Sit down and be counted

Jim Thorpe, the greatest American athlete ever, was born on this day in 1888.

“I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who loves sports hates common sense.” – H. L. Mencken.



Sports, according to the latest census, is now the third-largest religion in the world. And like all religions, it is based on a set of highly questionable premises, one of them being: Life is a game.

All of us are born with the instinct to play, along with the instincts to feed, talk, and pack crayons in our noses, but we’re taught not to let any particular instinct become an obsession – except play.

From the time you’re old enough to open your eyes, it seems, there’s always somebody shoving a ball in your face, expecting you to throw it or catch it or kick it – or at least look like you would if you could.

As you grow up and learn to walk and then run, the sports paraphernalia begins to pile up around the house, and pretty soon you can’t even sit down and read a comic book or pick your toenails without your old man wanting you to come outside and throw the old cantaloupe around.

In school they expect you to play, starting with recess. Teachers never let you just stand around on the playground enjoying the clouds and the trees and the smell you just made, but demand that you participate in their idiotic games of “Red Rover” or “Capture the Potato.”

As if this weren’t enough, you’ve got to cope with all those extracurricular activities: Little League, YMCA, Cub Scouts or Brownies, camp, soccer teams, swimming clubs, gymnastics, Fourth of July races, and so on, until you just want to crawl into a nice hot bath and drown yourself.

By the time you reach high school chances are you’ve already logged millions of hours in pools and gymnasiums, on gridirons and diamonds – and now the serious part starts. You’ve got to decide what sport to major in.

Let’s say you decide on one, because you like it more than any other – love it , even. What happens now is that the person in charge – your coach – takes something that started out as fun and turns it into something different.

A coach is usually a former athlete, and consequently bitter and bent on revenge. Most coaches pass along the things they’ve learned from their own coaches, things like the importance of teamwork and keeping your shirt tucked in.

The one useful function the coach may serve is to sour a youngster on sports for the rest of his or her life.