Open-Mic: Defense Separates Sports from Games

Dictionary.com defines a sport as "an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature." It defines a game as "an amusement or pastime." Looking at just those, it would seem that sports are a subset of games, which I don't think anyone would argue.

It's also pretty clear from this that a sport requires some kind of athletic endeavors. The American Heritage Dictionary defines athletic as "characterized by or involving physical activity or exertion." That means there must be some real exertion going on, so things like poker, darts, shuffleboard and the like are resigned to being games, not sports.

From here on out, the defining gets contentious. Is auto racing a sport? The cars obviously are doing more work than the drivers are, but during races, the drivers have increased heart rates and must exert themselves physically and mentally.

When having this discussion, people are just trying to keep their favorite gray-area activity defined as a sport while keeping figure skating out of the "sport" category. The animosity towards those who call figure skating a true sport can be surprisingly strong, and most sports fans I know wish to keep it out of the realm of sport.

So, a requirement that the method of determining a winner must be objective is usually applied. That rules out anything that must be judged, and it eliminates the hated figure skating.

Personally, my favorite definition of what constitutes a sport is something I ran across a while ago, so I regretfully can't cite the original source. Basically, it goes like this—a sport is an athletic competition where defense is directly involved.

That definition neatly separates sports like football, basketball, and baseball from golf and hammer toss, and yes, it rules out figure skating as well. Track and field events are competitions but not sports by this definition.

It is fairly clear, though it does leave room for interpretation. Auto racing does involve defense as drivers seek to block each other on the track, but you can argue whether it counts as athletic. Cross country running is certainly an athletic competition, but you can argue over whether the unsupervised physical jockeying for position that goes on during races sufficiently counts as defense.

It's a simple, concise definition that works for me. Ultimately what counts as a "sport" or not is all semantics, and people will call things whatever they want anyway regardless of what I or the dictionary say.

Just to be clear though: if it involves playing cards, it's not a sport. That is an immutable truth that has always been and will always be.