{"id":1272,"date":"2014-07-24T08:22:08","date_gmt":"2014-07-24T08:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattralston.net\/?p=1272"},"modified":"2014-07-27T00:34:16","modified_gmt":"2014-07-27T00:34:16","slug":"sport-or-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/sports\/sport-or-game\/","title":{"rendered":"Sport Or Game?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are several activities which spark interest on a national scale. Some\u00a0are considered sports, others mere games.<\/p>\n

I am a fundamentalist when it comes to American sports. Not a fundamentalist like I exclude\u00a0blacks\u00a0from competing, I just think America\u00a0has room for a few legitimate sports, real athletes gravitate towards them, and everything left over is just white guys promoting obscure activities as sport because they want to stand out at something.<\/p>\n

I have a few criteria:<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0Sports are defined by athletes. Without athletes, you can have no sport. To prove someone is an athlete you have to make a reasonable case they could\u00a0have\u00a0become elite in another sport. LeBron James is a pure athlete who would\u00a0have excelled at whatever sport he chose. In contrast NASCAR drivers would die the first day they\u00a0entered the NFL.<\/p>\n

2) You can’t play a real sport wearing shit you buy at Banana Republic.<\/p>\n

3) If you need a lot of money to do something, its not a sport.<\/p>\n

Here are my determinations based on these and other criteria:<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0LaCrosse. Not a sport. Sports are not exclusively played by people you hate named Connor. This game\u00a0was born of the self-esteem movement\u00a0so upper middle class pussies in the Northeast could make a team. Basketball is a sport. Track and field is a sport. If I put basketball hoops near a steeplechase and make up a word for it, doesn’t count. I know LaCrosse is supposedly Native American in origin, but so is camping, and plus it sounds pretty fucking French to me.<\/p>\n

2) Golf. Not a sport. Golf requires your parents to be pretty loaded.\u00a0The\u00a0PGA is\u00a0sponsored by Rolex, DeBeers, Lockheed and Blackwater. Many PGA golfers\u00a0aren’t even in good shape. Like, not by professional athlete standards,\u00a0just by standards. Also you can’t play a sport in khakis. That goes for sailing too.<\/p>\n

\"Nope\"<\/a><\/p>\n

3) NASCAR. Not a sport. A sport is not something most people do every day, only faster. In a sport you exert energy directly, not through a machine worth 7 figures. If NASCAR is a sport the guys powering drones to commit war crimes are the best athletes in the universe.<\/p>\n

4) Baseball. Not A Sport. In a sport, wearing belts and gold chains would be too binding because you need to move a lot. Sports also do not require competitors to wear old timey socks, or anything old timey, since they do not have to manipulate\u00a0heart strings to convince viewers of\u00a0national significance.You cannot chew tobacco in sports. This is because a sport consumes your concentration during the duration of your participation and does not force you to occupy your time with ancillary activities. Also, you need to remain relatively sober in a professional sport, not try and get light headed. Regarding that, people do not pick a real sport, make the ball bigger, and use it as an excuse to get alcohol poisoning in the summer months.<\/p>\n

5) Bull Riding. Not a sport. All they do is get thrown off. They lose. If humans aren’t the best athletes in the arena, its not a sport. That would suggest\u00a0bears\u00a0and lions\u00a0would win every\u00a0Olympic event.<\/p>\n

6) Surfing, Figure Skating, Gymnastics, Freestyle Ski Jumping, etc. Not sports. Any\u00a0time judges pick the winner, its not a sport. The competitors are all doing the same thing.\u00a0These judges have resorted\u00a0to beauty pageant tactics of setting up arbitrary\u00a0parameters and writing down who they think best accomplished their wishes. It would be like if I wrote down what I want in a woman and went to a bar and gave someone a gold medal. There can be no subjectivity in sports.<\/p>\n

7)\u00a0Boxing. Not a sport anymore. Boxing now falls under the above mentioned category of subjectively judged choreography. The point is to knock someone out not count how many times you touch them.\u00a0Also it has no credibility. Its too easy to manipulate financially and has become orchestrated. What we are watching is more of a super long\u00a0and expensive\u00a0soap opera than sport. It exists to make people rich. Floyd Mayweather is supposedly the best boxer right now and his nickname\u00a0is perfect.\u00a0‘Money.’<\/p>\n

8) Hunting. Not a sport. Something cannot be a sport if only one competitor has a gun. If that were the case I would be starting for the Lakers while packing.<\/p>\n

9) Windsurfing, Skydiving, Base Jumping, Mountain Climbing, etc. Not a sport. If we rewarded the most creative ways to commit suicide or become injured these self indulgent stunts would seem boring compared to any maximum security prison’s lunch break.<\/p>\n

10) Women’s Basketball. Not a sport. Its just not a sport.<\/p>\n

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There are several activities which spark interest on a national scale. Some\u00a0are considered sports, others mere games. I am a fundamentalist when it comes to American sports. Not a fundamentalist like I exclude\u00a0blacks\u00a0from competing, I just think America\u00a0has room for a few legitimate sports, real athletes gravitate towards them, and everything left over is just …read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1272"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1284,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1272\/revisions\/1284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}