Monday, May 5, 2014

What is a Sport?

        Uh oh... here we go again. One of these "what is a sport arguments", except its one sided and being written down. Now, let's try to keep this as simple as possible. Two common terms that will be stated are "indirect competitions" and "direct competitions". Anything can be a competition, but that doesn't make it a sport. If people were to competitively drunk drive, that would not be a sport, although racing is a sport. So there could be two parts to defining whether something is a sport. One could be the difference between being a direct or indirect competition and the other could be whether it is accepted as a sport by society.

        Lets start of with the direct competitions. Some examples of a direct competition are football, soccer, hockey, basketball, lacrosse, rugby, baseball and so on. All these have direct contact with opposing teams. The amount of people on the team does not matter. It does not have to be a contact sport either. Tennis involves no physical contact between the two players. The definition of a sport to me is : anything that is a direct competition between two teams, contact or not, requiring physical activity and having some way to win either by scoring points and or completing an objective.
        
        Then, we have an indirect competition. This is where neither teams come in contact and often take turns for their performances. Here we have dance, cheer-leading, restaurants on opposite sides of the street, and many other argument inspiring activities. This is where I come back to the point where a competition does not make something a sport. Although some people just need to believe that their hobby, activity, or competition is a sport for some reason, sometimes we must come back to reality and point out that just because it is something you like doing, it is not a sport. It doesn't matter how long you have been doing it. It doesn't matter how much physical exertion is required. If it is not a direct competition I will always not accept it as a sport. 
       
        The one thing that passes this law is golf. Why? It is not a direct competition. Golf is somehow the only one that passes these laws unless there is some other one that I am missing. It seems everyone has just accepted golf as a sport for some reason, returning to my point in the first paragraph. Society deemed it a sport, so it must be true. But how far can society go? Could I wake up one morning and all of a sudden football isn't a sport anymore because society said so?  I don't know. I don't want to know. And we will never know what actually defines a sport.

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