talent.

Now, let's suppose, Tiger Woods would always try to hit the green from the tee on this hole, and he is very good at doing that. But even for him, intending to get the ball as close as possible to the pin isn't enough. He is at the mercy of the caprices of the wind, the manufacturing flaws of the ball, etc. But just once in a while he may fluke it and sink the ball on the first stroke. It is, to be sure, a bit of luck when the attempt succeeds, rather than the ball landing fairly near the hole but needing a putt or two. If he tried even fifty times more he probably wouldn't succeed again. But still, as they say, Tiger Woods "made his own luck" here -- it's no matter of luck that he gets the ball into just the right vicinity, and he's so good that he will get lucky from time to time and sink the hole-in-one -- and a lot more often than once in a billion years let's suppose (his hard work has at least considerably reduced the odds).

Now you pass me a club (despite my never having held one in my life). I take a wild swing at the ball. Unbelievably I make contact and the ball sails off the right direction ... and plops down the hole. Now that is the sheerest luck at staggering odds. I am exercising no skill here whatsoever. Far from reaching the green with my stroke, nineteen out of twenty times my swing wouldn't even make contact with the ball. Even give me a billions years' worth of attempts (at my current level of coordination and skill) and it wouldn't happen again.

So the initial, rough-and-ready, distinction we need is that between mere luck (succeeding irrespective of skill, etc., as with my golfing triumph) and what we might call skillful good luck, worked-for luck, we might even say deserved luck (where skill has markedly reduced the odds). True, it was a matter of luck that Tiger Woods's shot came off on this occasion while most of his attempts don't. But it evidently wasn't mere luck.

The idea behind many sporting competitions is to equalize the physical attributes of the competitors as much as possible, so that skill can be the deciding factor. This is why there are weight classes in wrestling and boxing, and handicapping in horse racing and in golf. Since women are, on average, physically different from men in lots of ways that are relevant to lots of sports -- e.g, tennis, basketball, track & field events -- it has seemed reasonable to separate men and women into separate competition classes for those sports. Automobile racing doesn't implicate physical skills that vary systematically between men and women, so there are no gender divisions there.

There are also some fairness considerations: using classes within sports gives more people the opportunity to play. If there were no classes, then men who currently box in lightweight divisions would nearly always lose, and sports like basketball and track & field, even at the high school level, would be virtually devoid of women.

But of course the main priniciple -- achieving physical parity among the competitors -- is very imperfectly implemented. Some sports have only male and female classes, but make no allowances for large physical differences within those classes. So -- women are, on average, shorter than men, but there are no "height classes" within basketball. This leads to a new problem about fairness. A man who is "only" 5'8" would be at a serious competitive disadvantage on a college men's basketball team (if he even made the team), but could possibly excel on a women's basketball team.Theoretically speaking, the ideal solution would be to come up with a larger number of classes, based on detailed physical characteristics -- Body Mass Indices, location of muscles, flexibility, pelvic characteristics (this affects gait, and so has implications for how fast women can run relative to men), etc. -- and then assign individuals to these categories regardless of their sex. There might still be significant gender segregation on this plan, but it would be a consequence of a more principled classification. Practically speaking, though, such a system is unlikely to happen, both because of the difficulty of constructing such a system, and because of historical and cultural inertia.

You're right to observe that the evaluative word "best" as applied to a chess move appears to be used in many different ways. In some circumstances, the best move will be the one that ineluctably leads to checkmate of one's opponent. (Though if that move demands subsequent overwhelming calculations, there is another sense in which it's not the best. It's the best move from God's point of view -- or Deep Blue's -- but not from ours.) Often, we can't find tactical maneuvers that will promote a win and so must make a strategic move, and now the best move will be one that clearly satisfies a range of strategic goals (e.g., developing one's pieces, controlling the center, etc.). One cannot even say that "best" always involves a move that promotes a win: for instance, if one is on the ropes, the best move will be the one that increases one's prospects for a draw.

A philosophical issue is broached if one asks whether there is something in common to all these uses of the word "best". Some philosophers have held that there is, indeed that there must be; it is easy to read Socrates as insisting on this. Others have held that there isn't, that there is simply an overlapping family of uses of the word; Wittgenstein famously suggested this.

That's a very good question, John, and one without a better answer, I suspect, than the limits of practicality. So many topics for philosophical reflection, so little time! As a matter of practicality, many philosophers feel the pressure of researching and publishing in the more traditional philosophical categories, in the interest of a respectable and marketable curriculum vitae.

But like other "philosophies of" areas of ordinary human life, like food and wine, philosophy of sport seems to be gathering a number of citations in recent years. The Philosopher's Index returns 189 hits for abstracts published since 2001 with "sport" in the title (a better indicator of topic than if "sport" appears anywhere in the text), and there is a semi-annual Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, which also began publication in 2001.

You might also look at the answers to Question 906.

I think this is a fascinating question, one which will probably bounce around in my mind for a while. I can well imagine music companies, for example, writing recording contracts only for musicians who pass drug tests. But I do think there are a couple of relevant differences between musicians and athletes concerning performance enhancing drugs. (1) The nature of the competition in music is not as exclusive. And (2) the extent to which drugs enhance rather than undermine performance is clearer in sports than in music. You see in a running race or playing a match, there can be only one winner. The victory of one implies the defeat of another. In music, by contrast, many musicians can be successful, and it's not clear that the success of one prevents the success of others. Many records can go gold. Now, I'll grant you, in music sometimes success is exclusive. Only one person can be first violin of the New York Philharmonic. Only one performer can win the Grammy in a given year. It's in cases like that that this question is so intersting. Grammy Awards could easily be conferred only on those who passed drug tests? But there is, on the other hand the second disanalogy I raise. While it's clear that anabolic steroids increase muscle mass, is it really clear that canabis or LSD helps musicians perform better? Anecdotally, I'm not at all convinced that this is so. I suspect that drugs and alcohol have wrecked more musical performances than they've magnified. This difference, however, also points to a third disanalogy. Alcohol and perhaps canabis and other mind-altering drugs can be used in moderate ways with few pathologies. That's less true for most performance enhancing drugs in sport. I'll grant you, however, that what separates performance enhancing drugs in sport from vitamins and sophisticated nutrition is a rather difficult (I suspect impossible) line to draw clearly.

I went to an all-girls high school. Girls from that school outperformed girls from the nearby coeducational school in both athletics and academics. Same-sex physical education can be good for girls, challenging them against the highest standards of female athleticism. But of course sometimes it isn’t, especially if girls-only athletics is not as well supported as boys-only athletics, or if girls are held to less demanding standards than boys (relative to those achievable by top female and male athletes). The best solution here may be complex: some activities in some age-groupings are best pursued within a single-sex framework (e.g. rugby once in high school); others can be pursued in mixed groups (e.g. swimming, orienteering, and soccer, where players are grouped by skill level). Another important part of overcoming gender-bias in sport is recognizing the genuine athletic achievement in those sports that are predominantly pursued by women and girls. This is starting to happen in New Zealand where netball (a female-only sport, somewhat like basketball) is beginning to receive the level of recognition previously given only to rugby (an overwhelmingly male-only sport). Just putting girls and boys in the same physical education classes by itself is unlikely to change these entrenched attitudes and may even risk reinforcing them.

Yes, I think so. I may be prejudiced as a former wrestler, but it strikes me that damaging one's opponent is far too much an intrinsic property of boxing. There is indeed a purity to unarmed, hand-to-hand, struggle between two unarmed human beings with no ball, no team, few pads, and no objective other than subduing one's opponent. There is a kind of grace and beauty to boxing's movements. There is sublimity in its power. But there is also--intrinsically--violence. Too much of it, I think. I say other sports (like wrestling) possess boxing's virtues without its vices, or anyway far less of its vices.

Before I begin, let me issue a quick reminder: Not all college sports is big business. Some of it is, to be sure: Big-time college football, basketball, and the like. But college golf, tennis, swimming, and gymnastics don't generate much revenue, except perhaps at the most elite programs, and college sports don't generate much revenue at all at institutions like, say, MIT. So when I talk about college sports and "student athletes" below, I'm talking about only some college sports programs.

So, that said, I used to be a huge fan of college basketball. (I went to Duke. Go figure.) Now I hardly watch at all, and the reason you mention is perhaps the most significant. The rules governing (that is, prohibiting) the compensation of "student athletes" were put in place many years ago to protect the interests of such students. For example, there was concern that a student might decide to go to school X rather than school Y, not because school X would better serve that student's long-term interests---which probably have little to do with sports---but rather because school X is offering certain kinds of financial incentives. That made a certain amount of sense.

But that was a long time ago, when the term "student athlete" didn't need scare quotes. Now, as you say, colleges and universities make large sums of money from their sports programs, and their "student athletes" are essentially prohibited from receiving any compensation. Of course, the "student athletes" do receive scholarships and limited amounts of subsidy, but the real value of these forms of compensation are trivial compared to what the coaches, atheltic directors, and the like make. (Compare professional sports, where the players typically make more money than the coaches and front office staff.) That's all the more worrying when so few "student athletes" graduate, and it's even more worrying when the graduation rate for black "student athletes" is so far below that of white "student athletes" at most programs. (Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson publishes such statistics every year as regards football and basketball.) The simple reason for this is that "student athletes" are admitted to colleges and universities absolutely all the time who have, and are known to have, absolutely no chance whatsoever of receiving a degree. Some of them, indeed, cannot even read.

One might well reach the conclusion that "student athletes" are being exploited for four years and that the fruits of their labor are going to enrich the colleges and universities that claim to be protecting their interests.