Sport, Not A Sport: Bowling

As bowling gears up for the beginning of it's Majors Season it seems appropriate to examine whether or not bowling is a sport, or not a sport. I'm kidding about the Majors Season. But you have to admit that I fooled you. Really, I don't think bowling has a defined season. They plan their events based on the most boring sports Saturday and Sunday afternoons throughout the year. No good football, baseball or basketball games happening? I hope you're ready for some 2pm semi-finals action, coming to you live from Columbus, Ohio!

Professional bowling is a sport that people are so vaguely aware of that you can say anything about it, with just a shred of confidence and they'll feign a mixture of interest and surprise. No one will question pro bowling's existence, but they won't be able to refute any claims you make. Oh, I didn't know they did Sprint Cup style scoring. You can't do that with Pro Ultimate Frisbee. You start talking MLU and most people will respond, "Really?! That's a thing?" We've all seen bowling on ESPN. Though we may not understand it's appeal, we already acknowledge it's existence. But no one knows enough to refute an assertion that the championship starts tomorrow.

Here are some real PBA events listed on the PBA website: PBA Xtra Frame Gene Carter's Pro Shop East Classic (THAT'S ONE EVENT), PBA Cheetah Championship, PBA Shark Championship, PBA International-World Bowling Tour UAE Open, and PBA International-World Bowling Tour It's Daejeon International Open. Events are held in Dohar, Qatar; Council Bluffs, Iowa; Las Vegas, Nevada; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Middletown, Delaware and Daejeon, Korea. All of that information sounds made up. What professional sports league holds events in Saudi Arabia and the 4th best city in Iowa? Council Bluffs makes sense. I would bet that bowling developed a stronghold as preferred pastime in CB, because you can only visit the Pottawattamie Squirrel Cage Jail and Museum so many times (Is that a jail for squirrels?). The funny thing is that on TV, all bowling events look like they're in Council Bluffs, because they're in a bowling alley, and all bowling alleys look the same. The audience is sitting in the shadows on risers, which is the vibe of Council Bluffs, a dimly lit bowling alley. We're coming to live from beautiful Riyadh.Whatever you say, Brent. I'll take your word for it. Arial view provided by the Goodyear blimp. 

Is that the Dark Tower?!

Naturally, Vegas is a host city (as is Reno). Vegas is what bowling enthusiasts consider an ideal vacation spot. It's the vacation spot for when you can't (or don't want to) think of a better idea, in the same way that bowling is the activity friends choose when they want to get out of the house but there aren't any good movies in theaters. "I guess we could go bowling," is the way every bowling excursion begins. Anyone legitimately excited by Vegas or bowling should be treated with suspicion. There's a reason that every movie centering around bowling is about misfit weirdos, creeps, and boderline-psychotics, because that's who can tolerate this game for more than 60 minutes twice a year.

Me when someone wants to go bowling.

In high school, I took a Lifetime Sports gym class. It focused, as the name implies, around activities you can play throughout your life, up to and including the decrepitude of old age. You know what people can't do well into their twighlight years? Play sports. The fact that badminton, archery, ping pong and bowling were included should tell you the physical ability they require. Grandpa might be able to shoot hoops or play catch, some aspect of a sport. He is not playing a game of half-court or two-hand touch. But he can bowl! Peak physical condition is not required to bowl at the peak level. Anyone can bowl a 300/perfect game. Hannah Diem did it at 9 1/2 years old, making her the youngest person to officially do so. The oldest person, according to Bowl.com, was 90 years old and requested to have their name withheld, presumably because being too good at bowling makes an otherwise cool person seem like they are not cool. Look at what it did to John Turturro. 

Hannah Diem was too young to think of having her name scrubbed from the record books. To her, bowling was something she did at her friends' awesome birthday parties, not a high intensity athletic endeavor. You don't even need to be a freakish athlete to be dominant at bowling. If Hannah or Name Withheld had gone up against this guy, 

If you can participate wearing dockers, it isn't a sport. 

it would have been a tie. Or a bowl-off. However you determine a winner after you're done bowling and you don't know who did it best. Look at that guy. He's the most famous bowler in America and I have no idea what his name is. 

And what kind of sport has a cap on the number of points you can score? That's for board games and youth sports leagues when you're still protecting fragile egos. There's no maximum number of goals in hockey or soccer, only the physical limitation of what a team can achieve in the allotted time. Bowling has a mercy rule built in. A real sport always contains the possibility of complete, unchecked annihilation. In fact, the only thing that makes bowling resemble a sport is keeping an objective score, and that's all. Players score definitive points. There are no judges. The pins either fell or they didn't. 

Bowling, like golf, also lacks the element of direct competition. There's no defense, only turns. You know how in Final Fantasy games when you "battle" an enemy everyone sits and waits for their turn to attack, and you're sitting there thinking, "What kind of Queensberry bullshit rules of engagement is this?" That's what bowling has. You launch your polished stone only after your opponent has taken his seat. If you can't play defense or directly effect your opponents actions then it can't be considered a sport. And the only way to effect your opponents performance in bowling is to order another pitcher of beer and secretly get them to drink it all. 

BOWLING: Not a sport. 

New rule learned: NO MERCY!

Sport Not a Sport: Golf

It's St. Patrick's Day! The the Americanized version of Ireland's weak-ass version of Germany's far superior Oktoberfest. Have you ever noticed how come September the beer aisle is littered with Oktoberfest seasonal beers, but the only beer specific to St. Paddy's day is Bud Light dyed green, which will be served throughout the NCAA tournament. You never realized how long beer sits around at a bar until they dye it green for one specific week and they're still serving it month later. I've ordered a beer in April and been served a green one. It's shocking.

Anywho. In honor of this most Irish of days I decided to knock back a few ales and write about golf, a sport I assume originated in Ireland.

Nope. Just Bing-ed it. Scotland. However, I watched Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: Why Is This A Trilogy, Can I Stream the Weird Cartoon Version I Used to Love last night, and according to Gandalf it was created in Middle Earth by Bilbo's ancestor.

Golf, a game which the origins of are highly contested, is a game played on courses of well landscaped forest clearings. The quality of the game is directly related to the property value of the particular course in use. This fact is part of the reason golf is seen as a sport of the elite. Another reason is cost. Golf is stupid expensive. Here is an Amazon listing for a used driver which you can purchase for $29. That is one club. You will be needing 8 to 11 more clubs to play golf. You can buy an entire set of clubs at once. Sometimes buying in bulk can lower costs. Let's see what happens when I search for "affordable golf club set."

$800!!!!

I specifically used the word "affordable." This is crazy.







More digging uncovers a used set on Amazon for $160. So that's good. You can buy those and still be able to pay your electric bill this month. Now you just need to buy some balls, special shoes and then pay to go play a game.

Yes, unlike in basketball, a sport whose sportiness is beyond reproach, the old men wearing double knee braces on the golf course don't take kindly to you standing off to the side and yelling "Next!" to stake your claim. Golf requires you to call ahead and arrange a time where you can play. Golf a sport for gentlemen. White gentlemen.

Just because golf is a game with daunting start-up costs and classist/sexist history that doesn't prove whether or not it's a sport. But it doesn't bode well. One of the great things about sports is that they act as an equalizing and unifying activity. Merit is determined on the field of play. If not everyone can afford to get onto that field of play then it doesn't seem very sporting.
(Note to self: Pitch movie to Disney about inner-city golf team)

Let's get into the nitty gritty of golf to figure out if it is a sport or not a sport. It has objective scoring. Every time you swing that counts as a point. Stroke? Whatever. You accumulate strokes until the ball goes into the cup. The person with the most points...what? Least points? YOU'RE ON THIN ICE ALREADY, GOLF! You accumulate strokes until you get the ball into all of the cup. "Cup" refers to the hole you are trying to hit your ball into. "Hole" refers to the stretch of course you are currently playing. From the tee to the cup is the hole. God you're stupid, golf. Still, objective scoring is involved. Penalties are given for prescribed reasons. There are no judges. If someone starts talking trash, you can always respond by saying "Scoreboard."

Golf is also physically taxing (so I'm told) which seems to be a qualifying aspect of sports. But the reason it's physically taxing is because you're walking around for 4 hours carrying a bag of metal sticks. Making a connecting flight in Charlotte is physically taxing when you have to haul your carry-ons from one gate to another. That doesn't mean ESPN2 should devote any airtime to it. And golf gives you the option of using a go kart if you get too winded. I'm sure John Kruk would have loved the option to hop into car instead of legging out a double when he hit one into the gap. To be fair, I don't think professional golf events allow the use of golf carts. I can't be sure because I've never watched one, because that would be the most boring thing in the world.

Golf also does not allow defense. You don't get to effect the way an opponent plays or what they do. It is played by taking turns. Players don't even take turns on the same hole consecutively. At pro events some players start on the first hole, some in the middle of the course, and some at the end. You could be winning when you finish the course and end up losing. How can something be a sport if the competitors aren't competing at the same time? I could play a course on Monday and my buddy could play it on Tuesday and then we compare scores to see how won. That's not a sport, that's a high score board. Golf is just an outdoor, extreme version of skeeball. But less entertaining to watch than skeeball.

GOLF: Not a sport.

Sport, Not a Sport: Soccer

The excitement of the World Cup is building to a crescendo, now that the Americans aren't around to make the rest of the world cringe with use of the term "soccer." There's no better time than now to break down bizzaro football, the world's most popular sport. A sport with a history involving kicking human heads and pig bladders, and is now played by underwear models.

So, what makes soccer a sport? The answer is straightforward. It's two teams trying to score points, and each can affect the actions of the other. To have a sport, you must have defense. What kind of sport involves sitting around and watching your opponent do their thing? (Besides when you're the DH in an AL baseball game. Pick up a glove, Papi!) No kind, that's what. If you can't impede your opponents progress, you may as well be playing darts.

The other integral feature of any true sport is objective scoring, not that soccer isn't rife with subjectivity elsewhere. A point should always be a point, no matter how many mobbed-up Russians are in attendance. Can we definitively tell, in a best-case scenario, if the ball went into the thing where the points are scored? If so, then you're on your way to a sport. Did the ball get there because an undersized drug addict illegally put there with his hand? You're pressing your luck.

Before moving on to what makes soccer not a sport, I would like to share some interesting history of the sport I learned from the venerable repository of human knowledge that is About.com. The parts of the world that use the term football when referring to soccer tend to be critical of America for calling American football "football." Somehow, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and parts of Ireland escape criticism for their use of the word soccer. The main argument against American football as a thing that should be called football is that the ball rarely touched a foot. Newsflash! Early iterations of Unamerican Football involved players picking up the ball and running with it. Sometimes they would use sticks to hit the ball. Players would also tackle each other gridiron style. Different teams played with different rules. Halftime was created to accommodate teams with differing views going head-to-head. My point is that Everywhere Else style Football used to look like polo without horses, so give us some slack about not using our feet to play American Football. Besides, if it weren't for weird British slang the word soccer wouldn't exist, so that's not even our fault.

So what makes soccer not a sport? The clock. The rest of the world may be okay with siestas and five months of compulsory vacation, but in the US of A, we're all about schedules. How long does a soccer match last? If you said 90 minutes, you're kind of correct. A more accurate answer is 90-ish minutes. It's 90 minutes, plus however much time is spent with players writhing on the ground in faux agony. That's the extra time. I don't know who determines the extra time, but apparently that person doesn't have a clock, because they add how much they feel needs to be added. But sometimes they get it wrong, usually when they add too little or too much time. I saw a match that had one minute of added time. Anyone who's seen a soccer game knows that no one gets up from a shin kick in less than a minute. If I were a soccer time keeper, I would just add three minutes, no matter what. No scarf wearing hooligan ever got upset by three minutes of added time. But even with the extra time, when the game stops is up in the air. The officials let the game go if a team is on the attack. The game goes until the people involved feel like it's time to stop. That's how I played Ninja Turtles in my back yard, it's no timing method for a professional sporting event. Unless you're playing to a certain number of points, there ought to be a buzzer.

Soccer in general is a casual affair. When a foul is given, the player kicking off can spot the ball where they want (as long as it's in the general area of the foul) and resume play when they want. Often you'll see the team with possession try to catch the defense off guard by doing a quick start. This strikes me as very slap dash and strange, since the officials have a can of spray paint holstered to keep players in right spot on free kicks. On some plays, the players can do what they want and on others precision requires temporarily defacing the pitch.

No analysis of soccer would be complete without a few words spent on the theatricality of competitors who find themselves in a prone position after brushes, near or otherwise, with opponents. Flopping isn't specific to the Beautiful Game. It's been in basketball for years in the form of the charge. No one actually thinks that when a charge happens, the defensive player was incapable of remaining upright. Falling down isn't a crime. Except in basketball, no one has to catch the vapors to draw a whistle. It's even started creeping into American Football in the form of players feigning injury to slow the game down. Much like in soccer, these players usually drop for no reason and were not touched by anyone else. When a player of American Football is suspected of this, he is chastised. Rules are being implemented into basketball to keep players from pretending to have been fouled. In soccer everyone stands around waiting for the injured party to finish their pantomime. Sometimes the official will cast a disapproving glance, if the player is really hamming it up. This is when the player knows that he only has 30 more seconds to get up.

Despite it's peculiarities, soccer has a solid foundation of points being scored by launching a projectile into a designated scoring area. And that's something no amount of phantom injuries sprayed with compressed air can take away.

SOCCER: Sport.

Sport, Not a Sport: NASCAR

For the first edition of Sport, Not a Sport (where I discuss the merits of various athletic activities, and whether they qualify as a "sport"...to me) I've decided to take on some low hanging fruit, NASCAR and race car driving in general. NASCAR is very popular amongst the farmer tan set. I assume. Race car driving, like GWAR, is a strange spectacle to outsiders but a passion for those who follow it. According an in-depth, peer-review study published in the scientific journal of Bleacher Report (they looked at some Twitter graphs), in 2012,  NASCAR was the second most popular pro sport. Only the NFL beat it out. A recent poll shows that "auto-racing" is more popular than the NBA and NHL. Anyone who doesn't follow NASCAR, such as myself, will find this information to be shocking. I don't really follow the NBA, but I know people who have favorite NBA teams and watch games regularly. I know people who will watch NHL and MLB games. Random ones, not just games with their teams. I can't name a single personal acquaintance who makes it a point to watch any kind of automotive racing.

On the surface automotive racing makes sense as entertainment. Fast cars and occasional car crashes. Things we all love. I've tried to watch televised NASCAR races and it is a slog, because they are going in a circle. Even Formula 1, where they throw in some right hand turns, doesn't do it for me. I don't know what it takes to be a fan of race car driving, but I don't have it. It appears that you need to be an American Southerner or a rich European. It's a strange sample group.

Let's move on to whether or not driving a motorized vehicle extremely fast qualifies as a sport. The "it's a sport" list consists of "it's physically demanding" and nothing else. This is the mantra of every NASCAR defender. It's harder than it seems. And I'm sure it is. Driving on a long road trip is tiring. Your arms fatigue, your butt starts to ache, and your leg gets tired if you aren't using cruise control. Imagine doing that at 180 mph, with no A/C, in a fire suit and wearing a helmet. You'd be tuckered out. I agree, NASCAR is a physically demanding method of driving a automobile.

The "it's not a sport" list is similarly extensive. That's right, there's only one reason NASCAR isn't a sport, but you only need one. It's a physically demanding method of driving an automobile. If your sport involves and internal combustion engine, then it isn't a sport. You're driving a car, which is how most of the fans get to the event. Which is odd. It would be like going to a football game by only moving ten yards at a time and stopping every seven seconds. My point is that Dick's Sporting Goods doesn't carry premium unleaded. A real sport only uses the term "running on fumes" as a metaphor. Actually any external energy source disqualifies an activity as a sport. I'm looking at you America's Cup. And surfing, which I didn't see coming, but there's going to be some collateral damage here in Sport Not a Sport. It's inevitable and I knew that, and so should you, dear reader. I'm just sorry that surfing had to be our first casualty. As cool as surfing is, it isn't a sport if the Moon is an integral piece of equipment.

Speaking of the Moon, did you know that NASCAR has it's roots in moonshine running? Drug smuggling is not a sport. What's next? Running a marathon with a balloon of heroin in your anal cavity?

NASCAR: Not a sport.

Rule Learned Today: External power sources are for commuting to work, not sports.