Five hundred years before the birth of Christ a great battle unfolded on the eastern coast of Greece. Six hundred Persian ships lay anchored in the Bay of Marathon. More than a hundred thousand Persian soldiers were already assembled on the shore, along with their war horses liberated from the dark, foul holds of the ships, the animals’ eyes down to slits against the brilliant Greek sun. The distance from Marathon to Athens was only twenty-four miles, with a fine broad road all the way. The Persians planned to attack the city from two directions. The forces at Marathon would march overland and strike Athens from the north while the Persian fleet would continue on to round the coast and deposit more soldiers to assault Athens from the south.

The Persians had not counted on Athenians marching out to meet them. But there they were, nine thousand assembled on the plain of Marathon, barring the way to Athens. The battle lasted only a few hours. Outnumbered ten-to-one, the Athenians arranged themselves in a line across the width of the plain. When the two forces clashed, the center of the Athenian line gave, drawing the Persians in. Military historians would later honor the maneuver with a special name — pincer movement. In less than an hour, the entire Persian host was enclosed by Athenian infantry. Persians crowded together in the center had no one to fight, those on the periphery were cut down. Seven thousand Persians fell before their entire army panicked and retreated toward the sea. The Athenians gave chase, following the invaders into the water, turning the surf red as Persians thrashed wildly to reach the ship’s rope ladders. When the enemy’s ships weighed anchor, the Athenians finally paused to count their own dead. There were less than two hundred.

It was an incredible victory that insured Athens would not be attacked from the north. But Athens needed to know this so it could divert forces and reinforce its southern perimeter. The soldier Phidippides was chosen to deliver the message. He ran the whole way, weighted down with weapons and armor. When he reached Athens he was nearly dead from the effort. Phidippides gasped his last words, telling of the Persian defeat, then collapsed with a burst heart.

The victory at Marathon was truly remarkable, as was Phidippides’ twenty-four mile run. Both were the result of individuals breaking the bounds of normal limits and achieving what no one might rationally expect could be achieved. For the Ancient Greeks, this capacity set humans apart from animals, even from the Gods. Aristotle would later express the idea in the notion of man as a creature with three different identities. There is man the animal, limited like other animals by his biology. There is also cultured man, set apart from other men by the special identity stamped on him by his culture, religion, language, and moral code. Then there is man as a unique individual whose identity cannot be defined by either his biology or cultural heritage. Such a man, or woman, transcends both culture and biology by doing or achieving the unexpected, by thinking beyond cultural stereotypes and forging his or her own values, or by displaying courage or athletic skill beyond what anyone could imagine was physically possible.

Even the Gods are incapable of this, for they are all-powerful and can do anything and therefore never face the challenge of overcoming limitations. Animals, on the other hand, are encumbered by limitations, but because they are hard-wired by their biology and mostly governed by instinct they do not have the ability to challenge them — which is why they are predictable and humans are not.

There is another characteristic that sets true individuals apart from both the Gods and animals. This is mortality. The identity of an animal is riveted to the characteristics that define its species. A particular crow is in all essentials no different from any other crow. Crows are, in the main, interchangeable units, and so long as crows continue to propagate, their identity is preserved, making them immortal. It is this realization that appears to motivate endangered species acts — to insure that members of an endangered species survive in sufficient numbers to enable them to reproduce and preserve their species identity. Like animals, the Gods are also immortal, not simply because they never die, but because they never change. Only human beings, once they have achieved a unique identity, are capable of mortality. For once a unique individual dies, there is no one who can take his or her place. They are truly unique and irreplaceable.

The ancient Greeks, and especially the Athenians, organized their societies to encourage people to achieve uniqueness. They held athletic contests to challenge individuals to break the bounds of what was thought physically possible. They staged drama contests and poetry contests to encourage individuals to transcend traditional cultural forms and achieve distinction and literary fame. Always the object was to encourage people to excel, to achieve the unexpected, to become unique individuals: to develop the third kind of identity which Aristotle claimed was the essence of being human.

The ancient Greeks became the inspiration for what we today call liberal education, whose presumed object is to expose students to the best thoughts and greatest cultural achievements of the past with the hope of inspiring them to attempt something great on their own. Athletic contests, which the ancient Greeks cherished, were appended to the list of liberal pursuits rather late, and have had a stormy history.

One reason for athletics’ checkered reputation is the mistaken presumption that liberal education should only be concerned with intellectual and artistic pursuits. If the ancient Greeks are to be our guide, the ultimate object is to achieve greatness by overcoming limitations — limitations not only of culture but of biology.

Understood in this way, athletics is perhaps the best avenue for quickly meeting liberal ideals. Only in a few intellectual disciplines, like mathematics and physics, do individuals ever achieve distinction during their student years — and they are the great exception. Most students are mere apprentices, acquiring skills, testing ideas, preparing for later careers where something great might finally be achieved.

Professors write books and essays and students read them. Professors create works of art which students are encouraged to admire. The work of students, on the other hand, is criticized by professors for its shortcomings, for students in intellectual or aesthetic disciplines are initiates and novices, and cannot hope to match or surpass the performance of their instructors for years to come. Only in athletics is this equation altered. No professor, or coach, can hope to equal the level of athletic achievement of a top student athlete. The window of opportunity for athletic greatness is small and fleeting. Only the young can pass through. While students struggle to master Shakespeare, or to understand the thoughts of Nietzsche or Marx, student athletes quickly rise from apprentice to master and set the standards of excellence for subsequent generations.

The higher the level of intercollegiate athletics, the more this is true, which is why the liberal function of athletics can never be supplied by athletic programs that are intramurals in costume dress. If the goal is to provide the opportunity for students to achieve greatness while still students, the highest level of competition a university can afford must be the standard.

Intramurals are useful for increasing participation in athletics, as are club sports. Like physical education classes, they help foster enthusiasm for life-long involvement in sports. They can even promote better health. But health and participation are subsidiary goals. The Athenians loved chariot races, even though they were held over rough courses and many participants were killed. The object was not to be safe but to achieve greatness. Similarly, the goal of great athletics is not health but breaking the bounds of human limitations. Today, we prefer to make things as safe as possible, yet many sports would cease to exist if they were made injury-free. Individuals do not engage in topflight sport to promote health, they do it to achieve distinction. Fast-walking or recreational swimming do more to promote health than football, baseball, basketball, soccer, or hockey. To claim otherwise is not only disingenuous, it ignores what really attracts individuals to sport.

If the principal virtue of athletic greatness is that it can be achieved by students, a derivative virtue is that it is a form of excellence the average citizen can easily comprehend. Intercollegiate athletics is one of the few university activities that the general public can both understand and enjoy. The genetic code, plasma physics, Roman law, Japanese grammar, or political philosophy may be more representative of what the university is about, but only a minority have mastered the learning necessary to appreciate their significance. In contrast, the rules of most athletic contests can be learned in a day, and the enduring popularity of athletic contests suggests that the ancient Greeks were correct in their assumption that physical prowess represents greatness unmediated by culture or special understanding.

Winning a Big Sky championship tells the public in unmistakable terms that Eastern Washington University is committed to excellence. Of course, the university wishes to be known for other things as well, but they are more difficult to communicate and less appreciated even when known. To jettison a top-flight athletic program for fear that it might leave the wrong impression about university priorities is to risk leaving no impression at all.

This is not to deny that support for athletics can sometimes be misplaced. Intercollegiate athletics can threaten university integrity in two ways: when athletics is subsidized at the expense of academic programs, and when athletes cease being student athletes. The athletic program at Eastern Washington University commits neither of these sins. Our coaches display as much concern for the performance of athletes in the classroom as on the field of competition. This is revealed in the grades of our athletes; they are higher than that of the general student body. Equally important, Eastern Washington University’s athletic program has willingly endured cuts in its budget, year after year, to help the university weather bad fiscal times and maintain academic programs. The athletic department has done all that can be expected. So have our student athletes. What they deserve is not criticism but praise, and the recognition that athletics at Eastern Washington University is integral to the university’s mission to provide the best liberal education we can afford.