RoR: Forum

"To further my view that we shouldn't rip out the tongue of anyone for not sharing our opinions i thought it interesting to add that the sport-heroes we follow do little for our own ideas and accomplishments, and little for making us in command of our own destiny."

Who are you including in this collective "we"? I can't speak for anyone else, but some of my heros are (or were) professional athletes, and they do a great deal to inspire the best in me. And frankly, there are fewer things I care less about than the subject of sports. But when I hear about an accomplishment like 40 year old Randy Johnson pitching a perfect game, I'm definitely impressed and inspired.

Post 21

Thursday, August 4, 2005 - 12:51pm

Marvin,

Soren was just spoofing "Anthem."

Post 22

Thursday, August 4, 2005 - 1:22pm

Marvin:

�Who are you including in this collective "we"? I can't speak for anyone else, but some of my heros are (or were) professional athletes, and they do a great deal to inspire the best in me. And frankly, there are fewer things I care less about than the subject of sports. But when I hear about an accomplishment like 40 year old Randy Johnson pitching a perfect game, I'm definitely impressed and inspired.

We, Equality 742522.

In 'we' I include anyone willing to subscribe to it. It would include myself and others i know, finding professional athletes to do little for our own ideas and accomplishments, and little for making us in command of our own destiny, but following them nonetheless.

I too find sports less interesting, and i too can be impressed and inspired. Though i often find this inspiration to be a pillow on which i can rest, rather than being the catalyst for own achievement. Only when taught by the words of these achievers what drives them, does it give me the drive to do something, merely watching their actions is more of an escape, a hollow feeling of accomplishment through their accomplishments.

My sports-heroes doesn't seem to last long, when occasionally i get caught up in a frenzy of national pride because my country is beating the others, then some of the guys are heroes. They are heroes when we win, and heroes dethroned when they lose... the rare soccer game, played to perfection. full of grace and precision brings me the same kind of joy, i would get from watching a good ballet, and as such i appreciate it. The same goes for many other types of sports.

Post 23

Friday, August 5, 2005 - 1:13pm

At 7 ft 1 (2.16 m) and 325 lbs. (147.4 kg), Shaquille O'Neal is a big guy, however, his championship success in basketball has little to do with his size. Basketball penalizes physical contact. While it does reward height, outstanding players have been in the 6'3" and 6'5" range, a full 15 to 20 cm shorter than most of the other men on the court. Basketball rewards agility. That is why I endorsed street pick-up games and Gus Macker Basketball, a 3-on-3 city league amateur event, often used as a charity fundraiser. And Gus Macker games, which can be mixed men-women, can be more brutal than an NBA game: no blood, no foul.

But look at those NBA games. The Miami Heat won the 2004-2005 season. They played 104 games from pre-season to championship. The single team scores in all games ran from 65 points to 125 points, which is a nice range. It does mean that the worst play possible is still 65 -- a top score in high school -- and it is difficult to score more than 126 points in four 12-minute periods. That defines the extremes. In point of fact, the statistically average (mean) game was 100 to 94, a difference in performance of only 6%. Moreover, in terms of difference in performance between the winner and the loser, the high was 30% the low 1% the mean 10%, the median 9% and mode 2%. Basketball is always a close game. So is soccer. Both (professional) basketball and (professional) soccer fail as candidates for Rational Sports because each hinges on statistically insignificant differences. It is true that Rational Sports such as baseball often see close games, pitchers' duals, high scoring slugfests and so on. However, the statistically average baseball game requires not a sudden victory, but a series of correct plays, showing a consistent application of correct principles. Compared to baseball, professional basketball is a game of chance.

George Cordero came close to the mark: "Marcus, I don't think he was being humorous at all, I believe he is being sarcastically contemptuous of sports in general; with an eye of denigrating the achievements and popularity of those that excel at them."

"Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." George Cordero missed my endorsements and enthusiasm for rational sports like baseball and Australian Rules Football and Gus Macker Basketball. I said that I enjoy the loneliness of the long-distance runner. I said much more. George Cordero is correct about my being generally contemptuous of most of what passes for sports. The "sports" are phony, artificial and neurotic and so are the fat fans screaming for blood in hopes of vicarious victories.

In fact, most sports -- American football in particular -- are wars or hunts, whereas if sports were truly rational, events would be based on ditch-digging, wall-building, hammer-and-anvil, etc. Baseball comes close in being abstracted away from killing, though perhaps the perfect bourgeois game is golf, which, like capitalism, orginated in Scotland. (Golf has serious problems that prevent it from being rational, and its virtues are not what most people claim them to be, but it is non-violent and quiet.)

In The Fountainhead, Rand displays several counterfeit individualists. These artists and writers appear as "non-conformists" but actually orbit Ellsworth Toohey because they are not true individualists but social metaphysicians who need the crowd in order to stand out from it and thereby belong to it. I see most professional "sports" as being pseudo-achievements. They are physically demanding but that is all. To me, most popular professional sports are like modern art, rap music and fastfood.

I believe in mens sana in corpore sano. Physical activity and competitive games are part of a well-rounded life, as are true art, good music, and fine cooking.

Post 24

Friday, August 5, 2005 - 1:30pm

Scott DeSalvo: this article is simply mildly denigrating opinion-laden vomitus.

(Supposedly someone who scored high points for being Open to new ideas and Agreeable with other people.
Personally, I think he fudged the test.)

In the Beauty topic, Ruth objected to make-overs, saying: "What a lot of BS this thread is. ... What is beautiful is what is in the MIND, for men and women." Brandon Miller voted for the mind side of the old dichotomy when he wrote: "physical beauty when applicable to humans means virtually nothing to me. I much prefer a beautiful mind to a beautiful mask."
But they were shouted down. Personally, I almost said the same thing, but decided that Carrie Walker looked pretty nice, so I took the other point of view more than a couple of times and endorsed looking marvelous. In fact, I zapped Ruth pretty good, hitting her for her own professional photograph and make-up.

So, KASS and be KASSED is a rule of participation on SOLO.

It is interesting to see where the norms are, what the "crowd" likes and what "popular opinion" is. It is interesting to read surprising opinions from people whose judgements I misjudged. This "mob rule" on SOLO operates in some interesting ways. Marcus Bachler wrote: "However, I want to challenge the notion of sport being necessary for a healthy mind." He said more and I think he actually led the reader to a general endorsement of sports, but no one took him to task. Marcus is pre-approved. He has a "license to kill." He can say whatever he wants and everyone will agree with him, or let it go, but no one will challenge him.

Ed Thompson wrote: "I, like many others here, have felt the sting of Michael's words. He is smart enough to make it seem like he's an expert at everything he talks about -- that is, until he crosses an expert qua expert, on a given topic. Michael recently crossed me (an expert in human nutrition) when he argued that ape diets are merely different in degree (and not in kind) from human diets -- which contradicts the opposite gut physiologies between the species. Knowing that I was dealing with a man who had not spent 1000+ hours of his life studying this particular topic..."

Well, Ed, you will have to cite chapter and verse on that because I do not remember challenging you on human versus ape nutrition. I can see that you are the "Fitness Leader" so I would be surprised if you did not know more than I do about nutrition, and that is the reason why I point out that 1000+ hours is only half a year of full time effort.

George Cordero wrote: "Golf is recognized as one of the single most demanding and difficult of all sports to master, both physically and mentally. The physical and mental skill level it takes to master this sport is enormous; which explains why so many professional athletes from other sports are drawn to golf: for many, golf is the ultimate test of focused mind/body control."

Yes, golf requires exacting split second carefully controlled wiggling of your bum and shimmying of your boobs before you get back in the cart or make that hireling carry your clubs.

George Cordero wrote: "... all of this is dictated by the chess-masters (the coach) mental ability to 'outwit' the other chess master ..."

Oh! I forgot the coaches!! I was so focused on the players, I forgot that you need bosses in order to work together. God forbid that 2 or 20 people should get together and play a game for two hours without controllers to see to it that they do the right thing. Yes, honestly, coaches can be helpful. However, George's praise of football for its martial, communal spirit insults the essence of capitalism.

George Cordero rightly assumed that I find boxing abhorrent.
http://www.hickoksports.com/history/boxgoldg.shtml#1947
1947
112 Robert Holliday Cincinnati
118 Robert Bell Cleveland
126 Eddie Marotta Cleveland
135 John Labrol Gary
147 John Keough Cleveland
160 Nick Ranieri Chicago
175 Dan Bucceroni Kenosha
Hvy Richard Hagan Chicago
http://coloradoboxing.com/more.htm
1948-10-29 Eddie Marotta Denver, CO, USA W PTS 8
1948-09-29 Eddie Marotta Denver, CO, USA L PTS 8
1949-09-01 Eddie Marotta Denver, CO, USA W PTS 10
http://www.matthewhunt.com/stanleykubrick.html
Rocky Graziano: He's A Good Boy Now [Portraits of Rocky Graziano, another boxing day-in-the-life. Includes Graziano with Whitney Bimstein, Irving Cohen, Eddie Marotta, Roxie Graziano, and during a fight with Sonny Horne (#14.4, 14/2/1950). Subsequent publications: The Fight Of My Life II (#18.25, 14/12/1954), The Fight Of My Life III (#18.26, 28/12/1954), Somebody Up There Likes Me (#20.16, 7/8/1956), and Look At Work (#21.9, 30/4/1957).]
After that, my father was a hand-to-hand combat instructor in the U.S. Army. My father sent three of his boys to the Olympics. His advice to us, his real sons, was "Never get in the ring." It is not because we were wussies, which we might have been, but because our academic achievements pointed to something better than getting our brains bashed to jelly, which is why he died prematurely of brain failure.
BBC Sport Online: Sports Talk
Monday, 18 December, 2000, 10:08 GMT
Should boxing be banned?
It is an excellent source of entertainment, I believe it should not be banned.
Michael Marotta, USA
(Not THIS Michael Marotta! I believe that boxing is barbaric and would not exist in a rational society.)

George Cordero agrees: Very true, Michael, your article was very revealing of your relationship to yourself, and what you find inspiring.

A double play, a triple play! A home run, an inside the park home run! A line drive, a frozen rope! A grass cutter. Ducks on the pond. Picking off the runner. A stolen base. Stealing home! I like to use the TV and the radio. I shut off the sound on the TV because the camera has made the announcers morons. And I thrill every time they say, "Hit deep into left, that ball is going... going... gone! It's touch 'em all time!!" And the scoreboard explodes.

Alec Mouhibian was having family of origin issues when he wrote: "... just check the GPAs on any college squad..."

Well, I honor and respect my immigrant grandmother, so we differ there. I did point out at the top of my original post that Cleveland Browns quarterback Frank Ryan held a Ph.D. in mathematics. However, I also do not have to go far to show that college athletes have good grades because the coaches lean on the professors to pass them. No, not in crew... not in women's field hockey... or at least not until the team is seriously in the championships... but definitely in the big-money, semi-pro, minor league "college" sports of basketball and football. Physical education is a major, not just so that high schools can have gym teachers, but so that jocks do not have to take too many credits of history or mathematics, Frank Ryan to the contrary notwithstanding. The GPAs on college squads are like the production figures of Soviet factories -- and for the same reasons.

Kevin Haggerty wrote: "You obviously haven't played competitive ping-pong!"
Yeah, I know... and I know people who do it and I like them even though they do. It is challenging and you do get worked up, but it's not for me and I won't insult you by making fun of it.

S�ren Olin wrote: "On sports in general, whatever makes anyone happy, at the expense of nobody else, must be, by definition, good."
I agree 100%! In my "Crab Bucket" put-down of tennis, I did allow -- as how could I not? -- that if you want to do it, then do it well. If you want to do it well, working at it is expected. In short (gratefully), the world does not need to meet my expectations, categorize and label as I might. New York City Objectivists went through a "rational dancing" phase when ballroom dancing was declared rationally sublime by Ayn Rand. Actually, it always seemed like something I would want to do, but never got around to.
S�ren Olin wrote: "... so when our daughter died, i needed a kick in the butt ... and turned to sports."
<Ich schweige.>

Brandon Miller wrote: "While this statement about "almost no mental alertness" being required may perhaps be applicable to bowling, it most certainly is not to billiards."

(Oh, right... The other guy's sport is irrational, but not yours.)
How about this?
"Why, sure, I'm a billiard player
Certainly mighty proud to say,
I'm always mighty proud to say it
I consider the hours I spend with a cue in my hand are golden
Help you cultivate horse sense and a cool head and a keen eye
Didja ever take an' try an' give an iron clad leave
to yourself from a three-rail billiard shot?
But just as I say it takes judgement, brains and maturity
to score in a balk-line game
I say that any boob can take and shove a ball in a pocket.."
I enjoyed learning to shoot from not at all to badly. We moved into a newly built apartment building with a new table and I bought sticks for my wife and myself. She seldom played, but I bought a book by Willie Masconi and I got good enough to know what skill it takes to be poor at it -- and I never got that good: I just sucked. But I enjoyed playing. And I enjoyed watching The Hustler. And we also own the video tape for Donald Duck in Math-Magic Land. Billiards is physics like few other games can ever be. Angle of incidence equals angle of reflection. To that you add spin: forward, backward, right, left. And from there it gets complicated. But billiards does not get your heart up into the ideal cardio range. You never have to catch the balls or chase them or kick them. Billiards is rational. It is not rational sports.

Marvin Paul Thomas tossed down a gauntlet: "Mr. Marotta neglected to mention that Lance Armstrong is just a wannabe athlete, because all Lance does is ride a bicycle."

Well, Lance came back from cancer. He is an inspiration for many reasons. According to the Official Tour de France website: "Before cancer, the Texan couldn�t climb and his ability in the time trial was reasonable at best. Tactically he�d made more than one faux-pas. He was a star but not a rider capable of holding onto the �maillot jaune�."
I enjoy biking. Who doesn't? It is good for your heart. It gets you outside. You can get to the office without burning fossil fuels. Bikes are good. Where biking fails is that it only exercises the legs (heart and lungs, etc., of course) and does nothing for the arms. All you do is sit down and peddle.
And "Lance Armstrong" is a TEAM. He has guys devoted to his victory who wear themselves out pacing him so that he stays ahead of the pack. Where are their laurels?

S�ren Olin wrote: " ... to ask why we should advocate improving the health of mind by letting a healthy body acompany it, while at the same time rejecting the notion of letting a healthy body be complemented by a healthy mind."

Good question and a base I touched when I pointed out that "Mens sana in corpore sano" appears on gyms and yoga ashrams but not college math labs. I think that this is a result of the cultural consequences of a mind-body dichotomy. Back in the old days, when baseball teams traveled by train and bus, baseball players devoured and discussed novels, poetry and other literature as part of their common culture.

Post 25

Friday, August 5, 2005 - 1:37pm

Multiple choice:

A. Professional sports are symptoms of social decay. In ancient Rome, cemetary stones say "Here lies Rufius, a loyal Green" and "Probus, Yellow to the End." These refer to chariot teams. The poor citizens of imperial Rome identified themselves with the circus racing teams because they had no other source of social esteem or self-esteem.
B. Professional sports are the result of a free society. The Greeks were manic about sports, but it took the Romans to make a business out of them. When Rome died, so did constitutional government and professional sports and their coincidence was not accidental. Professional sports were reborn in the industrial revolution.

A. Sports are dehumanizing. An example of that is how they divide skills into narrow sets so that athletes are like people on a assembly line, doing repetitive mindless routines best done by machines.
B. As products of the industrial revolution, sports allow individuals to focus on their natural talents and developed skills instead of demanding that everyone do everything like a neolithic humanoids.

A. Professional sports are a social sickness because players are contracted like endentured servants. The sale of human beings is outlawed in civilized nations, except in professional sports. The only hope a player has is to have a good manager or a strong union. Those are not the modalities most comfortable to a capitalist.
B. Professional sports represent a sublime achievement because business managers, accountants, advertising agents, lawyers, negotiators, and arbitrators, have created multi-billion dollar enterprises whose goal is to entertain and thereby enrich the lives of those who pay for tickets. The huge salaries commanded by the best athletes in every field are a testimony to the wealth that has been created in pleasure, joy, and achievement.

A. Some professional sports are abstracted away from hunting and warfare, but most sports are martial conflicts. Competitive sports are a zero-sum game. Ford Motor Company can sell engines to General Motors, but Shaq cannot profit from passing the ball to Antawn.
B. Some sports still retain vestigial attributes of their origins, but sports are far from warfare and getting farther away all the time. As a substitute for war, competitive sports offer hope.

A. Sports are for the body, but the essence of humanity is the mind.
B. Mens sana in corpore sano.

Post 26

Friday, August 5, 2005 - 2:12pm

Very Interesting.

Friday, August 5, 2005 - 2:13pm

Marotta, once again, you have no fucking idea what you are talking about.

MM: At 7 ft 1 (2.16 m) and 325 lbs. (147.4 kg), Shaquille O'Neal is a big guy, however, his championship success in basketball has little to do with his size. Basketball penalizes physical contact. Compared to baseball, professional basketball is a game of chance.

There have been many 7-footers in the NBA, but Shaq is uniquely dominant because of the 300 lbs plus of muscle that he uses in an extremely physical manner. Quite often, the physical contact "in the paint" (a basketball term) is ferocious at times. In fact, most teams use a strategy of purposely fouling Shaq with a rotation of centers, in order to have him shoot from the free-throw line (where he has a poor average) instead of taking his shots near the basket (where he will �muscle� in a dunk or lay up). Your comment as to basketball being a �game of chance� compared to baseball is ludicrous; statistically speaking, during a regular season game, an �upset� by a weaker team over a better one, is more likely in baseball than basketball.

MM: George Cordero is correct about my being generally contemptuous of most of what passes for sports. The "sports" are phony, artificial and neurotic and so are the fat fans screaming for blood in hopes of vicarious victories.

No one can argue with the above statement you made, there is no doubt that you are an authority on the phony, artificial, and neurotic. As to �vicarious victories�, your denigration and contempt for athletes and sports, has all the hallmarks of someone trying to achieve a vicarious victory of his own.

MM: In fact, most sports -- American football in particular -- are wars or hunts, whereas if sports were truly rational, events would be based on ditch digging, wall building, hammer-and-anvil, etc.

�Ditch-digging� and �wall-building�: Marotta�s rational sports!? Any further comment would be superfluous.

MM: I see most professional "sports" as being pseudo-achievements. They are physically demanding but that is all. To me, most popular professional sports are like modern art, rap music and fastfood.

Actually, sports are one of the few endeavors left where excellence, competition, intellect, skill, and courage are still valued and less tainted by altruistic sentiment. In many ways, sports, is the last bastion where Western men can still glory in human achievement without being made to feel ashamed.

Of course, Marotta would like us to feel ashamed, even in our sports.

My god, Marotta, that bullying you took on the playground; it must have really taken a toll on you.

(Edited by George W. Cordero on 8/05, 2:13pm)

Post 28

Friday, August 5, 2005 - 2:48pm

Look Michael, I was picked last for teams on the playground too but dammit man we've got to move on!

Post 29

Friday, August 5, 2005 - 9:15pm

Michael, I was trying to defend you -- oh brother in spirit.

-------------
Well, Ed, you will have to cite chapter and verse on that because I do not remember challenging you on human versus ape nutrition.
-------------

Very well then (from: http://solohq.org/Forum/Dissent/0015_1.shtml#24):

-------------
2.� You have a brain that will let you survive as an omnivore�gatherer, eating fruits, vegetables, insects, etc., without tools.� It is the default position for a primate.
-------------

Michael, there is a stolen concept here. In order to GET that big brain in the first place (the one that lets me now "survive as an omnivore gatherer"), my ancestors had to evolve by cutting their intestinal length in half -- while liberally consuming long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (the building blocks of brain tissue). Without these 2 evolutions, there would be no humans.

Humans have about half the intestinal length of apes, and triple the weight-standardized brain metabolism. These 2 points make folivorous (leaves) and fruitarian diets -- diets followed by many apes -- incongruent with human brain development.

The "default position for a primate" is not congruent with standard human brain physiology. In other words, those who choose to adopt fruitarian (etc.) diets are, quite literally, out of their mind. They will be senile -- or dead -- within 6 years of meticulously maintaining this diet.

If you don't believe me, then I suggest that you try to live like that (on the diet of a gorilla or chimp) -- and see what it does to your mentality / existence.

74% of the weight of the food that a gorilla swallows is merely fiber -- try to eat like that, Michael. Try it for just one week.

Ed

Post 30

Saturday, August 6, 2005 - 5:37am

Thanks, Ed. Thanks, twice, in fact. Yes, I recognized the compliment, and it was remiss of me not to doff my hat in return. One of the problems with the online world -- perhaps an outgrowth of the "Letters" columns of print periodicals -- is that we tend to focus on disagrements. We go on and on proving each other wrong on Point 73 and by the way, yes, I agree with points 1 - 72 and 74 to 129. In a different climate -- perhaps one not dominated by the Hegelian concept of a "dialectic" path to truth -- we might focus on agreements and toss aside our differences.

In fact, that might be more sporting, would it not?

Post 31

Saturday, August 6, 2005 - 9:32am

Michael, I think that the friction in this thread stems from differences in thinking style, which I believe stems from differential hemisphere (right vs left vs both) activity in the brain. You wouldn't happen to be LEFT-HANDED, would you, Michael??

Left-handers are in their right minds (they're imaginative right-brainers). I think that you are a right-brainer, Michael (though we'd need a brain scan to prove it) -- being left-handed merely increases probability, it doesn't prove hemispheric dominance.

I'm a left-brainer, and I tend to take single points to their conclusions, building from bottom up, and seeing how high (how grand) of a point I can make from the monument.

In contrast, right-brainers build an entire castle in the sky -- a beautiful one -- without adequately testing its foundation. When they set the castle down firmly on the ground, it may crumble, though it may stand, an if it does, then it is a profound thing (a testament to what we call "human intuition").

I'm not entirely left-brained. I frequently build air-castles, it's just that I then become anxious to build the ground-up support to keep them in the air -- so that I can then snip the mental suspenders holding them up (and I'm pretty good at that).

Some people call this "rationalization" (when you find reasons that support conclusions which weren't, in the first place, consciously and explicitly derived from those self-same reasons), and they look on this method disparagingly. I think that the concept of rationalization is misused in order to squelch the voices of others. I think that there is a bigger way to argue with others than to say they're mere rationalizers.

My take is that if you can get something to logically entail something else, then I don't care how you managed to do it (logical entailment doesn't need it's own support -- it IS that which support is -- it "supports" itself). Again, opponents may call this inauthentic, but authenticity is really only about a cultivated desire for truth, understanding, progress and benevolence -- it is not about the "preferred" method of attaining these values.

Michael, you attacked a particular method when you said:

-----------------
In a different climate -- perhaps one not dominated by the�Hegelian concept of a "dialectic"�path to truth -- we might focus on agreements and toss aside our differences.�

In fact, that might be more sporting, would it not?
-----------------

Not being in my right mind, I would have to disagree. Agreement focus is a wonderful base that needs be maintained in order to maintain the value of interactional discourse, but Hegelian haggling is still a great way to make progress, and should not be tossed aside as a method qua method.

Competing conclusions -- actually, competing lines of reasoning -- are what I find to be sporting about rational discourse. After all, what is progress, if it is not an honest competition of the new -- against the status quo?

Ed

Post 32

Tuesday, October 4, 2005 - 9:48am

> Both (professional) basketball and (professional) soccer fail as candidates for Rational Sports [MM]

I just got done making a post on another thread about whether or not it is 'rational' to have a pet and go to great effort for it. Now five minutes later this utterly foolish, besotted, rationalistic question:

What is the eternal list or hierarchy of "rational" sports?

There is *no such category* as rational or irrational sports.

Just as there is no ladder of rational or irrational careers or rational or irrational pet preferences (cat people, dog people, plant people, inanimate art objects people, insect people). There is no rational or irrational preference between whether I like blondes or brunettes, legs or tits or butts, or any combination of the above.

There are eternally and independent of context rational and irrational choices and preferences for all people, but they are more abstract. They do not apply to things this concrete.

I hate to sound so subjective on an Objectivist list, but in all these questions the absolute, rational, precise, moral, healthy and sane choice is:

"Whatever, dude".

Phil

Post 33

Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 6:15am

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Researchers confirm problems in youth sports
Posted: Monday Nov 28, 2005 4:12 PM

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/more/wires/11/28/2080.ap.youth.sports.ethics.1st.ld.writethru.0529/index.html
Start with the homepage, www.si.com and then choose More from the middle of the dropdown menus. Scroll down and under Top Stories, select another "More Sports." Under November 28 is a hyperlink to Researchers confirm problems in youth sports.

ST. LOUIS (AP) - A study of youth sports found evidence of cheating, taunting, even intentionally trying to hurt an opponent.
"There has been a hot debate in the news media about the overall quality of youth sport programs, but incredibly little research to support backers or detractors,'' said David Shields, an education professor at Missouri-St. Louis and one of the authors of the study. "This study supports some of the views of each.''
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Incidents of abuse are minor. 13 percent of kids tried to hurt an opponent. 7 percent of coaches encouraged a kid to cheat, according to kids, but Zero percent according to coaches. 4 percent of child athletes said their coaches hit, slapped or kicked them. On the other hand 31 percent of kids admitted to arguing with an official and one-third of coaches surveyed confessed to yelling at kids who made mistakes. Still, these are all minority numbers.
Overall, sports seem like a good way to sublimate and channel aggression. Also, I would speculate that you get these abusive behaviors in team sports, especially combative encounters like American Football. On the other hand, I suspect there is less of this in cross-country running.

Post 34

Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 11:25am

Michael M,
That you find 13 percent who tried to hurt an opponent minor is odd. I would consider them criminals in training. Of course, 'hurt' is vague. 1 percent would be adequate to end the activity, in my view.

Post 35

Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 11:28am