Alternate Philosophy

All right, it's time for thought experiment number two. So far, among most people with whom I've shared my rules for sporthood, my second rule has been met with much more contention than the first. Now, to be clear, I do still agree with that rule (these are just my personal rules, so it would be tough for me not to agree with them), but it has yet to win the hearts and minds of the public. So, in the spirit of offering an olive branch to our loyal fans, I present to you:

Alternate Rule 2: To be a sport, an activity must define its success objectively rather than subjectively. This requires some clarification, because there is a lot of subjectivity in all sports. Did the runner touch home plate, or not? Did the sprinter beat his competitor by a few thousandths of a second, or lose by that same margin? You could argue that all attempted judgments of these types of close calls are subjective.

However, the crucial distinction is that, whether or not our judges, umps and referees can always find it, there IS an objective answer to these questions. The athlete DID touch home plate, and if he's called out, that's a regrettable error. The runner DID win the race, even if it's too close for us to tell accurately. The subjectivity is in the judging, not in the actual sport. The only place you find subjectivity in sports is in some of the more loosely defined rules--did he make a "football move," did the batter attempt to get out of the way of the pitch, etc. Overall, these sports are objective, with some subjectivity thrown in.

That leaves out, once again, figure skating and gymnastics--even under this new rule, they still don't make the cut. These are performances, much more similar to ballet than they are to, say, soccer. The key factor that makes them performances and not sports is the fact that their success is defined subjectively--hence, the creation of this new rule.

So, another option for my fellow sports-definers out there. Maybe this one will be a little bit more popular.

Show Your True Colors

Let's say you're a Cavs fan. You're happy. You like your team this year. You have a chance at locking up LeBron and having a guaranteed Most Beloved And Celebrated Athlete Of All Time for your city. You decide you want to wear your team's colors to celebrate.

Let's take a quick look online at what those colors are, shall we?

http://www.nba.com/cavaliers/history/logo_uniform_history.html

Uh oh. Well, it looks like your current colors are red and white, with a little dark green mixed in there, so you could go with that. But, if you want any connection to your team's history (maybe you grew up as a Cavs fan in the 70's or 80's), you'll have to wear black and light blue as well. And orange. And a different shade of blue. And there's some tan in there. Also gold. You might as well just get one of those rainbow afro wigs and cover your bases.

The point is quite simply this: teams change their uniforms around too much. For me, a big part of sports is history. When I watch a sports team, unless it was recently added to the league, I'm witnessing the latest chapter in a long and storied history of the franchise. Sure, some teams (Yankees, Celtics, Packers, etc.) are thought of as being more "historic," but most teams have their history, and they're proud of it. And along with the timeless feel of a team comes the timeless feel of their uniform. Celtic green. Yankee pinstripes. Green Bay green and yellow. They're iconic, just as the teams they represent are iconic.

Even for teams that may have a little less history, it's still important to maintain an ongoing connection to their franchise identity. For the Cavs, for example, the biggest chapter in their history may be going on right now. If they change their uniform again in five years, the Cavs of the future will look nothing like the Cavs of yore, the quintessential Cavs. Sure, uniforms, logos, etc., they're all ultimately superficial. But they're still part of your history, and team colors are still a part of your pride, and you shouldn't throw that away and start from scratch just because some guy from marketing suggests that it's a good idea to "rebrand" and make everyone re-buy their LeBron James jerseys. When even the classic Red Sox logo is getting a facelift, it's time to rethink our obsession with reinventing the wheel. If the Yankee pinstripes turn into polka dots, you'll know things have really gone too far.

Let's Get Philosophical

Dark days are upon us, my friends. The football season is over, the baseball season has yet to begin, and basketball is stuck in the doldrums of the All-Star break. With no sports to watch, it provides us at Poop on Boozer with an opportunity to take a step back and reflect on deeper, more profound sports-related questions. Today's edition: what is a sport?

It's not a coincidence that I find myself asking this question as the Olympics begin. Sure, there are Olympic sports we can pretty much all agree actually are sports (hockey, etc.), but is bobsled a sport? Is ski jumping? In examining these questions, I've come up with two essential rules that distinguish true sports from events, exhibitions, spectacles, etc.

Just one thing to note before we begin: classifying a competition as "not a sport" is not necessarily intended to diminish it. Sure, it might be. After all, one of my unofficial litmus tests for whether or not something is a sport is if someone told me, "I'm a professional athlete, I play ____," whether or not I'd have to laugh in their face. If a croquet player told me this, they would not pass that test, so yes, croquet is less tough, less intense, less worthy of athletic respect than, say, basketball. But many activities that will not pass my rules (e.g. logging) are immensely tough--they just aren't sports.

If it's understood that I don't necessarily mean to insult anyone (although don't rule it out), on to the rules:

Rule 1: To be a sport, an activity requires a certain minimum level of exercise and exertion beyond what is normally experienced in day-to-day life. This is what I'm really getting at with my "I'm a professional athlete, I play ____" example from before. The best example here is NASCAR, which passes my second rule (keep reading) for sporthood, and would be a sport if it required any exercise at all, but it does not. Note that an activity can require a great deal of skill (as NASCAR does), but that doesn't make it a sport. International diplomacy requires a great deal of skill. So does knitting. Neither are sports.

Other activities excluded from sport-hood by this rule: golf, luge, bobsled, skeleton, archery, etc.

Rule 2: To be a sport, the activity must force its participants to interact directly with their opponent or opponents. The main intent of this rule is to get rid of "performance-style" sports such as figure skating, gymnastics, ice dancing, ballroom dancing, etc. These activities do pass Rule 1 and are perfectly athletic and tough, but they're performances--more akin to theater or ballet than to football.

I added this rule because, to me, sports isn't just about exercising, it's about strategizing in order to best somebody else. Gymnasts, by and large, do not strategize against their opponents, they strategize against the rings, or the parallel bars, or the pommel horse. Any activity where you are trying to go out and do exactly what you did in practice, and beat a course as best you can, does not fit my definition of a sport. In gymnastics, nobody tries to stop you, and having someone try to stop you is absolutely essential for sporthood.

Another effect of this rule is that some racing-type sports make the cut, but others don't. Swimming and track and field don't--in those sports, you stay in your lane and try to move as fast as possible regardless of what the people in the other lanes do. In cycling, however, you can jockey for position, cut off your opponents, etc., so it earns its right to be called a sport.

As one final note, "direct interaction" doesn't mean physical contact, necessarily. Tennis is a good example--you and your opponent aren't allowed near each other, but you each try to stop the other from doing what they're trying to do, and you have to adapt to what your opponent is doing if you want to beat them. Thus, sport.

* * *

There may be more rules out there, but I've tried to come up with a system that can define sports in as few rules as possible. I'd be curious to know if my colleagues disagree, and if so, how they'd create their system.

boozer on the trading block?

espn's TrueHoop blog reports that boozer may be on the trading block, even though sloan wants to keep him:

Having lost 13 straight games, the perimeter-heavy Detroit Pistons would like to get their hands on Carlos Boozer. A Boozer-for-Rip Hamilton trade works, but Utah doesn't want to take back the three years, $38 million remaining on Hamilton's contract, even though he'd made a sweet backcourt mate for Deron Williams.

Boozer for Tayshaun Prince also works financially, but Prince has one more season after this one at $11 million, and the Jazz aren't looking to add salary for next season.

Utah coach Jerry Sloan wants to keep Boozer, who will be a free agent next summer, for the rest of the season, and perhaps beyond. To that end, the Jazz are shopping Andrei Kirilenko with all their might. But good luck with that one. Kirilenko won't have any takers until next season when he's in the last year of his deal.

could it be time to restart the paul millsap countdown? for now, we're watching -- and waiting impatiently.

Right Now...

...my team's MVP, Wes Welker, is being carted off the field with a knee injury and is sitting on the bench crying. My team's other MVP, Tom Brady, has three broken ribs and is playing. This game is utterly, utterly meaningless. Why are they on the field at all? Last week, we saw Jim Caldwell pass up a chance at history and forfeit the most important game of his career just because he was trying to limit the risk of injuries going into the playoffs. Now, Bill Belichick is throwing his A-listers out there for literally no reason?

Someone out there in the POB universe, please--explain this to me.

And While We're At It..

Quick memo to Jim Caldwell: Super Bowls don't have any inherent meaning other than what we assign to them. We consider them to be the ultimate goal because, under normal circumstances, there's no better way to demonstrate your team is the best, and no better way to become a part of NFL history. But this season, there was--your team had the chance to do something no other team had done. The benefits would have been far greater than those that come from winning a Super Bowl, but you chose not to pursue them. You're clearly an excellent coach, but you just made the most important decision of your career and you made the wrong one.

Why No One Will Ever Go 19-0

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE CITIZENS OF NEW ORLEANS AND INDIANAPOLIS:

Hey guys,

I know this is a difficult time for you, and this may only make it worse, so I'm just going to get it out there: your teams never actually had a chance of going undefeated. It was never going to happen, and it never will. In fact, no team actually enters the season with that possibility, even though we think they all do.

Indy fans, I don't want to hear about how you could have pulled this one out had Peyton played the whole thing. Sure, your coach made a decision that I will never understand, and robbed you of a chance at immortality and us of a chance to watch a fascinating season-long story reach its natural conclusion. But that's a subject for another post and ultimately, it doesn't really matter, since either way, your team was destined to lose.

Allow me to explain. You see, I've been there. My Bostonian brethren and I have Ph.D's in this kind of stuff--we wish we didn't, but we do. Our 2007 Patriots team was among the best there ever was, with one of the best coaches there ever was, and they still couldn't get it done.

In fact, that 2007 season was among the most interesting sports phenomena I've ever seen. Sure, the Patriots had some holes on defense--and you could argue that their failure to go 19-0 was the result of those holes--but their offense was just about invincible on paper. However, as the season progressed, even their offense began to struggle more and more to eke out wins. And that is because of one fact: the pressure of an undefeated season drove Bill Belichick and the Patriots crazy.

It's true. Normally, I think mental factors in sports tend to be overrated, but in this case they're the only explanation for an inexplicable breakdown. For no apparent reason, during the middle of the season, Belichick completely abandoned the run (one of the best offenses in history wasn't doing well enough, apparently), and the margin of victory got thinner and thinner from week to week. With other teams already starting to gun for the undefeated Pats with some smart coaching choices (The Eagles almost ended New England's run prematurely via surprise onside kick), and the Pats' D beginning to show its weaknesses, the addition of a coaching meltdown was enough to trigger that one fateful loss. Remember Belichick's decision to go for it on 4th and long in the Super Bowl against the Giants? That's the only way to explain it.

It makes a certain kind of sense--a team can only survive so long a stretch in which every game has the intensity of a playoff game. Then, once you get near the playoffs, every game has the intensity of a Super Bowl. It is simply nonsurvivable. A team that goes 18-1 can beat any of the teams that it plays that season, but it simply cannot beat all those teams.

That brings us back to you, Colts and Saints. Sorry it didn't work out, but it turns out that you can only survive so many Super Bowls in one season. With any luck, your regular-season losses may actually prove beneficial when it comes time for the real one.