What is "Sport"?

Oh, dear, oh dear, did I really not reply to your kind invite, Jay? How remiss...so sorry...would LOVE to partake with you...d'you also serve beer? The laptop dancing sounds fascinating - d'you perform as you sip? As for popping round to throttle me - I DO hope you don't suffer from air/sea sickness, as I live rather a long way away... ps. Sent YOU a long email...do hope you read it :-) (the email address you have on here is still the old one, Jay, sent email to the ntlworld one) x

Yes Liana done a bit of that in my time..........well!!! if you take the lap part out but always willing to learn so shall we go together and drag Andrea + Ari along what you say up for it or not...

i agree with Iceman. i think the playing of sport is dying out a bit in this country. there was a time when you could go into any sports shop in Central London and buy sports equipment. now, you can only buy sports clothes. the emphasis is much more on looking sporting than actually playing a sport. it's a very rare occurrence to see young people on a tennis court. i notice in clubs that no one can dance for more than ten minutes without having to retire off the floor, and that's not very vigorous dancing we're talking about. i also notice that the boys can't jump very high, and the girls can't jump at all. i think girls definitely spend too much time on make-up, much talked about diets, and mooning over pictures of celebrities in magazines. boys, on the other hand, seem increasingly adept at doing nothing at all. i think that both sexes spend too much time watching television.

Just look at your average footy fan.... they are a load of lard a.rses who couldnt run down a football pitch if their big lardy a.rses were on fire... Jay i think you mean lap dancers, or table top dancers.. laptop dancers are liable to break those tiny little portable pc's i would've thought... great image though :o)) Oh, and i am the proud mum of a beautiful 12 year old girl, who rarely watches TV, is a county trampolining champion, runs on the beach with the dog every day, cycles madly and swims like a fish (well like some fishes) and would laugh loudly in your face at the mere mention of a diet. Stereotyping is alive and well on this thread, as so aptly demonstrated by myself at the top of this post. :o)

Ah, well said, L. Yes, my sprog (well, youngest, anyway) hardly ever watches TV, spends relatively little time on the pc (unlike his Ma), cycles, plays football/basketball, swims, judo, etc etc. Diet? What's that? As for Eldest Sprog.....Liana...LIANA???

Lard a.rse?? LARD A.RSE??? ME??????????

If that cap fits....... *smiles sweetly*

At the risk of upsetting people who dislike me for being too clever by half, Karl poses a similar question to a philosopher. If you sit and try to define 'game' how do you go about it? How can any definition encompass football, darts, chess, Monopoly, hide and seek, Pacman, poker and tig and still mean something ? It seems to have an element of sport, but windsurfing or skateboarding is not a game. It also seems to require an element of competition, but patience is a game. I would go for playful competition myself, but it doesn't seem to quite hit the spot. As for sport - if you don't need a shower after an hour at it, then it isn't a sport in my book. (But then, wouldn't that still cover synchronised swimming, to get the chlorine off?)

Now a personal word.... When I was at school and we were there on the playing field, the teachers took great delight in separating the fatties, the nerds, the thick and the uncoordinated into a rubbish team or teams, who were then ignored for most of the lesson, while the better more "sporty" types were coached constantly in order that our school suceed in beating another school (no doubt with a similar philosophy) at football. I never forgave them for this. On at least one occasion I was told that if I put a bit of effort into it I would make the "squad". Really? PLaying with the rubbish, as rubbish and treated like rubbish. Needless to say I got my own back, playing football at the weekend and coming home with dog shite on my boots from up the park. iceman (just because I'm tall doesn't mean I'll be any good in goal)

Iceman: I would think it would be easier to shine when amongst those of such lower abilities and get picked. Sport is physical competition for it's own sake in my view. The idea of sport is that we compete in a physical way for the very act of competing. It's where sportsmanship comes from. If the competition is more mental than physical then it's not a sport and if it's physical but for different reasons (ie getting tw@tted by a gang of skinheads) then it's not sport. When Gabriel Batistuta kicks someone to the ground and then tries to play act to the officials that he dived...THAT'S NOT SPORT When Paolo De Canio is on goal and receiving a perfectly weighted cross that's almost guaranteed to get him a goal but catches the ball and stops everything because someone from the opposing team is injured......THAT'S SPORT

Jay - I would love to come to tea with you. I could do with some laptop dancing lessons to add to my repertoire! The only sports I liked at school were trampolining and badminton. I was never really competitive enough to get properly involved in rounders and the like - no good at team work either, really. I used to spent most of my rounders games waaaaaaaaaaaaay out in the out field under the pretence of fielding. There was no way in hell anyone was going to hit a ball out that far.

Come on Adrew, get your Ludwigs out. Actually, I love a bit of philosophy, indeed have a degree in the stuff. However, although the format, if not the content, of my 'Some Remarks About Football' is indebted to the Tractatus, I have to admit, I could never 'get to grips' with Wittengenstein. I remember once saying to one of my tutors about one of his arcane sentences, which seemed so oblique as to be invisible, 'Yeah, but it's a bit academic isn't it' To which said tutor boomed 'Well we're in the groves of academe here, aren't we?' And as that great philosopher Eric Morecambe said, 'well there's no answer to that, is there?'

Oops, just realised I misspelt Wittgenstein. Steady with that poker, Ludwig!

Not to mention misspelling Andrew! In fairness, I am trying to listen to the World Cup, work out fixture permutations etc. Apologies in advance to anyone whose name I misspell during the next month/century.

Agree, broadly, with your definition, Karl. I s'pose a snooker/dart player would argue that there's a certain degree of skill involved (quite a lot, probably), but personally I'd call them games, rather than sports. Ditto dominoes. As for fitness...would you LOOK at some of those dart players! Mind you, they DO have to be fit enough to lift glass to mouth I guess... Don't think a sport necessarily has to be competitive though. I'd class parachuting as a sport (and a death wish), also hang-gliding and scuba diving. Mad, the lot of 'em. My boy does judo - that's a sport, innit?

I stupidly thought that swimming would result in a miraculous loss of weight. I swam 20 lengths a day while on hoilday, sometimes more just for fun. I didn't lose any weight at all. I don't do sport now, despite having spent about three years going to the gym regularly and cutting down the time it took me to run a mile from 13 and ahalf minutes to just over 11 minutes. iceman

For me, and I would suspect many others, football is not a sport. It's a mixture of love and war, hate and despair, tribe and territory and much more besides. For those who fancy a fuller analysis, you can find one in my 'Remarks About Football'. ENGERLAND!

I thought a sport was a mutation. Seriously, a lot of kids today are too weedy to play Rugby or Football, or if they did they would break like badly trained flowers. Since they spend most of the day reading magazines and playing games they would be incapable of running any distance in time of danger or to catch a bus. As most of them ride to school by car, it is unlikely that they could walk without assistance from a brick trolley. I see a future where limbs have atrophied and people get about in little Gingers with securing straps holding their feeble bodies upright. Of course with the knowledge freely available on the web, these weedy sorts would have brains the size of melons. In aeons to come the human race would become just animated brains with two huge thumbs, that get around by telekinesis. iceman

Well, that's encouraging Ice! *yanks sprog away from pc and boots him out of the door closely followed by football*

You could define two people laying in bed sport. I can't believe I just wrote that but with all the wit going on that last theard I was just trying to join in, blaming all on the teaching on this discussion group so there...

Well, yes, they DO say it burns off lots of calories, don't they? Alas, I've forgotten if it's true or not...

But do you get 45 minutes each way and change ends at half time?

No, no, Hox, it's 2 hours each way and no golden goal...

*takes early bath*

They don't come better than you dear Andrea I think you could keep me laughing from morn til night non stop, there's a thought move in with me, don't think that will happen though as on a thread back I asked you to tea or what ever was your preference and I never got so much as I like you but!!! so I just cried...."Now how do you feel" and if you say fine I will personly come round your house and throttle you. Oh look I'm even becoming violent, me thinks if I don't stop right now, next it will be smoking, drinking, laptop dancing who knows where I could end up all because dear Andrea can make me laugh but won't move in or even come to tea. Well be it all on her head and "watch this space" PS You better read this as it took me ages to write it and all the hundreds of dictionary's have just fell on top of me so might not be up to laptop dancing after all, I heard that word good said at the back so will that person come to the front please like Now!!!

LOL that is total crap about kids being too weedy for football and rugger! I spent 3 or 4 yrs at school successfully getting out of sport and PE, and always chose to miss a bus rather than run for it. And there were no playstations and gameboys then, just that I hated sport. I think kids are much more active now, they have skates, skateboards and those little scooter things which only exercise one leg. and they eat better food even if its junk and are bigger

Jay.... laptop dancing ??????

if you don't drive - that is sport