トーナメントにおける 「競争」 についての一考察

抄録

In this paper, the present author has considered and discussed “competition” in a tournament of ball games. The main arguing points are as follows.
A tournament is constructed by a principle of order to decide whether a team is superior to the other. At an independent game, the players compete to the victory and, when either team wins or loses, the game is over, which marks the completion of the game. However, in a tournament, to defeat the opponent means that the winners have gained the right to fight in the upper rank, so to win the game does not always mean the completion of the game. As a consequence, a victory in a tournament produces a different type of competitive consciousness from that in other types of contest. Here this kind of competition is named “A Competition for Ranking”, which means a struggle for the right to advance toward the higher rank of the games. Then the aim of the competition is to fight for another victory. The result of the competition for ranking gives the winners the prize of superiority as well as the right to advance to the next higher rank game. And here the losers are completely excluded from the tournament. Each of the game ranked by the upper=superiors of course functions as a device to measure the competitors' locomotion.
Games are the practical places to exercise the players' faculties and to confirm their ability which they cultivated in their training. But in a tournament, each game is transmuted into the field of the pursuit of advantageous ranking, by which the competition in the game is changed in quality from the intrinsic competitive cooperation into a exclusive competition. Although a tournament is a contrivance to decide the ranking among the teams, we should not give precedence to the rank over all others. Because it will bring about the idea among the competitors that the value of a sport is the pursuit of a competition for ranking and it will also produce the false concept that the ranking indicates the superiority or inferiority of human competence.