Have you been playing a sport?

 

          With ESPN televising everything from darts to cheerleading to poker, more and more activities are being called sports, and quite frankly I’m tired of it.  I’ve already complained about things undeservedly being called games here, and now I’m turning to sports.  Again, I’ll start with the definition given by dictionary.com since that’s probably reasonably close to the standard definition:

 

Sport -noun

  1. an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature, as racing, baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, wrestling, boxing, hunting, fishing, etc.

 

This definition is really stupid.  Throwing a ball up in the air and trying to catch it is technically a sport.  It’s an athletic activity, and it requires skill.  It’s not competitive, but according to this it doesn’t have to be.  In fact, any athletic activity here is supposedly a sport, unless you can think of one that doesn’t require skill or physical prowess.  Who writes these things anyway?

 

I think there is a subset of activities we can all agree are sports – baseball, football, tennis, basketball, …etc.  Surely, throwing a ball up in the air and catching it should not be included with this group.  So we surely have to revise something here to properly classify activities as sports or not. 

 

Now to my mind, good classification has to do with lumping things that are fundamentally the same in the same category and vice versa.  Even within the list given in the above definition of things most people would generally call sports, I believe there is a fundamental difference separating some of them from the others.  Thus, I believe this definition is inadequate for yet another reason.  Here is my personal definition of sport (and much better, I think):

 

Sport -noun

  1. An athletic activity requiring physical strength, speed and/or stamina done in competition with others who directly affect the result of the contest. 

 

I italicize “directly” because this, I believe is the fundamental difference.  In baseball, you swing at a ball thrown by an opposing team’s player; in football, you are trying to avoid being tackled by someone running at you.  In golf, there is no direct interaction between you and the other players.  Yes, you can look at the leaderboard and see who’s ahead of you, but that’s not a direct effect, it’s indirect at best.  Does this mean that golf is somehow worse than baseball and football?  No, it just means it’s different, and shouldn’t be put in the same category.  Now maybe it’s unfair of me to call the things I think are sports “sports,” and call golf, bowling, hunting, etc “not sports.”  Arguably, we should make up new terminology to accommodate this fundamental difference, say calling baseball and football “geerhobs,” and calling golf and bowling “flignots.” But seriously, nobody would go for that.  So for now, (to me anyway), this is how it should be. 

Some common misclassified activities:

 

Golf – Sorry, no can do.  Yes, Tiger Woods is a great athlete – he’s just not playing a sport.  If your opponents got to hit your first ball in the wrong direction, then I’d call it a sport (and much more entertaining).  Not to mention this bullshit of making everyone be quiet while somebody is trying to hit a golf ball off a stationary tee.  Baseball players hit a ball that’s moving at 100 MPH with 50,000 people screaming at the top of their lungs.  Get over it golfers. 

 

Bowling – Sorry, in this one there’s not even really an indirect effect of the opposing players – there’s no strategy other than “try to hit as many pins as you can each time.”  If you started two guys at the same time, and told them that whoever’s ball hit the pins first would get double points – now that would be a sport.

 

Hunting – Unless you’re hunting other humans, sorry.  Deer just don’t count for “competition.”

 

Fishing – Unless you’re fishing for other humans, sorry.

 

Poker – Yes, it requires stamina, but it’s mental stamina.  Nobody is calling chess a sport.

 

Pool – This one is sort of on the border, but I’m throwing it out because the skill is really not very physical.  Not to mention that you really are only indirectly affected by your opponents, since your play isn’t really affected by anything your opponent is doing, but rather by something they did that’s over with and the fact that they get (have) to hit next if you don’t put a ball in a pocket.  Now, if you each got to hit your own cue ball at the same time…

 

Darts – Yes, throwing a dart does require physical skill, but if a 500-lb guy can be good at it, it ain’t a sport. 

 

Cheerleading – Again, no interaction, even in cheerleading competitions.  A highly athletic activity that I have nothing against – just not a sport.

 

Gymnastics – Not unless they allow multiple people to do simultaneous routines on the balance beam and whoever stays on the longest wins.