On Sport ...and (a bit) on reality TV

something i wrote a long time ago.

Sport allows us to observe the naked soul of man. No pretenses, no facades, no excuses. Men trying to do stuff, competing, failing, succeeding, doubting,choking, panicking, scratching through, living up.

Sport ultimately is enriching to its participants. It forces the best of them to look inside themselves at a very young age. Of course, they may not like the answers, but it leaves them better equipped to handle reality.

It is an interesting exercise to compare sport to its mass media counterpart - the moving, talking picture and all its forms ranging from movies to reality television. Some of the more thoughtful of the thespians have remarked that making your living by pretending to be someone else is inherently dissatisfying and degrading to self.

While movies can be great art, reality television in almost all its forms is inherently vile. It promises to celebritize everyone with giving out two minutes of manufactured fame. Admittedly, there are exceptions, but on closer look, the ones which are good are similar to sport with the camera being a capturer of action, not the creator.

Again, not all sport does all that. Women's gymnastics seems to be nothing more than using children for misplaced national pride. The bat and ball games, though not popular as their ball only cousins, have more of the real life components interwoven into them than just pure athletic ability and hence are more human, more interesting.

----
Hoping for a great series.