Kansas City Star: No. 3 has huge influence in sports and our lives
A s Big Brown faded along the final stretch of dirt Saturday at Belmont Park, he lost more than horse racing’s 12th Triple Crown, more than glory, more than the imagination of fans hoping to witness history.
He’d been chasing something perhaps mystical: the number three.
“It’s the magic number,” said Michael Eck, a math professor so enamored with all things in threes he started the Web site www.threes.com and has written papers on the subject.
“Everything is connected by this pattern of threes.” ...
...We love to celebrate the three, hold it in high esteem, put it on T-shirts and in history books.
The three-peat. The triple-double. The hat trick. Achieving something twice gets you noticed, but three times gets you carved in history. ...
...If you want some props, do it twice. If you want immortality, well, the third time really is the charm.
Nearly every sport, and many human endeavors outside of competition, has a hallowed principle based on the first odd prime number. Three has ensconced itself in politics (three branches of government), daily life (three meals a day), religion (the trinity), fairy tales (the three bears), time (past, present and future) and nearly every other subject.
And, of course, it is the building block of art — from which, many would argue, sports emerged.
“Think of the Golden Mean, which goes back to ancient Greeks who applied it in their sculptures,” said Gabriel Schechter, a research associate at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.
“It’s an aesthetic in photography, nature, painting — it’s the sense of unequal thirds.”...
...“We’re very comfortable with this sense of threes as an organizing quality,” Miller said.
...It also speaks to how we as humans process information and then express it.
“What we do as human beings is we take things and (put) them into three parts,” Eck said. “Two things repeat and could be a coincidence. Three is where conceptual knowledge takes place. It’s how we break things up to understand things. It doesn’t take place in the real world, but we as humans have created this. It’s the perfect number as a thought.
“Freud (put) the brain into three parts: ego, superego, id,” Eck said. “It’s simply completion for us: ‘Of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ ‘Once, twice, three times a lady.’ It doesn’t even have to make sense, but it seems complete.”
More examples: “Christ was dead, Christ is risen, Christ will come again,” Eck said. “It’s a perfection sentence because of its completeness. ‘Three blind mice.’ In Japan you have morning rice, noon rice and evening rice — that’s what they call breakfast, lunch and dinner. We all, everywhere, chunk knowledge into threes.” ...
It is interesting that Jesus' parables and New Testament stories often contain threes (Priest, Levite, Samaritan; 5 talents, 2 talents, 1 talent; in the tomb three days; cock crowed three times; Jesus reinstated Peter by asking three times if he loved him; love the Lord with soul, mind, and strength; etc.). We talk about the standard three point sermon. Jokes frequently feature three characters ("A minister, a priest, and a rabbi all walk into a bar..."). Someone who is very authentic we describe as a "three dimensional person." Three strike laws for criminal offenses. In demography its all about birth, death, and migration. And let us not forget Larry, Moe, and Curly.
It is interesting how prevalent the number three is.
