Sports – A Defintion for Simpletons

With the Vancouver Winter Olympics a little more than a month away and NFL Wild Card Weekend starting tomorrow, I’ve got a newsflash– Competitive eating is not a sport.  Playing poker is not a sport.  I don’t care if these people have endorsement deals or if their mugs are flashed on ESPN 2 in primetime.  Just because something is recreational and televised, doesn’t make it a sport. Somehow the recognition of what a sport is, has been perverted by the never-ending hunger for programming of the 24 hour cable sports networks like ESPN, ESPN2, Versus and others.

When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, we had the four majors football, basketball, baseball, and hockey and then there was everything else which was pretty much encompassed by the Olympics (track & field, swimming, skiing, figure skating, etc).  If it appeared on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, no matter how strange or foreign you could be reasonably assured it was a true sport. Things like: log rolling, motor sports, and bass fishing for example.

But now just ten years into the twenty-first century something is very wrong.  The public is confused.  Being able to deep throat a hot dog might be a skill, but so is tongue twirling– filming it and sticking it on ESPN on Sundays after Sportscenter doesn’t make it a sport. While the dictionary defines sports as, “an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature”.  We have to go further.

If you have to pause and think about it, then it just might not be a sport.  So I’ve come up with a list of qualifiers to run through during that pause to help define what activities are sports and more importantly which ones are not.  Let’s begin by asking some basic questions:

(1) Is there an element of competition in the activity?

At this point you have a game, not a sport.

(2) Does the activity require some sort of physical exertion?

My first thought is decathlon, but you can also see that shooting pool and bowling are activities that require a participant to move about.  We can now rule out spelling bees, any type of card game, and chess.  They meet the first rule, but not the second one.

(3) While attempting this activity can you be can be seriously hurt, maimed, or killed?

Now many of the readers out there would say that you could be seriously hurt, maimed, or killed in a high stakes card game, but those type of games are not televised.  They tend to take place in more secretive venues and may have a mob element attached to them.

(4) Is the outcome of the activity unscripted and given to the random chance?

There goes “professional wrestling” and Vince McMahon.  Which makes it all the more tragic since NBCSports.com contributor Mike Celizic noted that the toll of wrestlers and former wrestlers who have died before the age of 50 since 1997 is closing in on 70. That is a significant number. As Sports Illustrated’s Frank Deford observed last year, it’s the equivalent of 435 premature deaths among NFL players and alumni or 186 major league baseball players and alumni.

(5) While attempting this activity is it necessary to leave your home to particpate?

Any thing you could do from the comfort of your living room or kitchen with webcam is not a sport.  So now we can eliminate competitive eating.  Which really is a bunch of First World narcissistic bullshit when you get down to it.  Million of people are starving on the African continent, hell people are probably starving three blocks from your home or office– but fans are cheering on a skinny Japanese kid as he stuffs his face.  Not to take anything away from “professional eater” Takeru Kobayashi, but do we really have a pressing need for organizations like the International Federation of Competitive Eating and the Association of Independent Competitive Eaters.

Using this criteria we know that cheerleading of the high flying gymnastic sort is a  real sport.  Darts played in a bar or pub is a sport, think of it as archery on a really small scale. I think that covers it, now that we’ve separated the wheat from the chaff… what do you think?  Anyone out there care to defend “professional eaters” or the rigorous physical training regimen needed to play a couple of hands of Texas Hold ‘Em?