Go easy, buddy. Relax.
Do you really think so? I’m not so sure.
I thought that the Canadian government had already apologized for Bryan Adams several times? There’s no need for that kind of retribution, is there?
This isn’t science. It’s marketing. A sports league is a commercial enterprise that will use whatever terminology benefits its brand. It’s an age-old tactic that’s recognized by the common law under the term “puffery.” “Mere puffery” is exempt from any cause of action based on a false statement if fact because no reasonable person will understand it to be an actual factual claim.
If some kind of perceived American “arrogance” is at the heart of the issue… well, there are two ways we can look at this.
- Can you think of ANY team in the rest of the world that plays American-style football better than the Green Bay Packers? Neither can I.
They’re the best American-style football team in the USA, which means they are, de facto, the best American-style football team in the world. Hence, they ARE the “world champions.”
In the same way, the NBA champions undoubtedly ARE the best basketball team in the world, and the best team in Major League Baseball undoubtedly IS the best baseball team in the world.
The rest of the world, of course, is perfectly free to yawn and say “Big deal. Who cares?” (And they do!)
2) Have you ever seen a restaurant with a sign saying “World’s Greatest Pizza” or “Best Burgers in the Universe” or “Our Margaritas Are World Famous”? I have, hundreds of times. Does ANYBODY get offended by such claims? Of COURSE not! And really, that’s all “World Champions” amounts to- a slogan.
Nathan’s claims to have “World Famous Hot Dogs.” When I See that, do I sneer, “Yeah, sure, people in New Zealand and Ethiopia and Bangladesh and Ecuador have all heard of Nathan’s hot dogs?” Do I call Nathan’s “arrogant”? Of COURSE not.
Again, it’s just a slogan. It’s puffery. There’s no need to take it seriously.
Erm, dude, I’m not Indian. If you thought that I was then you couldn’t be more mistaken.
My point was that Kabaddi is similar to American Football in that it’s a niche sport that only one country on the face of the planet actually cares about…
Immaterial. Without any sort of method of being even open to international competition you simply are not World Champions. What people believe or think about how good a team is doesn’t come into it. Take football/soccer for example. I always thought (and pretty much knew) that my team, Coventry City, are pretty crap. Always have been. Yet in 1987 we won the FA Cup, we were the champions of football’s oldest competition, one that involves teams from the grass roots levels all the way up to the top tier (indeed, two seasons later we were knocked out by Sutton United, an amateur team several divisions below us). Yet, due to the nature of the competition, Coventry CIty could easily be described as the English champions.
Yet any fool could have seen there were better teams out there (Coventry came tenth in division one that season). The problem is, they didn’t win the competition. Coventry did. Coventry were the champions because they took part in a competition and won it, the only valid way to be champions. Everything else is just idle speculation.
Otherwise, why bother playing if you already know who are the champions?
Simply deciding you are better than everyone else without bothering to put it to the test is arrogant and, frankly, isn’t a decent metric. There’s only one way to know, to put it to the test.
The difference is, there is a very, very simple way to decide who are the world’s best team at a sport. You have a competition where they all play against each other and the one that wins is world champions.
Food is a different matter and actually is a whole new discussion, one that I think I have mentioned on this board before. I honestly believe that any “sport” that relies on judges to decide scores has no place in a sports competition (eg. the Olympics) as in the end it comes down to what a judge thought of it, rather than something clear cut like a ball in goal/through a hoop/carried into an endzone/touched on the floor or a man running round a diamond/up or down a strip. And food is the same, it comes down to someone’s opinion. How much they like the food. That’s just not the same as clear-cut rules regarding scoring.
I believe it is the man with the moderating powers that needs to relax. Or at least be willing to accept points of view that disagree with his own.
Personally I’m not a fan of being accused of being a troll. A lot of people aren’t, which is why it isn’t allowed on this board apart from in the pit, a forum which this thread is not in.
You’re missing the point. It’s a product, an entertainment product. They can call it the greatest whatever they want with no objective justification whatsoever. The fact that you think that this is some kind of fact that must be proven or that it illustrates some kind if national character defect just illustrates a lack of perspective.
By the same logic, surely, doesn’t that invalidate any named titles within the sport? I mean, in that sense, calling a team the NFL champions equally doesn’t require any factual support. You could declare any team you so wished to be the winners of the Superbowl without objective justification, and be as correct as any other person.
And while we’re at it, what right does Budweiser have to call itself “the KING of beers” without any objective justification? It just wraps itself in its red white and blue can and calls itself “King”. I don’t see how other brewers put up with it.
Irrelevant. They’re world champions because that’s the name of the title. If you win the World Series, you’re World Champions in baseball; if you win the Superbowl, you’re world champions in football.
The fact that there are other countries that play the sport is irrelevant. The title is “World Champion,” and thus they can call themselves World Champions.
Let me say this more than once, since you continue to ignore the point.
“World Champion” is a title. It is not a description.
“World Champion” is a title. It is not a description.
“World Champion” is a title. It is not a description.
Now say that to yourself a few times until grasp the concept that a title is not a description.
Amen. I just read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair for the first time and there wasn’t a single goddamn tiger in the whole book!
Now you just need to explain why you think it is a title and not a description. Hell, we can’t even get a consensus in this thread about whether it is used, so how you can be so sure it is merely a title I do not know.
For all your lovely big letters (congrats on finding the font size drop down, by the way), from my perspective it is used as a description. Those claiming to be “World Champions” genuinely act and feel as if they are World Champions. I came to that conclusion over years of watching US sport, starting in the mid 80s when they started showing Football on Channel 4 in the UK.
To be honest, right now I am struggling to think of “It is a title, not a description” examples for any sports that are not US-centric. As others have said, the likes of Dublin GAA (Current All-Ireland Football Champions) or Geelong Cats (Current AFL Grand Final Winners) don’t seem to be parading “World Champions” as any sort of title.
One final thing, apparently Superbowl I was known as the “First World Championship Game AFL vs NFL”, so clearly they thought it was a World Championship and not just a fun title given to the winner. This can be seen in the logo at the bottom of this page:
And let’s not get started on “NBA World Championship”. I mean, really? They managed to get “National” and “World” in the same championship name?
No, it’s not the same logic. The term “NFL” and the term “Superbowl” and the term “Olympic” are among the many terms reserved by law to a specific entity. The NFL owns the terms “NFL” and “Superbowl” and so they get to define what an “NFL champion” and a “Superbowl champion” are. Even if the terms had been unregistered, the established use in commerce of the term “Superbowl” as a designation of the origin of services would lead the public to understand a meaning relative to a specific entity.
On the other hand, terms like “world’s champion,” “world’s greatest,” “world’s best,” are not terms in which any specific entity has any rights. More importantly, they are not terms in which it is possible for any specific entity to have rights and define specifically. They are generic terms, and, as stated before, terms with an established history of use as puffery, both in the law and as understood by the public.
“World’s champion” has no specific meaning, either by law or by tradition or by general understanding. For it to have any specific meaning, it would have to be a proprietary term put under the control of a specific entity. For example, before the advent of the modern Olympic movement, the term “olympic” had no specific commercial meaning and could have been used by everyone. Now, however, the term “Olympic” (among other terms) are reserved by law in many countries to a specific entity.
The U.S. Code, for example, 36 U.S.C. § 220,506 states:
There is no legal or linguistic support for the proposition that the term “world champion” or similar terms have any specific meaning in commercial tradition, commercial practice, or in the general experience of the public. Not only that, but as stated before, there is specific recognition in the common law of the practice of commercial puffery, which allows enterprises to use superlative terms to describe their goods and services without any expectation that they are factual claims.
I do not believe “World Champion” is an official term used by the NFL anymore. It’s used by people a lot, but it’s not actually what the winner of the Super Bowl is formally called.
Originally, the AFL-NFL game WAS called the World Championship game, but they dropped that name in favour of “Super Bowl” and renamed the trophy the “Vince Lombardi Trophy,” so there’s no official “World Champion” styling involved now.
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And let’s not get started on “NBA World Championship”. I mean, really? They managed to get “National” and “World” in the same championship name?
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Who uses that term?
The NBA styles its champions the NBA Champions, its championship cntest the NBA Finals, and the trophy is the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy. Who calls it the “NBA World Championship”? The NBA apparently discontinued using that term 25 years ago.
Precisely so. I suppose the difference lies in that (and I admit I make an assumption here) some people do put some stock in some sporting titles. IOW; the particular argument I was arguing against would mean that there are no titles for any entertainment product which have any meaning.
So to call Budweiser a beer mean nothing at all either, though of course this might well be your view already depending on your tastes.
You keep saying stuff like this and you know who will show up, fuck the thread Dio-style, cats and dogs will be living together, The Vikings will forever suck and the world will remain in imbalance, so stop it now for the love of Pete!
Under what global jurisdiction do you make this appeal to law?
Merely because people recognise such terms as puffery, doesn’t mean that they still aren’t wrong. Nor does something having one generally accepted meaning necessarily mean that it does not have other meanings. A literal reading of of the terms you cite suggest to me the best in the world, and indeed there are competitions which do use those terms which do make a claim to be globally representative, and which are used by the public to refer to such winners.
If nothing else, if I claim that I am the “Best Football Player Ever”, you would be incapable of declaring that I am wrong?
I’d like a cite that it does not have specific meaning by general understanding.
Apparently enough people in Boston that Gregg Popovich felt compelled to publicly comment on it a massive year and a half ago:
Looks like I’m not the only one that sees it as arrogant then 