Oh, sorry, didn’t see your smiley.
Right back atcha.
Scylla:
By your definitions General Hospital and All My Children would be sports. The fate of characters on those soap operas is determined by audience response, too. The performers work with scripts but try to use their talents to make their characters resonate with the crowd. Producers measure audience response and adjust storylines to make popular characters more prominent.
Sorry – I must reject any definition of sport that places “Luke and Laura” in the same class as the “Miracle on Ice”.
BTW: Gladatorial contests were sport. The outcome of the event (winner/loser) was not determined by the reaction of the crowd. The crowd (or the emperor) simply determined the penalty for losing. It was not, however, fair sport. Often one competitor or group of competitiors was severely handicapped. In that respect, it is much like bullfighting or the Nebraska vs Podunk U. football game.
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
Spiritus:
Damn your reasonable refutations! You raise good points.
Still it seems more sportlike than many actual sports.
I understand that there is actually a professional computer Gamers league out there.
It doesn’t seem proper that that should qualify, while wrestling doesn’t.
No, pro wrestling is not a sport.
Go Badgers!
In Mick Foley’s book, he dodges the question of whether Wrestling is actually a sport.
He gives an interesting example though.
In a famous match he was thrown off the top of a 30 foot steel cage (as per script.)
Unfortunately what wasn’t scripted was that he missed the special table that was supposed to cushion his fall. He dislocated a shoulder, and bruised a kidney. Still, he climbed back to the top of the cage to continue that match.
Something else unscripted happened. His opponent body-slammed him on top of the cage, and it gave way. Again he plummetted 30 feet. A steel chair (ubiquitious in wrestling) landed on his face, driving a tooth through his nose and knocking him out.
In a “legitimate” sport, I guess that would be it. In this case, Mick’s friend Terry Funk came into the ring and wrestled with Mick’s opponent for minute or so to give him time to regain consciousness and see if he could continue. He did.
It seems to me that the athleticism, commitment, and insanity displayed by Mr. Foley goes just as far (if not farther) than any professional athlete’s (I’m reminded of the Chinese Olympic gymnast who managed to do his dismount form the rings on a shattered ankle. That one brought tears to my eyes.)
Hopefully you’ll grant me that it’s on a different level then a Luke and Laura love scene.
So goddam what, Amish-hater?
In one of her 1930’s movies, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire danced through a scene more than 80 times (sorry, I don’t have a cite for this – it was something I read). She had blood in her shoes at the end of the filming. Was that a sport?
My father laid bricks one day with a kidney stone (I know this to be true because I helped him that day and then rode with him to the hospital on the next). Was that a sport?
I grant you, professional wrestlers have a great deal of athleticism, but pro wrestling is not a sport. Brian Boitano and other skaters are tremendous athletes, but their activities are not sports. When they bale hay, your Amish neighbors expend more energy than many athletes, but baling hay is not considered a sport.
I just HAVE to jump in here.
Professional wrestling is a “postmodernist sport.” It is all about deconstruction. What it deconstructs is the notion of real athletic competition among participants in favor of what sporting events really are all about nowadays: entertaining the spectators in order to get them to spend more of their money.
Don’t tell me that’s not what professional basketball, baseball, and football are REALLY all about. You’re living in a dream world if you think the goal is to determine the best athletes.
Michael Jordan got every call in every important game for the last part of his career.Don’t tell me he was so good he never fouled anybody. He won defensive player of the year and never once fouled out of a game.
The NFL? The NFL markets not competition but violent hits.
Baseball? Baseball markets people who hit home runs, the quick orgasm. When’s the last time you saw a commercial where a guy laid down a perfect sacrifice bunt in the bottom of the ninth inning to move a runner into scoring position?
I’m not saying any of this is wrong.
What I am saying, however, is that professional wrestling is no different from other sports nowadays. They are all after money, not determining who’s the best athete in a fair and equal contest.
Professional Wrestling is just more honest in admitting that’s what it’s all about.
And yes, Foley is indeed God.
Professional wrestling is not a sport. It’s a sort of performing art. In America, where all sport events have to have commercial brakes, it reminds people of sports, which makes them think it is one. It is difficult to define what is a sport, but one thing common to sports is that there is always a way to measure the quality of performances (time, length, number of goals, judges evaluation…) The number of people watching wrestling on TV or the decibel level of the audience do not measure the performance. They measure popularity, which is something associated with art, not sport.
Professional wrestling is really nothing more than a stunt show, plain and simple.
“It’s only common sense,
There are no accidents 'round here.”
That’s not true. It’s also a Soap Oprea for men.
Yeah, but it wasn’t real.
Ok, a sport implies competition (in my book). In wrestlin’ there is no real competition, just virtual/artificial competition. I really admire the atheleticism though. And the storylines can be pretty entertaining too. I enjoy my Monday night wrasslin.
I think professional wrestling is a sport, in the same sense that synchronized swimming and figure skating are sports. Whenever I say this, people think I’m putting one of the sports down by comparing it to a phoney sport.
Not so. Those are all sports requiring tremendous athletic ability. They are not directly competitive; competitions in these sports take place over several time periods - you never go head to head with your opponent.
That doesn’t make them non-sports though. As long as air pistol has a place at the Olympics, pro wrestling is a sport. Bowling and golf are sometimes considered sports as well (not by me, at least not the bowling).
And in a way, pro wrestling is competitive, just not in the obvious way. If you perform less spectacularly, you’re going to have a smaller fan base, and lose ground in the federation. Nobody just said, “Hulk Hogan is going to be our biggest draw”, he just went out and earned it.
I consider boxing a sport (not one I like, but still a sport) and it is judged in some cases (when it hits a certain limit, with no knockout) based on the judges opinion of the technical merit, etc.
You wouldn’t want audience in all cases, or with any audience, but in performance sports, or sports that attract a knowledgable audience, audience judging should be as valid as any other performance metric.
As much as I hate to admit I read them, much less found anything valuable in them…
Have you ever read the Adept series by Piers Anthony? Specifically the first few. In the technological world serfs compete in ‘the game’ which is really a framework with a huge collection of actual games, from football to horse racing to chess.
One of the games the hero is in is a cooperative acting game, where both participants (the opponents) are given a script which they must follow to the best of their ability. Performance is measured by audience appreciation of how they played their part. Multiple tactics could be used, to actually be a better actor, to ‘upstage’ the other participant, to subtly bait them out of character, etc.
The point is that this did seem like it could be a valid sport, though imho a somewhat dull one.
If you carry this far enough, a soap opera can be seen as a sport. Characters take assigned roles, yet try to make their character interesting enough that the audience feels strongly (for or against) about them. Success is measured by the number of fan comments about them, because even “I hate that evil so&so” means that they got across to the fan, this results in their contract being renewed.
‘That’ rigged? Perhaps not. Depends on if you see the sport being the wrestling or the acting and stunt work. But yes, many sports depend on much more than the skill of the competitor.
Football, Skiing, Bike Racing, Yacht Racing, Bobsleding, etc.
Anything where purchasing better equipment gives you some advantage.
Ideally we’d all love sports that athletes could perform nearly naked, (no purchases assistence) or with identical equipment in the contests. Foot racing could be done barefoot, or the sponsor could supply the same shoes to all contestants… Bike racing could be done similarly, where each contestant was given a certain limit and allowed to ‘spend’ that buying a bike from the sponsor, so they wouldn’t all have identical equipment, but would have the same chance to get it.
That itself, no. There wasn’t a competitor, so I’d have a hard time calling it a sport.
But overall, yes, in a way. Her dedication to perfection made her famous to this day, no doubt beating out other dancing women for movie roles.
Rich businessmen often see the stock markets as a bit of a game, or so I’m told, because they can try to make money, as a score, more than for purchasing power. I’d say that any competition can be seen as sporting. Most of us would have trouble seeing food/rent money as a prize in a sport, but if we were all richer, we might see job performance and promotions as the game that they really are, in a way. Kiss up in the right way, toss out the right power words, and rise right into management.
Let’s look at boxing.
Who gets title shots?
The biggest draw. The most popular. The guy who brings in the most pay-per-view receipts.
Witness Mike Tyson. He gets out of jail and fights three turkeys, three absolute nobodies, and then he’s fighting Evander Holyfield.
This is competition?
He got absolutely pummeled by Holyfield. Yet one judge had him ahead, the other had it as a tie.
Let’s look at baseball. The current system is designed to give big market teams the most money. They use that money to get the best players. Why? Because baseball is smart enough to know that they will get the best ratings, the biggest revenue overall, if the Yankees are in the World Series. Not the Twins or Brewers.
Basketball? Michael Jordan retires. The Knicks and Rockets play in the finals, and its ugly, just a mug and slug fest. Ratings go waaayyy down. So Basketball changes the rules so that mugging is no longer possible.
Football? Bill Parcells wants to come coach the New York Jets. The Jets stink. Parcells is the best coach. He’s also under contract to another team. Football fixes it so Parcells can come coach the Jets, a big market team.
This is competition? No, it’s business. It’s capitalism. I’ve no problems with that.
And yet no one hesitates to apply the term “sport” to these businesses.
I don’t either.
But wrestling is no worse or better than any of them. And saying its not a sport because it’s more honest in what it’s about doesn’t seem very fair. The definition of sport has shifted in America. The rules of the game are different.
Look at the sports pages. Maybe 10% of the space is devoted to the actual games. The rest is what somebody has said about the coach, who’s having problems with who, how much money someone is going to sign for or what team they’d rather be playing for, and what the players personal lives are like.
That’s really not that different, is it?
this has already been discussed to some extent here.
-ellis
I specifically remember a commercial in the last few years for Baseball coverage on ESPN or another sports network where a guy described the suicide squeeze. It ended with him saying “That’s the suicide squeeze. That’s baseball.”
Sure, they’re gonna show highlights of dramatic moments to market the enterainment value of the sport. This is how they make money, no one denies that. When somebody hits a homerun to win a game it is dramatic. And of course the teams that can afford the better players are going to do better in any sport, unless the game is scripted.
It is an athletic show, but it is not a competitive sport if the outcome is predetermined. If wrestling is so wonderful because they can “admit what it’s all about” then why can’t the fans admit the same thing, it is not a sport. It is a show that involves a high degree of athletic ability. We can argue over semantics all day, and you can find definitions of the word sport that encompass wrestling. Non-wrestling fans are not going to agree that it is a sport because the winner is not determined by who plays the game better at the time it is played.
If John Rocker were a wrestler he would start losing every game.
I guess it depends on your definition of a legitimate sport, but everyone knows that figure skating, at least the ice dancing, is rigged.
Before the Nagano Olympics started the Canadian pairs or ice dance team was told that they would finish 5th. Didn’t matter that they were the best couple out there, the Russians were going to win.
Gee, I don’t think any of us expected him to say that.
I believe you could call wrestling a sport, based on the fifth meaning as specified by the Merriam-Webster® WWWebster Dictionary
Main Entry: 2sport
Function: noun
Date: 15th century
5: an individual exhibiting a sudden deviation from type beyond the normal limits of individual variation usually as a result of mutation especially of somatic tissue
Just kidding, wrestling fans!
Encyclopedia Britannica says:
I, for one, would say that the meaning of sport could possibly be stretched to include wrestling. But I would draw the line at using the word “competition”, because, as many other people have said, the results are pre-determined.
Another point of view: does wrestling fit the definition of a sport that could qualify as an Olympic event? In that case, again, obviously not, for the same reason as above, in that there really are no prescribed rules and the outcome of the matches is decided ahead of time.
adam yax, you say
That’s a startling assertion, and one that I would doubt without seeing a reputable source to back it. Not that I’m saying you’re not reputable, or maybe that is what I’m saying ;).
Arnold, ask and you shall recieve http://www.canoe.ca/SlamSkating/jan27_cfs.html and there is more further down in this story http://www.canoe.ca/SlamNaganoFigureSkating/feb21_tara2.html .
Gee, I don’t think any of us expected him to say that.
Thank you adam yax. I didn’t see any mention that “the Canadians were told they would only come in fifth, even though they were the best”, but I do see accusations of judges conspiring to fix matches. Which is certainly possible, especially in events that have subjective judging.
That is different, however, than what happens in wrestling. In wrestling, the “fixing” is an admitted policy of the organization that sets up the matches, and the “competitors” are fully aware of it.