My life has been pretty surreal recently. First, I stood outside Village A and was asked by a group of first-years if they could use my name at a party they planned to attend. Then, as I watched an enterprising group of juniors hang an X-Games poster in their endowment and declare their house “the spot” (don’t only sophomores in Henle do that?), I began to reflect on deeper, more meaningful things.
Such as sports.
It all comes back to sports. It is the one activity that can take a thousand people, from a thousand different upbringings, races, genders and socio-economic levels and make them all into one giant ball, one collective soul for a mere moment when the kick goes up (yea Norwood) or when the Hail Mary is launched (yea Flutie).
Why am I making so many references to the Bills?
To continue on a debate incited by the X-Games, what is sports? What constitutes a “sport” as opposed to anything else?
These are the great questions of the universe. So I decided to take some time and ponder them. Here’s what I came up with.
Basketball: Yea. You need stamina, ball-handling skills, a sweet shot, some leaping ability and crafty intelligence. Now, this is not to say that the game of basketball, sweet mother of mine though she is, is always contested as a true sport. Sometimes, all levels of physical skill and intelligence are removed. For an example of this, see the Cleveland Cavaliers of the late 1990s. You would think the whole “Four Corners” approach to basketball works in the NBA, right? Nay. Sorry Fratello. Could the guru please return to his rightful seat behind the bench … of the NBC pre-game desk.
Baseball: Baseball is a game that requires an uncanny ability to write things down and then find them at a later date. If the St. Louis Cardinals are playing the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Warren Morris comes up with two outs in the bottom of the seventh on an artificial turf field, and it’s after 10 p.m. and the pitcher is a southpaw who throws breaking balls and cheats on his wife with a woman who calls her dog “Poindexter,” then Tony LaRussa knows Morris hits .279 in that situation. Why? Because he has a book that details every possible situation known to man. Does this involve any skill? No. I just basically said that any pre-med student could win three World Series rings. Yea Wit.
But the game of baseball is a sport, because playing on those nuances and getting the most out of your athletes involves great cunning. Unless of course, you believe the plot of Major League, in which all you have to do is have a strip-down cardboard of your mean owner. Ah, Corbin Bernsen. How we’ve missed you.
Football: A bunch of dudes run around hitting each other and talking trash, and occasionally something flies in the air, causing everyone to gasp and occasionally count numbers out loud. It sounds a lot like a Henle kegger, no? While likening a kegstand to a Jeff Blake bomb may sound a little out of the ordinary, football is not a sport. I love the game, and Arizona State vs. Washington from September 1998 profoundly changed my outlook on life. The problem is this: most times, when you make a movie about a sport, the nonsensical scenarios could never actually happen. See Little Big League. If it was really was that easy for a 12-year-old to guide the Twins to the promised land when Kent, Kirby and a 60-year old whose been managing his whole life couldn’t do it, then obviously the game is not a sport. But in Little Giants, the most defining football movie of my generation, that little nerdy kid who invents the “Annexation of Puerto Rico” play, I really believe that could happen in the NFL. Hell, the Houston Oilers of the early 1990s? Their entire offense was designed by an eight year-old.
Hockey: HA-HA. Hockey is a bunch of Canadian dudes on skates hitting each other and occasionally firing rapidly-shot objects in the general direction of the person in control of everything. That, dear reader, is not a sport. That’s a Canadian Thanksgiving dinner with a Radio City theme. Wait, they don’t celebrate that up there, do they?
And are the X-Games a sport? No. They don’t have Joey Harrington.
