Life, Writing, Weirdness

In a post earlier this month, I talked about how not being a sports guy, I still managed to have an opinion that to qualify as a sport there has to be an objective winner. Otherwise, it’s not a sport but an athletic competition.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Well, other than the fact that I hate our society’s constant drive to turn absolutely every activity into something competitive.

Not long after I wrote that post, it occurred to met that in spite of not being a sports guy I somehow manage to have other sports-related opinions. Which is weird. Or maybe it isn’t.

Being a man, if not a sports-oriented one, I do still recognize that many men are in fact sports guys. For various activities and at various times in my life, I’ve spent a great deal of time in social or professional settings with a wide variety of other men around, so I’m also able to recognize that many of those sports guys have the need to talk about sports. Sometimes incessantly. It allows for semi-innocuous small talk and saves them from long periods of comfortable silences where they would get to contend with their own thoughts.

It may or may not be worth noting that sports obsession is not an exclusively male phenomenon, but men do tend to be louder about it in my experience.

And I do have some opinions about sports. Whether these are well-informed or not, whether they’ve grown out of having to listen to too much conversation about things I don’t care about, whether they’re just a byproduct of living in western society but not buying into the idea of sports as a way of life, I don’t know. But I do have sports opinions.

Here are ten of them.

One: To be a sport, there must be a human athletic component.

Which makes dog racing, for example, not a sport (and also a contemptible practice but that’s a different philosophical point). I had someone suggest once that it was a sport because you could bet on it, just like horse racing or any other racing. I don’t think that argument holds a lot of water. I can get odds on and place a bet on various aspects of the next major democratic election anywhere in the world. Politics isn’t a sport, either.

Keeping to the ‘must have a human athletic component’ point, robot combat doesn’t have humans involved, so isn’t a sport. Competitive eating might be a competition, but there’s not much athletic involved beyond how fast you can bite something into small enough chunks to be swallowed. Also not a sport.

Two: Further, it must be the main athletic component.

This leaves out things like horse racing, since the horse is doing the real work and the human is just around to make sure the horse stays pointed in the right direction.

It also leaves out racing anything mechanical, and for the same essential reason. The human is there to make sure the mechanical thing is going the right way. Yes, that’s oversimplifying. Reflexes and experience both matter, but a race car (or whatever is being raced) driver is really just riding a very expensive, very well-engineered mechanical horse.

Three There should be a definite season for any given sport

But, Lance, all sports do have seasons.

Do they, now? Most do, I think, but not all of them. Particularly at the professional level, even if amateur and leisure levels tend to be built a little more around the calendar, things like soccer, football, golf, and so on absolutely do have seasons with definitive beginnings and endings. But not all of them.

Take hockey for example. Preseason hockey starts in September. Regular season runs from October to April with, every four years, a break for the Olympics, and I think a shorter break in non-Olympic years to work out the All-Star game. The playoffs pick up after the regular season and run until mid-June. Then we have international tournaments. When enough of those have been played, or before, there’s the whole draft process, development camp, free agency crap, and schedule release for the upcoming season. After that, it’s not hard to find classic games from the 80s and 90s being rebroadcast. (I say “not hard” because it seems like if I go somewhere that has multiple TVs in the summertime, most of them will be playing summer sports but one of them will be showing a decades-old NHL game.) These classic games are designed to carry fans through to the start of preseason in September, with maybe a couple of weeks off.

How can I miss you if you won’t go away?

Four: Sports don’t belong on the national news broadcast.

And haven’t for decades. There are entire dedicated networks for sports fans to go get incredible amounts of detail. Don’t waste my time when you could be telling me about important things.

Five: Violence in hockey is stupid and unnecessary.

Okay, so I’ve already called out hockey once. But as nearly every hockey fan I’ve ever met feels the need to point out sooner or later, it’s Canada’s national sport. Except it isn’t. It’s one of the two national sports of Canada, the other being Lacrosse, and before that we didn’t have one.

Actually, when a Canadian hockey fan brings it up, it’s usually more like, “How can you call yourself a Canadian if you don’t like hockey? It’s our national sport!” After I tell them how condescending and insulting they’ve just been, I ask who their favourite/least favourite Canadian politician is and why they think they’re in the right party or not.

This is where I trot out the old joke, “I went to a fight last night and a hockey game broke out.” Hockey is a physical game. Collisions are built into the rules. But it’s not a combat sport. Why do we cater to spoiled bully behaviour that off the ice would be treated with assault charges?

Six: Professional sports are only about artificial in-groups and out-groups.

It’s in the way people talk about “their” teams. “We beat you last night.” No, the team you root for beat the team he roots for. You were an observer with no vested interest in the outcome, unless you bet on it. Or it’s seen in the way that fans “good naturedly” make fun of each other by dunking on the relative prowess or lack of it of teams that aren’t their own or players on those teams. Us vs them. Me vs you. In-groups vs out-groups. That’s all.

And I’ve met people who have picked their teams just because they like the logo.

Seven: American/Canadian football should just be called Gridiron.

And it is, but only in official documentation and scholarly articles. Football (as in soccer for North Americans) came first, with centuries (or possibly millennia) or variations leading up to the modern version. American football evolved from Canadian football in the late 19^th century which evolved from rugby a few decades earlier. There are other offshoot varieties, but they all fit into the Gridiron family.

Eight: It’s different when your kids/spouse/parents/friends are involved.

Your opinions on the sport don’t matter. They are enjoying playing the game. Go enjoy watching them play. Cheer them on. Commiserate at everything that doesn’t go their way. Learn a little bit about this thing they love. Be a supportive human. And don’t be a dick.

Nine: eSports are not sports.

Speed and reflexes are paramount. Endurance can be critical. Training can be intense and grueling. But eSports are sedentary. There’s no cardiovascular activity involved. Plus, they can actually have health risks that are systemic rather than injury-based.

I supposed I could have covered this one under athletic activity requirements above.

Ten: If sports fans put that kind of passion into things that actually mattered, think of what could be accomplished.

I feel like I’m just going leave this one without comment. It stands on its own pretty well.

Note: Opinions Can Be Changed with Good Arguments

Any or all of these are up for debate, if it’s a reasoned one that doesn’t boil down to, “Nuh-uh, you’re wrong.” I’m always happy to consider new points of view. Sometimes, I get to change my mind on something and that can be fun.

Be well, everyone.