The New Definition of a Sport
When I was a kid growing up, a sport was something that you played for physical activity. I used to play road hockey with my friends, and ice hockey, baseball and soccer in leagues. If you didn’t break a big sweat, and feel completely physically drained after it, then it wasn’t a sport, plain and simple.
Back then most of the sports specialty channels that exist now weren’t around, especially in Canada where I grew up. We had Hockey Night in Canada on CBC and then we had hockey, baseball and Sunday car racing on TSN.
Nowadays when I turn on the TV I can see all kinds of things on our new sports specialty channels; I’ve seen poker, blackjack, chess and even hot dog eating competitions!
While you can make the argument that mental exhaustion leads to physical exhaustion to justify the first three…a hot dog eating competition? Give me a break!
But the channels keep showing these events, because quite frankly they’re popular amongst the general viewing public. Therefore, we’ve gotten to the point where the old definition of a sport is obsolete.
Which means we need a new one.
While it would be enough to say that anything displayed on a sports channel could be a sport under the new definition, it’s a bit easy.
Is there a way to make it a little more interesting?
Let me propose this for a new definition: something is a sport when the program airing it uses video replay.
Every single sporting event that’s broadcasted on television makes use of video replay, either for actual in-game purposes or alternatively as an added feature provided to the viewers by the broadcasters. It’s a much safer way nowadays to identify the difference between a sport and a non-sport activity than the older definition.
It’s a rather facetious way of looking at things, but
one that’s pretty accurate considering present day circumstances. Go
try this definition out for a bit, and see what happens. At the very least,
you and your friends will get a nice laugh out of it!
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