23 February, 2008
Sport or not?
I don't know the "official" definition of sport and I am too lazy to look it up. I have a pretty good idea of what I consider a sport to be, though. Football, baseball, soccer, basketball...all sports. Boxing, skiing, track and field...also all sports. Pretty much anything that the average person could never hope to do on any sort of real competitive level is a sport in my book. What is not a sport, in my opinion, are any activities which can also be classified as leisure activities and to which almost anyone can aspire to be reasonably competitive in with some practice. At the top of the list for me is golf. Don't get me wrong, golf takes skill but that does not make it a sport. Darts, billiards and chess all take skill but none of those are sports either. These are things that most of us, with practice, can become good or even great at. We can not all throw a 60-yard bomb into double coverage or slam dunk a ball on a 7-foot, 300 pound man intent on stopping you from doing just that. You may delude yourself into thinking this but it is not true. And don't tell me it was your parents' fault for not involving you in said sport from an early age. I love sports and I enjoy watching shows and reading magazines that cover them. What I hate is having to sit through the non-sport crap they cover, i.e. golf, NASCAR, or the damn Bassmaster fishing garbage that is presently on ESPN. Look, I'm not saying these things don't take skill. I'm just saying these people are not elite athletes and their fields are not restricted to a minority of the population. I could drive a car really fast around a track and run into stuff just as much as these professionals do. I could catch fish if I had either the patience or hours of my life to waste. And given enough practice, I could learn to hit a little white ball all over what is essentially a beautiful waste of land and then follow it so I could hit it some more. (On a side note, why don't they just close down all the golf courses and use that land to build housing for the homeless?). All these leisure activities being passed off as sport are really starting to piss me off. Why can't they get their own channel and leave the sports channels alone?
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1 comment:
First off is the floor exercises w/ the stupid little twirly flags at the Olympics can be considered a sport then for damn sure golf is going to be! with practice one can become good at it?
when exactly is the last time you tried to hit a stupid little golf ball across a vast expanse of beautiful lush green land to precariously land as near a hole smaller than the palm of your hand??
as a blooming idiot that has spent countless time and money trying to master this 'hobby' as you put it (b/c I'm obviously a fool) - it's NOT easy!! To the masses that it doesn't come naturally to, it's equivalant to throwing that 60 yard bomb with seconds on the clock.
should fishing of any kind be considered a sport? hell naww! only if what they are trying to catch weighs more than 500 pounds and they are in a 16 foot aluminum flat boat.
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