Hating Sports Isn’t a Sign of Intelligence
Every time the Super Bowl or World Series is happening, you get throngs of the “I love sportsball” crowd, with their sarcastic dismissal of sports and the people who like them. They often see sports as a mindless activity and hating it as a sign of intelligence, but I'd argue it's the opposite. Sports have been one of the cornerstones of civilization for over 10,000 years, and yet many of these people can't throw a ball.
When a championship’s on the line, the culture can feel saturated by sports talk. So the hostility is understandable, yet it often comes off as lazy, ignorant contrarianism. This noble human pursuit was a pillar of multiple civilizations across the world for over thousands of years, from the Olympic Games in Ancient Greece to early forms of soccer and wrestling in Ancient China. It’s among the initial forms of cultural exchange, and remains one of the first ways we learn about using our bodies and how to socialize as kids. And there’s the critic: an ill-fitted aging troll who can't relate to or participate in one of the most natural of human endeavors.
It's often the case that those who hate sports are terrible at them and feel alienated as a result. One should feel shame in this, not pride. If you’re able-bodied, and can’t manage to throw a ball with a modicum of accuracy, that’s a lack, not a sign of some evolved state. We’ve partially developed as physical beings testing our athletic natures against the limits of our bodies and physics.
We needn’t take the Spartan approach and toss the sports illiterate off a ledge, but some attempts at understanding on their part would be appreciated. The misnomer is that professional sports is little more than a bunch of big, mindless jocks chasing a ball around. They’re often big, and yet there's infinitely more big people who didn't make it into the leagues. The professionals we see are the most intelligent, talented, and disciplined athletes, and their success is even more impressive considering that sports leagues are among the most egalitarian industries in existence.
There's little networking, political correctness, or human resources issues involved in going pro. You can be an insufferable prick, but if you put up the numbers, they'll often let you in and keep you there. Try that out in most other industries and see where it gets you. Connections have little to do with it (excepting Lebron's son), and there's no system of patronage that ensures people with the right ideas or money or family makes it in. Most of them just have to work really, really hard.
It's lazy to compare sports to chess. Yet when you understand the game or watch an old show like Open Court, and hear athletes discuss strategies and moves in jargon-filled conversations that even I as a basketball fan have trouble understanding, you see there's much more to sports than moving fast and jumping high. You see that athletes constantly study film, their predecessors, and try to anticipate every single move and countermove, until such thoughts are second nature. That's no different than the ways people learn to get good at anything.
Not to mention the tension-filled excitement and spirit of competition. There’s particular suspense in sports that can’t be recreated in the arts or any other avenue. When people dismiss sports as a mindless distraction, they go back to binge-watching TV, reading terrible bestsellers or cheering for their political side like it’s a team, usually with a myopia that’s often worse than most sports fans.
I'm not asking the sports-phobic to enter the NFL Combine tomorrow. But instead of reflexively taking the easy path and crapping all over something you're terrible at, go with the attempt to understand. When no one's looking, try throwing a ball really high in the air and running to catch it. Fun, wasn’t it? Or next time there's a hockey, baseball or football game on, ask a friend what's happening.
Like the arts or any other endeavor, sports are just an elaborate system humans made up to bond and get us through the day. All forms of human pursuits have some level of importance, and they all involve some level of distraction as well. The alternative is spending your life merely contemplating mortality and the void.