Imagining an America Without Sports | Hacker News Reader

Imagining an America Without Sports

psmag.com

44 pointspappyo49 comments

Noam Chomsky has an interesting section about sports in Understanding Power – he essentially asks: "what would society be like if all the attention given to sports was put towards politics?"

When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief...

http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-why-americans-know-so-m...

I've always enjoyed this quote, but I disagree that there is much in the way of serious "analysis" happening when ESPN talking heads are arguing about football game outcomes.

This Onion classic has always nicely summarized the seriousness of these sorts of conversations for me: http://www.theonion.com/articles/you-will-suffer-humiliation...

Sports radio sounds just as retarded as politics to me. I'm a huge hockey fan and played a very high competitive level. Let me tell you that sports talk is not sophisticated. What you hear on the radio is not nearly the same level as you hear from a coach.

"what would society be like if all the attention given to sports was put towards politics?"

Sounds like hell to me. What would society be like if all the attention given to sports was put towards minding our own business?

    Last week, on the first day of the fall term, he asked the students in his
    Cultural Politics of Sport class for their thoughts.

    “The students said they would see an America without sport as a world
    that is deficient. Almost none of them said something good about it,”
    King says, also noting that in a class of 50 students, only one didn't
    have an active relationship with sport—watching or playing—in the
    last week.

Students in a "Cultural Politics of Sport" class are hardly unbiased when it comes to sports. It's unsurprising that they all watch or participate in sports and feel that they'd be deficient without them. I'm sure I could round up 50 peopke that hate sports and want them banned, but they wouldn't be representative of the general population either.

It’s very telling that there have been very few proposals from feminists or kinesiologists or sports marketers to come up with a way that men and women can compete together, or men and women can compete on a different kind of a playing field.

This has puzzled me for decades. There are some sports in which men and women compete together at the highest levels (e.g. horse racing), and there are some efforts at other mixed competition at lower levels. However, these seem to be minimized by everyone, and not even referenced as a benefit of which we'd like to see more. I can't think of any arena besides sports of which that could be said, although perhaps it might almost be said of the military. Even the military is criticized to an extent for the opportunities it denies women. Yet, sports get a complete pass.

It is true that many sports would have to change in fundamental ways to allow women and men to compete together at the highest level. That isn't really an excuse, though, is it?

Seriously asking, what opportunities are denied to women in sports?

Most high schools and colleges dedicate a very small portion of the sports budget to women's sport as opposed to men's.

No this is completely wrong. Look up Title IX.

It's the reason the university I went to e.g. had a women's swim team but not a men's team.

Actually, they don't, but the male sports, particularly football, do pay for the female sports.

Being noticed at all at the top level? What is the difference between the price payed for an ad at the men's superbowl, versus an ad at the women's superbowl?

Really? Since when do we live in the era where "being noticed" is a right?

What is next? Affirmative action for TV time during the Superbowl or the World Cup?

The difference is that millions of people watch men's football.

Is there a single woman on any of the teams in any of the leagues listed at the following?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_sports_lea...

It's a list sorted by revenue. Female sports don't make a fraction of what male sports do. Female's in general are not as interested in sports as makes are. Whether cultural or not is debatable, though I imagine at least a large part of it is. However, a list like this is not proof that women are not allowed the opportunity, only that, when given the opportunity, they have failed to capitalize on it. Look at the WNBA.

I of course admit that the argument can get circular. Current culture -> unsuccessful female sports -> reinforcement of current culture.

EDIT: Care to comment? What about this is factually incorrect?

They get paid less; they don't get to set their pay; but it's somehow their fault that they get paid less?

It's the same for men in fashion. It is just a matter of market value. We are talking about opportunities here, not how valued they are.

You can talk about whatever you want. When I kicked off the thread, it was to point out how the structure of sports in our society puts women in a ghetto, in ways that e.g. the admittedly imperfect tech industry doesn't even approach, and yet sports get a complete pass on this. Even many outspoken feminists settle for Title-IX-style resource-grubbing rather than challenging the basic structure of the ghetto.

Any argument you might make defending the sports status quo would have applied to any sexist cultural institution ever. Case in point: every single sentence in the comment to which this is a response.

I guess we are talking about very different things. I am talking about opportunities in sports, not about the state of the sports industry.

The men's basketball medal counts just the same as the women's in the Olympics. They both had to train and practice the same to get to that point. That's all I care when I think about opportunities.

They get paid less because they work in a much smaller market. Does it also upset you that stage actors make less than AAA movie stars?

People are not blocked from being AAA movie stars on the basis of their gender.

Right, because they have the physical capacity to compete. In the NFL, the NBA, the MLB, etc., they don't. They just plain don't. If that confuses you then go take it out on God or biology.

If that is true why not let women try out for it?

Because at best it's a publicity stunt and wastes the time of all involved? Do you really think that a woman can compete with men on a football field? C'mon. Even the women in these sports laugh at the idea.

Is there a single man on the list of highest paid fashion models? http://www.forbes.com/models/

What exactly is your point?

It is because the men are behind the curtains making the actual money:

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-15-wealthiest-people-in-f...

(Note: everyone there is a white old dude, other than the two women, who inherited the money from white old dudes)

A better solution might be to create new sports that allow men and women to compete together rather than to change existing sports. Fans of existing sports are often very opposed to change for many reasons not least of which is that changes hamper the ability to compare athletes and teams over history. Many an hour has been spent having those arguments...err...discussions.

> few proposals from feminists

This is ludicrous. Womens' rights activists have talked about this since the beginning and often. Women have been explicitly banned from almost all sports that are associated with men only for most of their existence. There have always been women who wanted to play. This is slowly, slowly changing, as activists continue to fight for it, tooth and nail. Their gains are quickly assimilated and forgotten.

It is not the case that sports would need to change. This is an old canard. Remember, all normal distributions have tails and pro-athletes, whatever their sex, are in those tails. Up until recently, women couldn't ski in the Olympic long jump because it was believe it would damage their reproductive systems. Wonder who was writing the rules?

http://thesocietypages.org/sexuality/2010/01/09/reproductive...

Womens' rights activists have talked about this since the beginning and often.

Really? Who has said that our society would be better off if the NFL or NBA were replaced by some other league that offered any opportunity whatsoever for women to compete at the highest level?

There have always been women who wanted to play.

Of course! I certainly didn't intend to imply otherwise. In fact I've spent much of my time playing and watching stuff like the horse sports and kendo, which in all important respects women play just as well as men. I've also heard this about distance swimming. Perhaps ski jumping is another such sport? I don't know it well enough to say, but if it is, or if it can be made so, I'd say that it will be better for our culture to have more of it.

Motorsports are about the most even, but consistent winning is probably another generation out since car time is so important.

> It is true that many sports would have to change in fundamental ways to allow women and men to compete together at the highest level. That isn't really an excuse, though, is it?

A very good point. But on the other hand, entrenched fields of endeavor are hard to change regardless of the social issues involved. Business, politics, and software development are fields where women always have had the physical ability to compete equally, but change is very, very slow.

Why do we care about a hypothetical that is about as likely as an alien invasion?

The more interesting questions are the sociological ones which ask why anyone cares so much about sports in the first place. I don't care about sports in the slightest, but I can keep myself entertained indefinitely with an internet connection or an IDE. I don't think that's true for most people.

Sports seem to me to be a reflection of the modern human's boredom and need to fill all of those hours with something exciting, dynamic, and community-oriented.

There's nothing modern about sports. We are much LESS* excited about them - than the Romans were. We also don't pay our sports stars anywhere near as much.

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=VPENAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA56&dq... *http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7942...

Oh, Pacific Standard... good job, you actually managed to get me to read more than half of it before getting to "white privilege".

> "white privilege"

It's frustrating that it's mentioned so often, but perhaps that's because it's so frequently present in our society. That's what frustrates me. I look forward to a day when it's so rare that it barely needs to be mentioned.

Sport, like culture, is not about any one individual, or any one kind of participant: the "observation" that physically powerful male individuals dominate sport is a) a fallacy, because it's b) a snapshot of a microcosm mis-framed, because of a certain bias. Sport and culture ought to be a perfect balance of the individual and the group, so if the society around it is out of balance, sport will reflect that: not "perpetuate" that. Feels like people are pointing at a mirror here and chastising it, not taking note from it and changing something on this side of the reflection directly.

If anything, "America" needs to consolidate its sport habit and just not dissipate so much, because by doing that it gets diluted and has a hard time competing with the rest of the world. Other subcultures "master" a sport with more depth across the group, versus being so spread out across so many specializations and being an inch deep and a mile wide.

And by compete I don't mean "be better than" or "best" them, I mean "adhere" to the well balanced state of play and acuity mixed together, along with the deep immersion in one of the best schools teaching "human nature" in a way one can actually learn from and do something with, versus behavioral sciences which are theoretical or abstract and usually lead to political or pharmaceutical work. Sport and "street smarts" go together, but on a total scale -- one can "grok" an entire nation by assessing its sport programs, provided the population is well enough represented in that program... complete with laying bare the governmental and artistic, even religious underpinnings of a subculture of this planet/lifeform we all find ourselves being.

It would be nice to see a country without such institutional tribalism. I still can't get over how much of my college fees went to athletics.

I think sports are great, good exercise, good fun, team work and strong friendships and a healthy night out each week.

Watching strangers play sports is insane. Without some personal vested interest, where is the point? The answer is sports betting: when you add betting into the mix it does indeed make sense again.

I don't know. I personally see it as being more like going to watch a pianist perform. Sure, I can play a piano piece and it will be good fun and a fulfilling experience. But a professional pianist who has devoted their life to the art can do things that I am not capable of, and it's wonderful to watch. Likewise, sometimes it's just amazing to watch professional athletes showcase what the human body is capable of.

It may be popular to be all super intellectual and look down upon sports as an activity of brute simpletons, but how much of the development culture uses sports terminology and idioms?

"team" "winning" "hit a home run" "move the goalpost" "sprint" "scrum"

How much of business culture uses military terminology or idioms? If sports were eliminated I'm sure we would find something to fill the gap.

This is funny. A bunch of nerds upset that millions of people like something they don't understand.

I don't see anyone being upset. It's a hypothetical that asks a few people what would be the impact if sports didn't exist or play a major role in American culture.

I don't hate all sports, just the one that doesn't make much sense, like baseball.

This seems like on overreaction. It's only in the US that sports are so laughably and harmfully bundled with education.

That's false. In Canada, I had to pay for my university sport teams.

No pro sport would be fine.

I submit that college sports are far more damaging to society than pro sports.

i'm for it

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