Sports In John Finny's A Separate Peace

Sports, in many ways, affect us mentally just like it affected the actions of the kids at Devon. Finny views athletics as an "absolute good," and throughout A Separate Peace, athletic contests represent an alternative to war. Like war, sports involve opposing sides and intent on victory, but unlike war sporting events lack the casualties common to the battlefield. Finny's perspective on sports is exactly the opposite of his views on the war. He sees war as a construct invented by governments, a conflict where everyone loses, while he believes "everyone always won at sports," which gives athletics a "perfect beauty." The novel supports Finny's ideas most powerfully by depicting Gene's experience while training for the Olympics. The intense training
I also saw a darker side of people saying that athletes develop aggressive traits like bullying and the need to dominate their opponents on and off the field. This relates to the book we read because when Gene lost he felt the want to eliminate his competition so he would be the best and lack competition. Since Gene never beat finny in any sports competition his want to win and destroy the person that beat him built up until gene decided to take away everything finny had in order to get ahead even though finny had done nothing to gene. Sports can be a good thing and a bad thing when I asked my teammates about their motivation most of them said that their motivation was to beat their opponent. Another question I asked my classmates was would you rather be known as a good student or a good athlete, most people said both and only a little said a good student which shows you that most people would rather when I asked my classmates does sports help you in school most of them said yes because it gives them good traits like determination and perseverance and they are good traits to have but sometimes in a bad way like the determination to beat someone and then take it a step farther by hurting them or putting them down with words or
The guilt is starting to get to him, but he is also less competitive now, since he lacks big rival. Therefore, Gene stops playing sports and applies for assistant senior crew manager. While applying, he gets into a fight with the manager, and shows that he does care for Finny, and that he took his competitive nature to far. He said, “I fought that battle that first skirmish of a long campaign, for Finny.” This could prove to be a turning point for Gene, since from now on he will probably take competition more positively than before, because of what he did to Finny, and what the outcome was of that