DEFENITION OF SPORTS

Sports is a physical competitions that pursue the goals and challenges they entail. Sports are part of all cultures, past and present, but each culture has its own definition of sport. The most useful definitions are those that clarify the relationship between sports and play, games and competitions. German theorist Karl Diem wrote that “play is an activity without a purpose, and in itself the opposite of work.” Humans work because they have to. They play because they want to. Play is automatic. That is, it has its own goals. It is voluntary and not coercive. Introverted children who are forced by their parents or teachers to compete in a game of football do not actually participate in sports. Not even professional athletes if their only motive is salary. As a practical matter in the real world, motives are often mixed and often very difficult to determine. Nevertheless, a clear definition is a prerequisite for practical decisions about what is and isn’t an example of play. There are at least two types of play. The first is voluntary and unrestricted. Examples abound. A child sees a flat stone, picks it up, and skips the pond’s water. The grown-up realizes with a laugh that he made a pun he didn’t intend. Neither action is pre-planned and both are at least relatively unconstrained. The second type of play is regulated. There are rules that determine which actions are legal and which actions are not. These rules translate voluntary play into a game, so can be defined as either regulated or regulated play. Leapfrog, chess, “playing house” and basketball are all games, some with rather simple rules and others with rather complex rules. In fact, rulebooks for games like basketball are hundreds of pages long.

As games, chess and basketball are clearly different from jumping and playing house. The first two games are competitive, but the second is not. You can win a basketball game, but it doesn’t make sense to ask who won the jump game. In other words, chess and basketball are contests. The final division divides competitions into two types. Competitions that require minimal physical skill and those that do not. Shuffleboard is a good example of the first. The board games Scrabble and Monopoly will do to illustrate the second. Of course, it should be understood that even the simplest sport, such as weightlifting, requires some intellectual effort, while other sports, such as baseball, require considerable mental 토토사이트 vigilance. We also need to understand that the sport that has excited humanity the most, both as participants and spectators, requires far more physical prowess than the game of shuffleboard. Throughout the ages, sports heroes have demonstrated tremendous strength, speed, stamina, endurance and dexterity. A sport, then, can be defined as an automatic (played for oneself) physical competition. A simple inverse tree diagram can be devised based on this definition. Despite the clear definition, difficult questions arise. Is mountain climbing a sport? If you understand the activity as a competition between a climber and a mountain, or a competition between climbers, you will be the first to succeed in ascent. Are the drivers of the Indianapolis 500 race car really athletes? This is when they believe they need at least some physical skill to win the competition. The point of a clear definition is that it can provide a rather satisfactory answer to a question like this. You can hardly understand a sport unless you start with the concept of what a sport is.