Friday, January 16, 2015

The Wide World of (Not) Sport


 Two climbers scale 3,000 feet up the face of Yosemite’s El Capitan using just their hands and feet, oh, and safety ropes.  Is that sport?  A blindfolded Nik Wallenda walks a wire suspended 543 feet above the streets of Chicago from one Marina Tower to the other, all without a net.  Is that sport?  Reese Witherspoon portrays the woman who walked 1000 miles more or less by herself in order to prove…something.  Is that sport, or when people venture out across Death Valley or the English Channel or the distance from the tip of Florida to Cuba, a support team to monitor their progress?  Or the person who sets out across the ocean, alone, in a tripped-out rowboat?

No, sport is a bat and ball with a fence for definition or a pool divided into lanes, a digital clock separating the winners from everyone else.  Sport is the primal assault of a safety blitz and the now more sad than not career of Michael Jordan.  The other stuff is an endeavor that means whatever its participants want, minus the hype.
I’ll take sport. 

No comments:

Post a Comment