The ridiculous argument about what is or isn’t a sport
I wrote about golf. That’s a fact. Most of you tumblr friends of mine probably don’t care about golf. Also a fact.
And I understand that. Golf isn’t exactly the sexiest of sports. It’s a four or five hour ordeal that involves very little contact (mostly between clubhead and ball, or Bubba Watson and the French) and less athletic ability than most of the other sports. But, it’s still a sport.
Some argue that with me, which is fine. I get that there are overweight people that have been successful at the game (most of the arguments) and that the main skill to it is a strong mental game.
Will I argue with someone that questions if golf is a sport? Sure, I don’t mind taking up for my favorite game. Will I argue with someone that tells me straight up, “Golf is not a sport”? No, because that guy is probably too ignorant to matter.
What does all this have to do with anything? On Monday, after one of the greatest sporting events in my lifetime occurred when the United States came back against the a strong Brazilian team to win the quarterbacks of the Women’s World Cup, a golf writer named John Feinstein was on a television show arguing that soccer isn’t a sport.
To be fair, it wasn’t as much arguing as it was ATH-ing (that’s something I call Around the Horn-ing, which is when someone just yells about something because they have to yell about it). Feinstein said that soccer isn’t a sport because the game is decided by non-soccer protocol, mainly the penalty kick situations at the end of the game.
His exact words were, “You can’t call something a real sport if you don’t decide it by playing the sport,” which is, flat out, one of the dumbest arguments I’ve ever heard about anything.
Sport is defined as, “an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature.” It isn’t defined as something that needs justification to make it such.
A lot of sports have situations that are different than the actual game. College football gives teams the ball on the 25-yard line (Where are the special teams?!). Tennis goes to a tiebreaker (but what about 40-love?!). Golf can go sudden death, or a three-hole playoff (You’re supposed to be playing the course, not the man!), and hockey can also go to penalty kicks (but Canada doesn’t count!!).
I just don’t get why anyone would argue that something isn’t a sport. Of course soccer is a sport. It’s probably one of the most athletic in the world. It is a game that gives players little competitive rest, and asks players to play both offense and defense all the time. It’s a beautiful game as we saw on Sunday when a header changed our country for the afternoon.
To sit around and argue the merits of the rules is one thing. To say that those rules make what you’re doing less interesting is a whole other, and it ends up making you come off as a blowhard that has nothing better to do than downplay one of the greatest single sporting moments of 2011.
