The Sport Ethic

The Sport Ethic is this rough guideline of what it means to be a 'real' athlete.  Furthermore, it comes from the coaches and players that are closest to the game and knows what it means to make sport as important as it is.  There are four categories that describe the Sport Ethic.  The first is being an athlete means making sacrifices for the game, this basically means that athlete will do anything to keep up with the demands of the game and the competition.  The second is being an athlete involves striving for distinction, this means that athletes will do whatever they can to get better and get closer to perfection, winning and successes help immensely here but this is usually an ongoing battle.  The third is being an athlete involves accepting risks and playing through pain, this means the athlete plays through pain, risk, and fear, essentially an athlete will play through pain or make the play that has a lot of risk because it needs to be done for the team and to succeed.  The fourth is being an athlete involves refusing to accept limits in the pursuit of possibilities, which means that an athlete doesn't accept a situation without trying to change it.
Athletes conform to these beliefs because they crave the exhilaration of the sport and the positive reinforcement of succeeding from coaches or other players or fans or anyone who shows praise to an athlete.  I have encountered some of the criteria, the first criteria I did everything I could do to play football in high school and start on varsity.  I was trying to stick to a three to four thousand calorie diet with mass amounts of protein to put on weight.  On top of all that I was trying to get faster and throw harder and more accurate that I worked myself into lower back problems.  Which leads me to the third criteria of playing through pain.  My lower back pain came from scoliosis which from the doctors told me to fix it completely at that time would've meant sitting out my senior year, I decided to play through the risk and pain and finish my senior year.  Looking back on it now it sounds more dangerous than I thought at the time but I guess that is where the over conforming to these beliefs comes into play.