Hitchens Says Sports Suck… And I Agree
-By Warner Todd Huston
Well, Christopher Hitchens has finally written something with which I can whole heartedly sign on. In his latest Newsweek piece Hitchens decries the sham that is sports — especially international soccer tournies. He slams the supposed benefits of sports and rightly pinpoints the singular truth that sports brings out the worst in everyone.
Hitchens eviscerates the lie that sports “brings people together,” lays low the lie that sports is good in schools, and obliterates the idiotic babble that sports are in any way filled with good role models — or that they even could present good role models.
I loved this delicious paragraph, delivered after delineating the “shock” that one sports dolt had when another dissed him:
On the contrary, Mr. Rossi, what we are seeing is the very essence of sportsmanship. Whether it’s the exacerbation of national rivalries that you want—as in Africa this year—or the exhibition of the most depressing traits of the human personality (guns in locker rooms, golf clubs wielded in the home, dogs maimed and tortured at stars’ homes to make them fight, dope and steroids everywhere), you need only look to the wide world of sports for the most rank and vivid examples. As George Orwell wrote in his 1945 essay “The Sporting Spirit,” after yet another outbreak of combined mayhem and chauvinism on the international soccer field, “sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will.”
I’ve said it myself a hundred times. Sports teaches nothing worth while. It teaches selfishness, it teaches that only “the star” counts for anything, and in schools the money wasted on sports benefits only the few halfwits running around in short pants on a grassy field of one sort or another. All that money wasted on sports in schools goes for the tiniest number of students and offers no benefits whatsoever to the 99% of the school body not involved in sports.
And the stupidity of the Olympics is the worst offense in all of sports. Billions of dollars wasted to NO good effect. Hitchens quotes the aforementioned Orwell on the point.
I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.
Hear, hear.
And as if sports didn’t degrade our nation, our very lives, any worse than they already do, we had the misfortune of getting Keith Olbermann out of them. If that isn’t an indictment against sports, nothing is.
Oh, I know that my outright hostility to the brainless effort that is sports is most certainly the minority view. But that does not make me wrong. Only smarter then the rest of ya! Seriously, though, Hitchens is laser accurate with his evisceration of sports. The saddest thing of all is the fact that so many otherwise logical, sensible people have allowed the lowest expressions of society to influence them to jettison intellectual pursuits for the garbage which is sports. So sad to see an adult American male, or any other nationality for that matter, that could be using his brain for something useful stuffing his mind full of pointless, boring, and utterly irrelevant sports statistics. It is galling that such attention is wasted on this falderal.
And lastly I want to leave with this: every time I attack the foolishness that is sports, some steroid addled, meat-for-brains, sports lover will always offer the same brainless, uninformed taunt. “You were just never good enough to play sports and you’re just jealous,” they will blather. I love how this brain-dead taunt comes up every single time. So, to disabuse you knuckledragging, muscle heads — and all your over weight, balding, wish-you-weres that sit on your couch stuffing your faces every game day as you act like a ten-year-old when “we” get a homerun or a touchdown… “we” as if YOU had anything to do with it — I played all sorts of sports as a child and teen. Like every set of American parents in the 1960s and 70s, mine carted me out to one team after another for years. In fact, I generally enjoyed the games (except baseball which I hated) and was even on a few championship teams. So, no you Neanderthals, I was not unable to play the game as a kid.
Fortunately, just like Hitchens I’ve smartened up as an adult and seen through the sham that is sports. So, hooray for Christopher Hitchens. He’s at last hit upon the God’s honest truth (OK, the God crack was a slap in the midst of my praise at Hitchens the atheist, but… you know). Sports are useless, dangerous, pointless and should be eliminated from our lives.
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Posted by Warner Todd Huston on February 6, 2010 5:00 pm
» Filed Under 1st Amendment, Debate, News, Social Engineering
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8 Responses to “Hitchens Says Sports Suck… And I Agree”
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I’ve said it myself a hundred times. Sports teaches nothing worth while
Well, I am not “some steroid addled, meat-for-brains, sports lover,” just a Mom who raised two children and two foster children, all of whom were hyperactive. Sports was their salvation and mine as well. It gave them an outlet for all their energy, it gave them discipline and a sense of accomplishment, and having to keep their grades up in order to keep their eligibility to play, is what got them through school. And in the case of the boys, it provided them with the much needed male role models they needed while their Dad was away on long year+ deployments with the Navy during the Vietnam years.
I don’t know which of the warped reasons you cite is why you are averse to sports, all I know is you don’t know what the hell you are talking about.
I have less problem with “sports” than I do with professional sports and the Olympics. Like I said, I know my opinion of sports is a minority view. And I don’t give a crap. I am right. YOU are wrong. Period.
You should lighten up a bit. Sports have been around since the beginning of time, and baseball is actually considered to be a large part of American culture, especially way back in the era that “conservatives” such as yourself take your values from.
And I’m the one who’s right- you’re the one who is wrong, and that’s the simple truth to the matter. Why? I have no idea, but that’s how I like to cap all of my arguments anyway.
“I have no idea, but that’s how I like to cap all of my arguments anyway.”
H, ha. Me too!! LOL
I disagree. Do not mix professional sports and the players or how the crowds react to the sport.
During a child’s upbringing learning team work, sacrifice, duty, self-discipline, not including the development of some kind of respect for physical exercise is a good thing. Name one field where all of those elements can be found. Chess? Debate? Video games? No.
Humans are humans and they need certain elements in their lives that help develop them into complete adults. Sports fills many of those needs. Not all, and not to the exclusion of all other things.
Now as for comparing sports to professional sports or European soccer madness, you and Chris are making a common cause and effect error. For example, European soccer equals crazy fans trying to kill each other. So, by your reasoning any activities that brings out the bad acts of people should be outlawed. People screaming at concerts? Political rallies? How about house parties if someone gets out of control and starts a fight. How about circuses, or Micky Mouse or anything that gets people excited.
Do not link what individuals do exercising their own free will with whatever has their attention at the time of the act.
What sours people like you on sports is what surrounds sports and often infects professional sports. As in paying athletes of questionable character millions of dollars to do really nothing that warrants that kind of pay (which really goes to my argument about doing to them what Fienberg wants to do to CEO’s – http://truthandcommonsense.com/2010/02/06/ken-fienberg-pay-czar-50000000-is-enough-for-anybody-anybody-how-about-players-and-movie-stars/)
I can understand why people turn away from sports because of the loss of as Costner said “The love of the game.” I quit watching professional basketball shortly after Bird, Magic and the others retired. I found watching a man getting paid tens of millions of dollars to pout was maddening.
But that doesn’t take away from the love the kids have for hanging out, testing their limits, gaining friends, and learning valuable skills that will serve them well in their lives.
Enough said. You are right about the dislike wrong about the why’s.
Sports don’t usually suck too bad, unless they include a propaganda session from our Imposter in Chief …. which I hear we will be subjected to in the Super Bowl pre-game show this evening. I already e-mailed CBS and told them I would be turning it off … Now I just have to find out who their sponsors are.
Another benefit of sports at schools, they bring in money for the school that gets spent on students NOT involved in sports.
Sport isn’t all bad, but it isn’t automatically pure and wonderful. For the record, I got turned off on sports by the attitudes of pro athletes.
The olympics? Waste of time IMHO. I think we should have the steroid Olympics. It’s where everyone HAS to be juiced to the gills to be eligible. Now that is something I would watch.
I think sports is just like acting… on low levels it can be a healthy outlet for a person; on a high level, it becomes bogged down with money and greed. Compare NFL to Hollywood.
And a caveat of mine here… “sports” like baseball, football, cricket, etc, are not actually sports, they are games (that’s why its called a football game). Real sports are activities like hunting, fishing, crew, rock/ice climbing, track and field, etc. These all originated as like skills back when these kinds of things were needed, whether it be for survival or war.
But I digress. I say keep these games as something for neighbor kids to play on nice days.