What a Sport Is
Dec 12th, 2007 by Micah Tillman | 15 Comments |
Okay, so I’m not “back,” but I’ve finished one of the two study guides to which I referred in my last post and for some reason found myself pondering the question of what a sport is. I don’t know why.
I don’t think I worried about the question until some people started claiming that ballroom dancing should be an Olympic sport back when I was a teen. I love the Olympics, and for some reason found the claim personally threatening.
“But ice-dancing and figure skating are in the Olympics” people would say. “Bah! Humbug!” I reply.
Anyway, I was just washing dishes and the following came to me (and I don’t care if anyone else has come up with a definition of sports. This is my “I can say anything I want and don’t have to research it” time):
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The activities that are most indisputably sports are those in which there are two or more opponents competing to complete some objective accomplished by the physical movement of those opponents about some area.
It is the physical movement that separates sports from fellow games such as chess. In chess, what is moved is immaterial (they could be figures on a computer screen or ivory pieces on a board). In sports the things moved have to be human bodies. It’s not that substitutes aren’t allowed but that the game could not even be played with anything but human bodies.
What separates those activities that are indisputably sports from other physical activities in which there is competition, however, is that the actions of each player are in some way physically determined by the actions of their competitors. The players on defense must run to where the ball was hit by the players on offense, for instance.
Specifically, in an activity that is indisputably a sport, players from one “team” (if the competitors consist of groups of players) can physically hinder the players from the other team from accomplishing whatever goal it is that is the “point” of the game. That is, every activity which is indisputably a sport necessarily has one goal and one corollary to that goal — the corollary goal being to physically keep the other team from accomplishing the primary goal.
This “hindering the other competitor” is also a mark of games like chess, but is not a mark of “sports” like the 100-meter dash, ballroom dancing, gymnastics, figure skating, etc. These latter activities are more performances than sports. It does not physically matter to one competitor’s performance who else is competing (even if it matters mentally).
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So, a sport is an activity in which
(a) There are two or more competitors
(b) The competitors have at least one goal, the achievement of which would constitute their having won the competition
(c) The goal is necessarily accomplished by the physical movement of the competitors’ bodies about an area (in addition, perhaps, to moving a ball or something)
(d) The physical activities of the competitors on one side physically affect, determine, or constrain the physical activities of the competitors on the other side
and (e) Each competitor has the corollary goal of physically hindering the other side’s attempt at accomplishing the game’s goal.
If you don’t meet those criteria, you’re not a sport. But it seems to me that a fist-fight or war might fit the description too, so there’s probably still something missing.
Wittgenstein. Family resemblance. I know. But there’s no Wittgenstein allowed in this post or comment-section. In other posts and comment sections perhaps, but not this one.
Intriguing that your definition of sport would exclude virtually everything that originally constituted sport, like almost the whole of the ancient Olympic events, for instance. I don’t think you have the authority to say the word has been used incorrectly for several millenia.
Suffice to say, I’m giving you an incomplete. And since I author a sports blog, you should take my incomplete very seriously.
;-)
I’m with Scott on this. The 100 yard dash is clearly a sport. I also think chess is a sport (though not athletic). (In fact, I think a great many games are sports. The International Olympic Committee does recognize chess and bridge as sports, not that that means anything.) Ice skating, however, is athletic, but not a sport. In my view, it’s all right to have referees who make calls about objective facts (was the ball inside the line or outside it?). You can do that and still be a sport. However, if your referees simply decide who won, you’re no longer a sport. You’re an aesthetic competition like a cooking or a painting contest. This is what distinguishes the 100-yard dash from your list of other impostors (ballroom dancing, figure skating, gymnastics). The 100-yard dash is won by the guy who ran it the fastest, not the one a bunch of judges thought looked the fastest. Boxing, by the way, is only a sport most of the time (knockout), but not all of the time. College wrestling is a sport all of the time since there are clearly defined rules on how points are scored if there is no pin.
Fist fights and wars don’t have well-defined rules. Therefore, they aren’t sports. All sports have rules. (You can have rules and not be a sport though.) If I got into a fist fight with someone and we both mutually agreed to Queensberry Rules beforehand, we are arguably now participating in a sport, rather than just a brawl. I don’t really count the Geneva Conventions or similar agreements as “rules” for war, by the way. They’re just not restrictive enough to meet my definition of rules. However, if two countries agreed beforehand on exactly where the battles would be fought, who would be allowed to field how many men, etc., with the winner receiving a pre-defined concession from the loser, then war would have become a sport (but it wouldn’t really be a war anymore).
OK. What about professional wrestling (wrasslin’ for those of us in the South)? Or NASCAR? Or the ‘sport of Kings’ which is either politics or horse racing depending on who you ask.
Andrew -
I agree with you on figure skating, but you’ve stated your overall point in a rather sweeping fashion that I can’t get on board with. Figure skating falls short not because the judges/referees have the outcome in their hands, but because that judging/scoring is in part based on subjective components, such as artistry. Were figure skating to rely totally on a technical code of points (you completed these elements which earned you this number of points, and made these mistakes which led to these deductions), it would be sport, without changing anything else, IMO. Gymnastics is a sport, for that reason. Olympic boxing is also a sport, because in that system, the decision goes to the boxer who landed the most punches if their is no knockout. The judges/referees are still determining the outcome, but there’s a defined objective criteria by which they are doing so.
I see where you’re coming from, but I’m sticking to my definition. If the scoring were really that well-defined, the judges would come to (at least roughly) the same conclusion a lot more often than they do. Figure skating isn’t difficult to eliminate, because as near as I can tell, it’s completely fraudulent. (I know that major reforms have been pushed through since the last Olympics though.) Professional boxing often suffers from the same problem. I don’t know much about Olympic boxing; it’s quite possible it’s a sport. Gymnastics has bonus points for “virtuosity” and there have been many cases when gymnasts have received a perfect 10 despite a wobbly dismount, showing that even the amount of bonus points, though in theory limited, in practice isn’t. Also, deductions are allowed for “artistry.” I’m not saying this can’t be objective; I’m just saying I doubt it very often is.
Before I’d read that a certain somebody couldn’t be named in this post I’d planned on invoking him… In fact, I think I will. We’ll call him the Philosopher Who Must Not Be Named. Micah can always delete this post with no hard feelings from me if he needs to.
The P.W.M.N.B.D. used the term “games” I think as the archetypal example of a word which doesn’t have a real definition, just a series of resemblances.
It seems to me he’s probably right. It also seems to me that sports are a subset of the category games. And though some subsets of the “game” category might have dictionary definitions, I think that atleast some of them must not. Because if each subset had a dictionary definition, then the whole set, by definition would have one… said definition simply being a list of all the definitions of the subsets.
I think sports is one of those subsets which only has resemblances, not definitions… Therefore, I think you’re going to run into problems with any suggested definition.
The simple fact of the matter is that the term sport has always been a very broad term. I think it’s only recently, as the media culture has evolved and “sport coverage” became dominant and, at least initially, focused on athletic competitions, that the clamour to refine the definition has arisen.
When most people talk about what is a sport anymore, they are talking about what they should see on ESPN or their local sports page. Micah is one of the few people I’ve seen give the “what is a sport?” question serious treatment without really just proceeding to outline the parameters of an athletic competition.
He’s wrong, but at least he was somewhat original :-) (You rock, Micah!)
I have the August, 1972 Sports Illustrated with Bobby Fischer on the cover. Other than chess, I can’t think of any other classically defined “game” that’s sanctioned as a sport.
Bridge. (Mentioned above and my own game of choice.) However, the game pretty much has to have a meaningful and hotly contested world title before anybody thinks it qualifies.
So here’s one. Is Calvinball a sport?
What’s Calvinball? (I’m the least sports-literate person you’ll ever meet. This might be a blindingly obvious question.)
Is there some hidden value judgement in the term “sport”? Do we have a tendency to want our personal favorite games or contests to count as sports because there is something inherently good about being counted as a sport… Does calling a game a sport imply it’s somehow legitimate?
Curling seems silly to me. It’s easy to imagine that I might argue with a curler (is that what you call somebody who practices curling?) as to whether her game is a sport. As a non-fan of curling, I’d most likely take the ‘it’s-not-a-sport’ position.
Sports illiterate is one thing.
I’m not sure I can forgive someone for being Calvin and Hobbes illiterate, however.
Jeff, as Scott alluded, Calvinball is a game played in the comic strip ‘Calvin and Hobbes.’ The game famously had its rules made up on the fly and was “never played the same way twice.” It was athletic and had some sort of scoring system. I mentioned it because I was curious if the physical games people make up in their own backyards are sports or not.
I just thought of poker, by the way, which some people consider a sport. I should clarify my own position. I’m not convinced that sports must have an intrinsically physical component, which is why I consider chess a sport, but I don’t actually object to that definition. If you want to define sports so chess is out, I’m okay with that. The word “sports,” unlike many other concept words, clearly refers to an entirely artificial category, which is why the definition is so flexible and the word can’t actually be defined precisely without disagreement. We should be cautious about taking this too far, though. Abraham Lincoln once asked a visiting Doctor of Divinity, “Counting a tail as a leg, how many legs does a sheep have?” “Five,” replied the clergyman. Lincoln responded, “No. Pretending a tail is a leg doesn’t make it one.” Lincoln was a very wise man and I think he was right on about this.
Mr. Tillman,
Sport can ONLY be defined as the following: a competitive endeavor governed by rules or customs. The only two mandatory requirements for an activity to be accurately identified as sport, then, is that said activity is competitive and that it has rules. That’s it. There need not be more than one competitor, or even physical movement. The best examples I can immediately think of are golf and swimming. One can excel at golf and/or swimming without ever competing against anyone…one competes against a set number of strokes for the course–”par,” and a time as determined by a stopwatch, respectively. In this regard, one is competing against either himself (if he is trying to beat his best score in the past), someone else who may not be present (the score of a famous golfer seen on television), or against time . The only movement required in golf is the swing (and ball-striking) itself, for which the golfer remains planted in a stationary position, moving his upper body only. The walking and/ or cart-riding between holes is in NO WAY essential to the game–only the striking of the ball is. Your point about chess is therefore invalid (“the pieces are immaterial”); in golf, all that matters is how far the ball (an immaterial object) moves, yet golf is universally acknowledged as a sport. Competition and rules are the only necessary ingredients of the delicious gumbo we call sports.
Hey Tripp!
Nicely done!
My response:
First, physical movement about an area is essential to golf, since you have to move from where you hit the ball to where it stops (at which point you have to hit it again). The whole point of the game is to get a ball from “point A” to “point B.” And that requires physical movement (except in the “limit case” of a hole in 1).
Second, swimming and playing golf by yourself are only called “sports” because they are related to the competitive sport of swimming or playing against other people (or, as you point out, because you can imitate the competition with others by competing with yourself). It’s an example of what Aristotle calls “pros hen” predication. If A is a “main thing” and B, C, D, etc. are somehow related to A, you often call B, C, and D by A’s name. (For example, “healthy” is most properly a description of a human body, but since certain foods and activities are related to having a healthy body, you call them “healthy” too.)
Finally, competition and rules aren’t enough to define sports, because games like chess, poker, etc. also are competitions governed by rules. And they aren’t sports.