What is and is not a sport?

"These are my rules... I make them up..."

A classic bit.

 

First definition of sport:
1. An athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature.

If you really think boxing is not a sport, I don't know what to say.

Anybody can fight, but to me what Manny Pacquiao does is certainly a sport.

On the other hand, another definition is a diversion; recreation; pleasant pastime, so poker certainly could be considered a sport as well.

Yes, hunting and fishing are sports as well.

 

If I might summarize, I see four basic criteria:

1) It must be a competition with clear winners and losers.

2) It must require a degree of athletic ability. Although, admittedly, the minimum athletic threshold to qualify is highly debatable. I think we can agree that poker, chess and videogames fall short, but what about bowling and auto racing? I don't know, but I might suggest as a rule of thumb that, if people commonly smoke or drink beer while competing, then it likely fails the athleticism test.

3) There must be a substantial organized structure in place for competitions, as well as widespread public recognition of the activity having sport status. Hence why lawn darts, dodgeball, kickball, beer pong and Wii are clearly out.

4) Outcomes determined by objective means, and not appointed "judges" giving subjective opinions disguised as objectivity. Sorry figure skating, gymnastics and diving, you easily clear the first three hurdles, but fail miserably on the fourth test.

 

Agree with your first three but as I mentioned before, there are clear objective guidelines for judging in the three sports that you mention. The fact that most people don't know what they are, doesn't change that.

By that line of thinking, boxing isn't a sport.

 

As noted previously, in boxing outcomes at least can and often are determined by entirely objective means if you knock the guy out. Judges only get to pick the winner when a fight goes the distance. The presence of judges in boxing is a complicating matter, but it certainly does better on the the 4 part test than gymnastics/figure skating type events.

And, regardless of whether the judges in those competitions are allegedly using objective "guidelines", they still are in the end making subjective determinations about who wins and loses, even if they dress it up as something else. It is an entirely different creature from competitions that are decided by truly objective systems such as putting the most points on the scoreboard, running the fastest time, knocking the other guy, finishing first in the race, etc.

 

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”

- Ernest Hemingway

 

I'm with Stoney on the first three points and with JR on the fourth. People might not understand the scoring systems in sports like gymnastics, but that doesn't mean they haven't taken great pains over the last several years to make them as objective as possible. IIRC, gymnastics, at least elite international competitions, has removed any pretense of grading artistic impression and diving has never had that. Figure skating still has some of that in there, so IMO, it's not reaching my definition of a sport quite yet.

Scoring systems in those sports are means to the same end as the timing or scoring systems in other sports. Instead of who can jump highest, it's who can execute the most difficult and perfect vault or whatever. If a boxing match does not end in a knockout, do you consider that match not a sport since it comes down to a scoring system? That's almost more subjective than comparing the execution of two vaults against a known perfect standard.

Golf is not a sport because it doesn't require enough (IMO) athleticism. Bowling, darts and curling are similarly not sports in my view. They are ridiculously hard to do well, but that doesn't make them sports.

 

By my yardstick, diving and synchronized swimming are not sports. They take a lot of athleticism on the part of the participants, but they are not sports in my mind.

 

Sorry, not sure what the difference is between an objective points system used in a sport like diving and figure skating and what a baseball judge does when calling balls and strikes. In both cases, they're subjective opinions of codified rules.

Oh, wait, he's an UMPIRE, not a judge. That makes all the difference in the world.

 

Before the advent of "modern boxing" with gloves and a fixed number of timed rounds, the winner of the match was the boxer who either:


a. knocked his opponent down for a 10-count - - or - -

b. beat him up sufficiently that he could not answer the bell for the next round.


A round lasted as long as it took for one fighter to knock down his opponent. It could last 12 seconds or 12 minutes.

However, at the end of that fight - - barbaric as it may seem - - the winner of the fight was unambiguous. There was a heavyweight title fight under the "old rules" that went for 76 rounds and ended because the losing fighter's second in the corner tossed in the towel and refused to let his fighter go to the center of the ring for Round 77. [See John L. Sullivan vs. Jake Kilrain]

In "modern boxing" we have subjective judging - - albeit with a numerical points system that makes it appear to be objective and quantifiable - - and that subjectivity leads to the current state where a large percentage of judges' decisions in fights are considered to be "very suspicious".

 

No, the difference in my mind is that the umpire/judge does not get to decide if a run scored should count for a full run or if it should be discounted - - or augmented - - because of style points on the part of the player scoring the run or the fielders who tried to prevent a run from scoring.

At the end of the game, all you need to is check to see which team had more players touch home plate to recognize the winners.

 

Is determining what is or isn't a sport a sport itself?