Noam Chomsky has an interesting section about sports in <i>Understanding Power</i> – he essentially asks: "what would society be like if all the attention given to sports was put towards politics?"<p><i>When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief...
</i><p><a href="http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-why-americans-know-so-much-about-sports-so-little-about-world-affairs" rel="nofollow">http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-why-americans-know-so-m...</a>
<p><pre><code> Last week, on the first day of the fall term, he asked the students in his
Cultural Politics of Sport class for their thoughts.
“The students said they would see an America without sport as a world
that is deficient. Almost none of them said something good about it,”
King says, also noting that in a class of 50 students, only one didn't
have an active relationship with sport—watching or playing—in the
last week.
</code></pre>
Students in a "Cultural Politics of Sport" class are hardly unbiased when it comes to sports. It's unsurprising that they all watch or participate in sports and feel that they'd be deficient without them. I'm sure I could round up 50 peopke that hate sports and want them banned, but they wouldn't be representative of the general population either.
<i>It’s very telling that there have been very few proposals from feminists or kinesiologists or sports marketers to come up with a way that men and women can compete together, or men and women can compete on a different kind of a playing field.</i><p>This has puzzled me for decades. There are some sports in which men and women compete together at the highest levels (e.g. horse racing), and there are some efforts at other mixed competition at lower levels. However, these seem to be minimized by everyone, and not even referenced as a benefit of which we'd like to see more. I can't think of any arena besides sports of which that could be said, although perhaps it might almost be said of the military. Even the military is criticized <i>to an extent</i> for the opportunities it denies women. Yet, sports get a complete pass.<p>It is true that many sports would have to change in fundamental ways to allow women and men to compete together at the highest level. That isn't really an excuse, though, is it?
Why do we care about a hypothetical that is about as likely as an alien invasion?<p>The more interesting questions are the sociological ones which ask why anyone cares so much about sports in the first place. I don't care about sports in the slightest, but I can keep myself entertained indefinitely with an internet connection or an IDE. I don't think that's true for most people.<p>Sports seem to me to be a reflection of the modern human's boredom and need to fill all of those hours with something exciting, dynamic, and community-oriented.
Sport, like culture, is not about any one individual, or any one kind of participant: the "observation" that physically powerful male individuals dominate sport is a) a fallacy, because it's b) a snapshot of a microcosm mis-framed, because of a certain bias. Sport and culture ought to be a perfect balance of the individual and the group, so if the society around it is out of balance, sport will reflect that: not "perpetuate" that. Feels like people are pointing at a mirror here and chastising it, not taking note from it and changing something on this side of the reflection directly.<p>If anything, "America" needs to consolidate its sport habit and just not dissipate so much, because by doing that it gets diluted and has a hard time competing with the rest of the world. Other subcultures "master" a sport with more depth across the group, versus being so spread out across so many specializations and being an inch deep and a mile wide.<p>And by compete I don't mean "be better than" or "best" them, I mean "adhere" to the well balanced state of play and acuity mixed together, along with the deep immersion in one of the best schools teaching "human nature" in a way one can actually learn from and do something with, versus behavioral sciences which are theoretical or abstract and usually lead to political or pharmaceutical work. Sport and "street smarts" go together, but on a total scale -- one can "grok" an entire nation by assessing its sport programs, provided the population is well enough represented in that program... complete with laying bare the governmental and artistic, even religious underpinnings of a subculture of this planet/lifeform we all find ourselves being.
I think sports are great, good exercise, good fun, team work and strong friendships and a healthy night out each week.<p>Watching strangers play sports is insane. Without some personal vested interest, where is the point? The answer is sports betting: when you add betting into the mix it does indeed make sense again.
It may be popular to be all super intellectual and look down upon sports as an activity of brute simpletons, but how much of the development culture uses sports terminology and idioms?<p>"team"
"winning"
"hit a home run"
"move the goalpost"
"sprint"
"scrum"