Sports Parents: Ever Heard of a "GAME"?

The BBQ Pit
21

Don’t you realize that however you feel about art, and however great the insight that you think we derive from art may be, there are millions of people who’ll say the same thing about athletics?

What do you think the Olympics are about? Like I said before, the only difference is one of subjectivity. You think art is beautiful, and sports are dumb. Many think that art is dumb, and figure skating is beautiful. Personally, I say different strokes and all that. But don’t go casting aspersions because you personally didn’t take to athletic competition. As for changing the world, again, just because you completely discount everything that’s ever happened on a playing field doesn’t mean other people aren’t being affected. You ever hear of Jackie Robinson? I don’t think he wrote any plays.

22

And music rewards musicians, but hey, they can play an instrument, isn’t that worth money? Not unless people are willing to pay for it.

Yeah, but putting pressure on kids to compete,compete,compete! is unhealthy, creates more losers than winners and strips the activity of its fun whether the activity is sports, academics, music or the Cub Scout pinewood derby.

And how do the arts enrich society? By providing pleasure to those who perform them and those who view or listen to the performances. Just like sports. No piece of music or art has ever saved a life or cured a disease.

23

Of course those are important. Sports has no special lock on them, though. You can learn to socialize and work in a team just as well in academic environments as you can on a playing field. And with the added benefit of not destroying the self-esteem of kids who aren’t fast enough or coordinated enough to make good on a field.

24

The Olympics are fairly different than the cancer that is modern American sports. Most Olympic sports are competitions against the clock or comeptitions for the favor of a judge, not truly competition against others.

Figure skating is a form of dancing, and an art. The competitive nature of it is artificial. The sports I am decrying are the “team” sports with direct competition, because they are a destructive force in the lives of millions, and contribute little to nothing worthwhile in return.

Think how many more science books and computers we could put in our schools if we never spent another dollar on a jersey.

Yes, Robinson was very important to the development of American culture. But as far as I can see, that’s pretty much the only substantive change sports has ever wrought. Compared to the incalculable impact of art, particularly the written word, he’s fairly insignificant.

25

The literature and fine art which “advanced society,” as you put it, were created by single individuals. Team-building exercises and socialization, whether you like it or not, are often created through games. If you were disincluded from sports in the past, it’s understandable that you would feel as you do, but you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I can’t imagine how many times you were judged, disincluded, or beaten up as a child to have formulated this completely preposterous idea that sports have no place in art. Either your criteria is laughably narrow, or your mind is.

26

The pressure by monster parents on their children to be the best at sports far exceeds that in any of the other fields you just mentioned, and it is far more destructive.

Sports reward skills that we shouldn’t, as a society, value all that much. Academic competition pushes to the crop the truly important people, the intellectual capable.

All major societal evolution has involved the sort of consideration and reflection that only art can provide.

Literature is a “piece of art,” and the written word has moved more men to more greatness than any other impetus in history.

The best art is inseparable from its source culture and such art endures.

Sporting events are just fleeting entertainment. Virtually meaningless to contemporary society, and almost certainly meaningless to the great movements of history.

27

Ah, so no sport is worth anything, except the ones that are. And nobody has ever done anything in a sport to change the world, except the ones who did. I think I see now.

28

Not true. Many of the most important pieces of literature were written over the span of centuries by numerous people – the various mytholigical texts, like the Bible, of the world’s great religion. The Federalist Papers is a key piece of political literature, and was written by three men.

Nope, you’re way off base there. I was never disincluded from any sport I ever really tried to be included in. I just see them for what they really are: games that have no intrinsic societal value, and which do far more harm than they do good.

I have, however, been beaten up once. Not that it had anything to do with sports, nor was it when I was a child. My friend Dave and I really kicked each other’s asses once, though, when drunk. Later, we couldn’t figure out why.

I feel very sad for anyone who gets a sense of accomplishment for being able to catch a ball or hit one with a stick. Those just aren’t important skills to have.

29

I’m sorry, this came out all wrong. There are plenty of folks out there for whom this would be a very big accomplishment, for whom simple skills are somewhat arduous to achieve, and I don’t want to appear like I’m slighting them. But, of course, on the surface, my words do that. I’m sorry.

I’ve also managed to totally trainwreck this thread, which was not my intention, either. Sorry.

30

If somehow I embodied the same creative concept, it was a subconscious mistake. Please, I claim no copyright to those words. DON’T SUE ME! I recently had an IP CLE sem. See, that’s lawyer talk. We use acronymns like the military or doctors. If you could understand all that, you wouldn’t need us. Well, actually, yes you still would. It’s like learning a foreign language. I took way too much criminal law in law school. I really like this corporate big money, no crime scene photos, stuff.

Corporate + "I"ntellectual "P"roperty (copyright, trademark, patent), Continuing Legal Education.

spectrum That’s it, buddy! I’m coming over there! Sorry, roid rage. Heh. LATEST HEALINES: PRO ATHLETES USE STEROIDS Also, chicken crosses road to get to the other side. Honestly, for the pit, that wasn’t a trainwreck. You need HAZMAT teams for some of these things.

I believe that an extreme overemphasis on sports, but especially faking the appearance of being healthy and athletic, is scary. When people are implanting things all over their bodies in lieu of working out or running around, that’s not healthy. The science is in, however, exercise and sports are good. Cults surrounding athletes, groupies, kids spending hundreds on mass produced autographs – that’s fucking nuts.

I do think that the most important function of the body is to carry around the brain. That’s a given. OTOH, exercise just makes you feel better and smarter. Clears the head, and such. There is a misconception that smart people don’t exercise. It varies. The ones that do usually get to publish, research, or whatever a bit longer.

31

Some people like to listen to the orchestra, some like to go to museums, some prefer live theatre, and some weirdos like me like to watch the Cleveland Indians play the Detroit Tigers. Whatever gets you through the day. But as fair warning to the art snobs, sports has been around in human culture for a long, long, time, and it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Having said that, the OP still has some validity. Many parents drive their children to try to excel at sports because they think that’s the way to college scholarship. So is studying but for some reason that I haven’t figured out that isn’t as attractive an option, so I’d cure the problem by eliminating college sports scholarships.

If I had to keep college football and basketball to satisfy the alumni, I’d get around Title IX by amending the statute so that a school had to make its sports scholarships proportionate to ticket sales and TV revenue.

I’d fund sports as a club activity on campus, but there’s no reason to give scholarships for it. That’ll eliminate a lot of the parents’ incentive to drive their kids to play sports right there.

None of this will come to pass, of course.

32

spectrum, we humans are competitive creatures. We compete in all kinds of ways, in all theaters of life, at work, at home, at play. The cancer, as you say, that is American sports is not an aberration.

Parents push their children to perform in sports because, at the highest levels, athletes are treated (briefly) like gods. We idolize them and we pay them large sums of money (too large, I think—a different debate) and we crowd by the tens of thousands into stadiums to watch them from as near as we can afford. We allow our children to play these games and some of us are frustrated when we fall short of our expectations or desires. But sports figures aren’t the only ones we idolize.

Lest we forget, The Arts aren’t a bastion of cool freedom from the pressures of parents. For every raging idiot at a Little League game, there’s a Macauley Culkin’s Dad or an Michael Jackson’s Dad and even Mozart’s Dad who push their children into show business. There was recently a Pit thread about a 2-year-old model who was suing a playground for injuries to his face. Who filed the suit for this budding junior star? Mommy.

There are parents who force their children to take hated piano lessons at age four, who don’t allow Junior to leave the house to play until he’s done his violin scales. There are parents who force their children to build soapbox racers and pinewood derby cars. There are parents who make their kids take gymnastics or ballet—kids who would rather be kids.

I doubt that you could demonstrate that a sudden shift from Sports to Arts would make the world a better place, or remove the “stress or distress” of strict parents forcing unhappy children into unwanted activities. It is something that parents do in the mistaken belief that it will be good for the children to learn how to be competitive and talented and idolized.

I think it is foolish to blame sports for this because happen to see these awful slave-driving parents shouting obscenities at their kids. Some parents do it in the privacy of their own homes, next to the piano.

33

There’s far more stress, I believe, from far more kids and parents for sports-related things. Sure, you’ll have an insane “stage mother” type that’ll ruin some music, art or writing for their kid, or you’ll have a harsh taskmaster choir director like I had. But these kinds of people are outnumbered, I believe, but the massive amount of people that take sports far too seriously and make others miserable because of it.

It was all so freakin’ important, for some reason. “Teamwork” my ass. Real teams don’t act like little monsters, little ungracious monsters who don’t give a rat’s ass about their teammates unless they are winning. I remember getting smacked in the face with a very hard ball, causing me to be stunned, my eyes to water, and my face to get bruised. As I stood there, stunned, my fellow teammates simply screeched at me to “throw the damn ball! THROW THE DAMNED BALL!” My priorities, apparently, were screwed up, because I didn’t think of the damned ball’s position before my own wellbeing. I hated that, I hated how my teammates became these selfish litte beasts, all because they were buying into some myth that moving this damned ball was more important than anything else.

It was like this all the damned time. It’s one thing to be a member of a supportive team, but I never experienced that. I was a member of some sort of dreadful, mean, spiteful team who blew the importance of the game way out of proportion and that didn’t want me and resented my presence.

However, I learned a great deal about patience and perseverence through my art studies, because no one was harranguing me there. No fellow students were browbeating me or treating me like a leper if I let them down in some way. Sports was a lot more damaging to me, psychologically, than any other subject in school. It wasn’t the sport, it was the so-called abusive “teamwork.”

So, if it works for some of the rest of you, great, but don’t pretend that it isn’t pure torture for many of us. Pure, unadulterated, useless, fruitless, pointless, abusive torture. Nothing good comes from such spiteful torture. Nothing. Just a loathing for sports and a disdain for the importance some people attach to it.

Sports may be great fun for some, but in the end, it’s simply not that important. Not nothing, not completely insignificant—I’m not saying that it’s nothing. But come on, let’s get real. It is just a game.

34

Sports never had any sort of meaning? Come on, sporting events have lifted entire countries/cultures:

1980 US hockey team
Jesse Owens during the 1936 Olympic games
Jackie Robinson enters Major League Baseball
How about those who play the game and are roll models for kids. Now let me preface this argument with I don’t believe that sports heros should be the only roll models for kids; but they are, and we are not going to change that. I remember growing up watching Wayne Gretzky. Now if a kid is going to want to be like someone, Wayne Gretzky isn’t too bad.

And colleges waste money on sports? What percentage of college athletes go pro? 1% or so? So that means that the other 99% now enter the work force with a good marketable skill, thanks to college sports. How many of these students would not have been able to attend college without their skill as an athlete? Who knows, but I’ll bet there are a few.

And finally, its fun! I play hockey two to three times a week. I still dream about going pro, I’d love to play professional hockey…hell I’d do it for free, just cover room and board. Is it going to happen? Not a chance, but it doesn’t stop me from playing and getting better. Going to professional games helps keep that dream alive for me. That is tangible to me.

35

I guess it depends on the people you know. I personally have seen parents and students get equally insane over who got the solo in choir, who got the lead in a play, who got accepted to or a scholarship for a better high school, whose story or poem was published, who got elected to the student council. I’ve seen parents who so wanted their son to win the pinewood derby that they robbed him of the most valuable part- building the car himself. Perhaps there are a few more of them in sports- or perhaps they get all of the attention. After all, when a parent pushes their child to get straight A’s , or take violin lessons or get into the best college, the parents are generally not yelling at and berating the child in front of an audience. The sports nuts are.
I don’t actually think it has all that much to do with sports itself. It seems to be a way that the parents compete - something between " I’m a better parent because my child got a full scholarship, won the short story contest, was elected student council president, made the varsity baseball team , etc" and parents (fathers in particular) who want their children to achieve what the parent wasn’t able to. In my experience, it’s not the father who played who pushes the kid- it’s the one who never did. The two pushiest sports parents I knew were a couple of fathers who pushed their kids to practice harder, begged for their kids to be put on a travel roller hockey team that they weren’t chosen for , always volunteered to be assistant coaches, got annoyed at the less skilled kids when a game was lost and screamed at their own kids, sometimes badly enough to be ejected from the rink. They also couldn’t demonstrate a single thing to the kids at practice- because neither one even knew how to skate.

36

Give me a break. College athletes are often allowed to let their grades slip if they are good enough on the field, because ticket sales mean big bucks for the school. And if a school gives more enrollment spots to athletes, that means less spots available for people who actually want to learn something.

37

Growing up in an environment where music and are were priorities (in my family’s life, anyway), I encountered some “stage parents.” Some of them are insane and there’s certainly potential for an unhealthy environment there. However, I don’t think that they outnumber the sports-crazed parents. Let’s face it, many people believe that sports is very high priority. Just watching the evening news will tell you that.

However, the majority of my complaint is about the so-called “teamwork” itself. This obsession rubs off on the kids and they become little boors on the field.

I competed in art, but I never had other artists browbeat me or treat me like a leper if I “let them down.” I never got injured while doing my art, only to have my classmates ignore that because, after all, nothing was more important than winning—even getting injured wasn’t as important as winning. And the teachers? Well, they just looked on as the “team” harrassed those of us who were not the best players.

I learned all about competition through my pursuit of art, and it was tough sometimes, to learn to be a gracious loser, to learn to realize that everyone has different strengths and we must respect each other. But the difference with art (and other more “creative” pursuits) is that your classmates aren’t going to eat you alive if you fail. But they often will in sports.

38

So because a few of these athletes are not holding up their end of the bargin, you propose to punish them all? How about all the funds that the student athletes brings in, what do you think they get used for? The college has to do something with that money, I’m sure the student see some of it.

39

Could you copy and paste where, exactly, I made any “proposal” of any kind?

That’s fine and dandy. All I’m saying is that either kids stop acting like little monsters on these so-called “teams,” or, let the kids who are being tortured and are unhappy (and to be honest, unwelcome) on these teams to opt out. Don’t make them play in competetive sports in school. Let them lift weights or something. But to force them to play, and therefore be tormented, does them no good. (All it taught me was that torment and bullying were a school-sponsored and teacher-approved activity.)

Why do you, apparently, want to “punish” the many kids who are being treated like shit in school, all in the name of a game?

40

yosemitebabe, the statement about punishing students was directed at sturmhauke, sorry for any misunderstanding.

I’m all for parents laying off their kids. I can’t thank my parents enough for leaving me alone and just letting me play in high school and college. I also believe that no one should be made to do anything. I also believe that any kids (or adults) who are acting like jerks should be dismissed by the coach, but that argument is for somewhere else…But those who are jerks should not ruin competitive sports for the rest of us.