Hitchens Says Sports Suck… And I Agree

Well, Christopher Hitchens has finally written something with which I can whole heartedly sign on. In his latest Newsweek piece Hitchens decries the sham that is sports — especially international soccer tournies. He slams the supposed benefits of sports and rightly pinpoints the singular truth that sports brings out the worst in everyone.

Hitchens eviscerates the lie that sports “brings people together,” lays low the lie that sports is good in schools, and obliterates the idiotic babble that sports are in any way filled with good role models — or that they even could present good role models.

I loved this delicious paragraph, delivered after delineating the “shock” that one sports dolt had when another dissed him:

On the contrary, Mr. Rossi, what we are seeing is the very essence of sportsmanship. Whether it’s the exacerbation of national rivalries that you want–as in Africa this year–or the exhibition of the most depressing traits of the human personality (guns in locker rooms, golf clubs wielded in the home, dogs maimed and tortured at stars’ homes to make them fight, dope and steroids everywhere), you need only look to the wide world of sports for the most rank and vivid examples. As George Orwell wrote in his 1945 essay “The Sporting Spirit,” after yet another outbreak of combined mayhem and chauvinism on the international soccer field, “sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will.”

I’ve said it myself a hundred times. Sports teaches nothing worth while. It teaches selfishness, it teaches that only “the star” counts for anything, and in schools the money wasted on sports benefits only the few halfwits running around in short pants on a grassy field of one sort or another. All that money wasted on sports in schools goes for the tiniest number of students and offers no benefits whatsoever to the 99% of the school body not involved in sports.

And the stupidity of the Olympics is the worst offense in all of sports. Billions of dollars wasted to NO good effect. Hitchens quotes the aforementioned Orwell on the point.

I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.

Hear, hear.

And as if sports didn’t degrade our nation, our very lives any worse than they already do, we had the misfortune of getting Keith Olbermann out of them. If that isn’t an indictment against sports, nothing is.

Oh, I know that my outright hostility to the brainless effort that is sports is most certainly the minority view. But that does not make me wrong. Only smarter then the rest of ya! Seriously, though, Hitchens is laser accurate with his evisceration of sports. The saddest thing of all is the fact that so many otherwise logical, sensible people have allowed the lowest expressions of society to influence them to jettison intellectual pursuits for the garbage which is sports. So sad to see an adult American male, or any other nationality for that matter, that could be using his brain for something useful stuffing his mind full of pointless, boring, and utterly irrelevant sports statistics. It is galling that such attention is wasted on this falderal.

And lastly I want to leave with this: every time I attack the foolishness that is sports, some steroid addled, meat-for-brains, sports lover will always offer the same brainless, uninformed taunt. “You were just never good enough to play sports and you’re just jealous,” they will blather. I love how this brain-dead taunt comes up every single time. So, to disabuse you knuckledragging, muscle heads — and all your over weight, balding, wish-you-weres that sit on your couch stuffing your faces every game day as you act like a ten-year-old when “we” get a homerun or a touchdown… “we” as if YOU had anything to do with it — I played all sorts of sports as a child and teen. Like every set of American parents in the 1960s and 70s, mine carted me out to one team after another for years. In fact, I generally enjoyed the games (except baseball which I hated) and was even on a few championship teams. So, no you Neanderthals, I was not unable to play the game as a kid.

Fortunately, just like Hitchens I’ve smartened up as an adult and seen through the sham that is sports. So, hooray for Christopher Hitchens. He’s at last hit upon the God’s honest truth (OK, the God crack was a slap in the midst of my praise at Hitchens the atheist, but… you know). Sports are useless, dangerous, pointless and should be eliminated from our lives.

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