I have always struggled with understanding the difference between a sport and a game.

My knee jerk reaction has usually been that sport required some level of athleticism and competitive perspiring and games do not. But then you have the Olympic Games. Serious sweating goes on there in some venues, even in the Winter Olympics.  Some games are sports then and some are not. Conversely, some sports are games and some are not.

Have we gotten anywhere yet?

I usually like to pick on golf, so let’s just get at it first. Game or sport? What do you think?

People always talk about the game of golf, but then golfers and golf fans point out the athleticism needed to pull off those crazy good shots day after day while walking 5-6 miles. And professional golfers do sweat, especially during summer tournaments in Memphis. Does that make them athletes? Make golf a sport?

Swimmers and runners are definitely athletes, but we have swimming, track and cross country “meets,” not games. But Olympic swimmers and runners compete in the Games, which must, therefore, be a collection of sports that add up to being games.

Someone has opined that games are when you have opponents facing one another, e.g., football, tennis, chess, and a sport is when the competitors are facing in the same direction, e.g., running and swimming. But this approach still has holes in it. This would mean that boxing is a game, for instance.

Anyone besides me confused yet?

Another take is that a game requires more than one person and that sport refers to an individual’s performance. Thus the necessity to have a designation of sports and “team sports,” the latter being a differentiation because an aggregate of individual performances makes up the results.

Again, what about track, cross country and swimming? The individual performances are key of course, but in school competitions, the individual results are tallied to make a team score and one “wins” the meet based on that team score, with the individual results subsumed into the team results. Game or sport?

Athletes participate in sports; players participate in games. Sports are based on physical effort; games on based more on mental effort. Games involve strategy, sport involves individual, comparative performance.

Maybe we can look at football as a game (strategies, teams facing one another) that involves athletes (sweating, physical effort, individual performances against someone on the other team [blocking, outrunning to end zone]) involved in a sporting environment.

If that doesn’t sound as boring as a chess game or a spelling bee (hey, ESPN covers the national Bee, so it must be a sport), I don’t know what does.

Bottom line: if studying something kills the passion and joy, fugidaboutit. It’s a football weekend in autumn. Turn on the television, sit down, shut up and enjoy. I’m saving this line of thought for the weekend after the Super Bowl.
 

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