After Atalanta

Bryan Hollister of the Bleacher Report has a " humor" column this week in which he lists and explains the top 15 sports that are not sports. I'm not going to get super uptight about this list. But I do have some things to say about his choices. First, though, it should be noted that the definition of sport is always up for debate--and this is the way it should be. Because a sport does not always involve "blood, sweat, and tears shed through hours of workouts, practices, scrimmages, successes, and failures." Or at least not all those elements all the time. It's a pretty naive definition of a sport, but it's the only one that Hollister offers. I'm not going to comment on all 15 of Hollister's offerings. Check them out for yourself. Here are just some of my thoughts on some of his. Winter sports seem to be especially heavy hit, curling, bobsled, and luge. And if Hollister really thinks that no one has ever said about luge "that's what I wan...

...and get over it. The cutting of baseball that is. The University of Wisconsin cut the sport in 1991--17 years ago. Yet every spring I come across all these young men pining for baseball. Not to play it--they want to watch it. They want to watch college baseball. Unfortunately, not that many people wanted to watch it when UW did have a team. But this guy , despite knowing the lack of popularity of the sport, longs for spring days in the stadium. And this guy , who I think has written this same editorial before, blames Title IX of course. Though he does that tricky "I believe in gender equity and supporting women's sports but they aren't that exciting yet" thing so he doesn't come off as a complete chauvinist. Title IX came along and baseball got cut--for fairly good reasons--it wasn't that popular, trying to play baseball in Wisconsin is difficult given the lengthy winters, and they had a gender equity problem. The writer thinks that "it seems like as l...