A Different Way to Play: Holistic Sporting Experiences Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza I. Introduction – Failure and Success in Play and Sports Two vignettes open this chapter. A fictional account illustrates failure via sports choking. With the “real” life narrative we go for a spin with a peerless Scottish trials cyclist. In Chad Harbach’s novel The Art of Fielding, we meet college baseball shortstop Henry Skrimshander. His arrival and nonpareil performance galvanizes the college’s perennial losers Westish Harpooners, putting them on the path to success. Henry’s seamless performances are melodies in motion. Harbach describes Henry thus, “Putting Henry at shortstop—it was like taking a painting that had been shoved in a closet and hanging it in the ideal spot. You instantly forgot what the room had looked like before.” (2011, 46) Henry can spontaneously meet the needs of the moment—no hesitation, all smoothness. Then, he becomes unhinged. A bad throw becomes a wrinkle that works itself into his innermost seams. The chronic choking episodes develop into a slump—a patterned response. Henry personifies discordant cacophony rather than holistic harmony. Danny MacAskill embodies a joyful and playful expertise that animates this chapter’s theoretical premise: a holistic bodymind. In his latest film, Cascadia (2015), filmed in Gran Canaria’s steeply hilled Las Palmas, MacAskill makes his way from the highest rooftop down to the ocean negotiating vertigo-inducing obstacles. A slip of the wheel or moment of doubt, and calamity would ensue. Balancing on ledges barely a foot wide four-stories high or jumping across enormous gaps between buildings while doing backflips, MacAskill displays an impish attitude, unflappable confidence, and consummate ability as to defy belief. Indeed, his stunts invite skepticism and ‘green-screen’ fakery were it not for recorded live performances. MacAskill interprets his bike as a virtuoso plays a Stradivarius violin, only that the stakes of missing a ‘note’ are much higher. Henry and MacAskill illustrate one extreme in the spectrum of sporting and playful skilled performance understood as holistic phenomenon where person, action, tool (if any), and environment harmoniously blend—or discordantly split. Which theoretical model should we adopt to explain underperformance and skilled action, and also give counsel to remedy the former and maximize the latter? The tide is turning, but computational cognitivist models still hold sway. They face practical and theoretical issues that, to this day, remain unmet. This chapter In Philosophy of Sport - Macmillan Interdisciplinary Studies: Philosophy series. R.S. Kretchmar (Ed.) DRAFT.