Welcome Sports Haters!

aren't you supposed to laugh at jokes?

just tryin' to fit in.

Well the league/leagues/college recruiting, etc. might be a joke but the game is not a joke and the obvious skill, fitness and aptitude of those players is a joy to watch.

I LOVE watching Alan Iverson play. I HATE watching Shaq play. Alan Iverson looks like something slightly more graceful than human, while Shaq looks like this bumbling and huge mass of flesh lumbering up and down the court and just using his sheer mass to achieve whatever he achieves blocking beneath the opponents basket or sometimes actually scoring in his.

So for me - it's almost never the game - it's the skill. I don't give a crap who wins (except when it's the YANKEES - world series AGAIN!!! Hurray!)

But I love watching any sport at any level because I love watching what human beings can DO - and that's the meaning I take out of it that if you have an aptitude and you work and practice and you love doing it - it can become your art.

I'm not much of a spectator by nature, regardless of what it might be I'd generally rather do it than watch it, assuming I have the interest/inclination.

However I do not condone government interventionism as per organized sports any more than I condone government interventionism as per organized religion.

I hope the government has made a note of that Chum.

CHAI SAID

Name something that is enjoyed and experienced that is without meaning.

CHAI SAID

You really cannot be that clueless about life.

That is what human beings do.



Even in literature, from an eccentric as weird as Vonnegut knew this.

CHAI SAID



btw thank you very much for the laugh.........

Such a remark coming from one who projects herself in her posts as the most bitter and unhappy person on site your remark stands both as the apex of humor and a prototypical example of a person who exhibits a complete lack of self-awareness.

You don’t need course in yoga, lady; you need a psychiatrist. Between every line in your posts here you exhibit unremitting anger, and twisting your body into the shape of a pretzel via yoga is not going to help with a twisted personality. Seriously, you ought to talk to your physician about your anger issues.……. And do Tai Chi, it is more fun.

Chai, nobody on this thread has tried to convince you to “enjoy” sports. On the contrary some of us, including me, have agreed with many of the things that repel you about sports. Yet your remarks make it abundantly clear to observant people that you are looking at the issue in a superficial and shallow manner. I understand that you don’t care about the issue but you refuse, by habit or inclination to ignore and reject the descriptions presented by your fellow posters of the value and benefit that participation in athletics produce in individuals for personal growth.

That you dismiss them with a yawn and wave of your hand is just subjective ignorance. So, stop digging a hole of shear sciolism with your remarks. I beseech, a la Cromwell, to accept that you are incorrect and that you accept that that you don’t know what you are talking about. It just makes you look bad.

btw: Yes, I am a hero. Each of us is the hero, of our own life. When you realize that you won't be so unhappy with your life.

Read this to begin your hero's journey, and maybe along the way you will become happy with yourself.

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

meep

And wouldn't that be that someone's meaning?

If you "enjoyed and experienced" something, the joy and simply being there, then, must have meant something to you.

No dear, that would be sheep. Keep chewing your cud.

I'm not either - in fact that's why when I'd take my son or daughter to their practices I'd be compelled to try to do what they were doing. I'd played softball myself and was a good hitter and an above average fielder - but have you ever tried to hit a little baseball that someone has thrown hard and fast - like 50-60 miles an hour (this was a highschooler)? It really hurts your hands and wrists all the way up into your arms (that's if you can even get the bat on the ball).
I had a new respect for my son and what he did - and understood perfectly when he wore those batting gloves from then on (before that I thought he just wanted them to look cool or something).

I give those guys who do that all the time and everyday RESPECT for their skill. Just like with basketball - its one thing to stand still, take aim and get the ball in the basket - but when you're running really fast and someone's chasing you and trying to take the ball away and you can STILL get it in the basket from mid court - that's a skill.

I don't think they should be paid such big bucks for it - but I do enjoy watching it - probably even more so because I know that I can't do it myself.



What's this about - is this on the horizon or something?

I don't mind playing team sports, mixed company only - it's more civilized. I go to the odd game but spend more time watching people and grooving to the tunes than I do the game. I golf and curl now, mostly because I can't play other sports - injured my shoulder and arm in a traffic accident, so softball and hockey is out, sadly. I had on terrible skiing incident, -32C at Lake Louise when they shut the blue and green runs and I was forced to ski through deep powder. I made a promise to god if he got me out of the quagmire I would quit, and sadly unlike the promises I made when I drank a few too many, this one has stuck! But I think I'm going to try my luck this winter.
I never watch sports on TV. It bores the crap outta me...
I think sports does teach many lessons, if a person is receptive but I don't begrudge people their interests. I'm a hippy at heart, not really competitive but to each their own I guess.

The UK government is heavily involved in organised sport. There is a minister for sport. It is massive.

You're no hippy Ceili.

Greetings. I thought this thread had died, partly because of my initial intemperate response. There are certain issues that have just not been discussed in this topic. There seems to be the view that anyone who doesn't like sports should be ashamed of himself (or herself) and is guilty of an offense akin to being a racist or an anti-Semite or a political conservative (just kidding). The designation "sports hater" is vague and rather broad. I won't call myself a sports hater. I'm critical of certain cultural aspects of certain (not all) sports. The question should be asked why someone doesn't like sports, instead of automatically disregarding that person.

For the record, I respect athletic achievement. But I don't believe (as some individual athletes and coaches clearly do believe) that athletes as a group are superior to all nonathletes. My friends include a few guys who played football in high school, one of whom even played in college; and I'm a member of a health club. One thing that irks me is the view that those who haven't participated in sports, especially men, are viewed as somehow being deficient in comparison to those who excelled in sports. Boys who have no interest in sports are often suspected and even accused of having homosexual tendencies (even by some mental health professionals and some evangelicals), which is a truly demeaning negative stereotype. Certainly more demeaning than the "dumb jock" stereotype, which I haven't believed in since I was in junior high. Never mind that homosexual men have been involved in sports ever since they were invented, as they have participated in every other human endeavor.

One of the greatest heroes of World War II was a Swede named Raoul Wallenberg, who was granted honorary American citizenship in 1982. (The only other recipients of this great honor were General Lafayette and Sir Winston Churchill). Wallenberg was a highly intelligent man who could speak five or six languages fluently. At the outbreak of the war, Wallenberg was running an import-export business with a Hungarian Jew. His business partner later heard what was happening to the Jews in Hungary and told Wallenberg, who prevailed upon the Swedish government to send Wallenberg to Budapest as a diplomat. He saved the lives of thousands of Jews by sheltering them in "protected houses" under the Swedish flag or securing their passage out of Hungary with phoney passports or by resorting to bribing. (His rescue operations were funded in part by the United States.) He worked under very stressful conditions, surviving several assassination attempts. Yet this was the happiest time in his life.

The Red Army that drove the Germans out of Hungary were accompanied by agents of Stalin's secret police. Wallenberg was abducted to Moscow, where the Russians today claim he was executed in 1947. But there have been survivors of the Soviet gulag who claim they saw Wallenberg in the 1950s and the late 1970s. According to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, on one occasion Wallenberg was brought before the Soviet Foreign Minister, who offered Wallenberg freedom in the Soviet Union if he would publicly denounce the West for propaganda purposes. Out of principle Wallenberg refused and returned to the gulag, where he surely would have died as a man whose heroism was not yet well-known to others.

According to his half-sister, Wallenberg "detested" competitive team sports (meaning, of course, that he had no interest in them). Was Wallenberg therefore deficient as a human being? Was he a wimp or a sissy?

Are you sure about that? lol

Yeah--hippies don't go ski-ing. And golf--ye Gods. Fancy having to have a flag to show you where the hole is that the balls go in.

What's your handicap--69?

Nope it's well over a hundred. I don't golf a lot, but when I do it's normally for shits and giggles and the beer cart. I'll never be good enough to be competitive. It's just another way to go for a walk in the park.

Raoul was a good guy...but his connection to this thread is a little....threadbare.

Why pan?

I think it's a perfectly valid point.

Because Raoul "detested" competing in sport doesn't mean he was a sports hater Didn't we establish the difference?