The Sportiness of Each Sport
Attempting to delineate among sports and objectively rank them
Arguing about what is and is not a sport is an age-old debate capable of evoking strong emotional responses. Another version is how “legitimate” a given sport is.
Here is my attempt to weigh in on this fraught discussion with what is hopefully a relatively objective framework. Certainly both my methodology as well as my specific answers leave ample room for disagreement. But that is the fun of it after all.
I will define “sport” as:
A human competition engaged in for pleasure that involves skillful athletic physicality and strategy resulting in an objectively determined winner.
I will evaluate sports along four dimensions on a scale of 0 to 101. These dimensions are:
Interaction between opponents
Opportunity for strategy
Degree that skill rather than luck determines a winner
Degree that success involves human athleticism and physicality
Objectivity of scoring to determine a winner
The Platonic ideal sport would score a 10 in each category. To be considered a sport to any degree requires a score above zero in each category. Therefore, games that can be fully played without physical activity—requiring just mental actions—are not sports. There must be an objective means to some degree or another of determining a winner—Calvinball is out.
Let’s shorten these criteria to Interaction, Strategy, Skill, Athleticism, and Objectivity. Interaction could be roughly approximated as the ability to play defense; although, this is not a complete understanding. In the extreme it implies that the actions or decisions of a player/team impact the opponent. Notice that this can be indirect as well as direct. Further, as a competition at the most basic level there is an interaction effect as simply a better score or performance of a player/team forces the opponent to match or beat it in order to gain advantage or ultimately win. I believe each of the others are self explanatory.
Using the Wikipedia listing of sports as a rough guide, below are my subjective scores followed by a ranking. I first look at broad categories and then examine some specific sports.
Note that some of these are categories where we could certainly delineate further. I am generally assuming there are not meaningful differences within a particular category, but I reserve the right to amend this in all ways including breaking out subcategories or specific sports. This list is not intended to be exhaustive and it is certainly not a mutually exclusive listing—I specifically break out the major sports out by themselves for examination even though they are within the broad grouping “team sports (response based)”. This allows for examination of how a particular sport in a group might have different characteristics than the group’s average.
Some notes on my thoughts:
American football is short of full points for OT rules (skill vs. luck) and degree of judgement calls on the part of officials that affect outcome (objectivity).
I mark down soccer for stoppage time and penalty kicks (skill vs. luck) and degree of judgement calls on the part of officials that outcome (objectivity).
Soccer, Ice Hockey, and Basketball simply seem to have less strategy opportunities than does football or baseball.
While the essential scoring element of baseball is very objective—probably a 10—the umpire plays too big a subjective role before that point in calling strikes and balls.
Tennis falls short of the ideal in that the strategic opportunities are not complete since there is only so much strategizing one can do in a particular match, set, or game much less a tournament. Further, the objectivity is nearly perfect now that we are in the era of Hawk-Eye (mostly) and not in the era of “You cannot be serious!”.
Golf is sure to bring about debate. Since golf is individually played, there is basically no strategy element directly between opponents most of the time. Hit the ball accurately, far, and as few times as possible is not a very rich strategy environment. I think the general element of strategy in golf is the important area of understanding how to hit a shot given the circumstances including ideal placement for the next shot. This has the added nuance of deciding between aggressive play—go for the green—versus conservative play—lay up before the hazard.
Golf does exhibit interaction and strategy in certain situations like a playoff. Each player can dictate a risk/return choice that the opponent has to consider. For example, a player going first could decide to take a very aggressive approach by, say, going for the green rather than laying up.
Golf loses on athleticism since, to be blunt, very old men can still play it quite well. I don’t mean this to be derogatory. This is just a dimension along which there is a relatively low ability to distinguish great from good. There is a (again, relatively low) ceiling to how much athleticism and physicality can add value.
Many a sports fan will insist on a dichotomous framework—various activities either are or are not sports. This framework obviously has appeal both for its simplicity (the obvious attribute) as well as its provocation (the hidden attribute). We use dichotomous models to describe the world because they are at some level more helpful than not. But at some point they become untenable. This threshold between useful and unhelpful varies both based on the topic as well as the objective for each topic itself. A dichotomy works for sex (male/female) perhaps >99% of the time. It does so for gender (male/female) perhaps >90%. Dividing the Americas between North and South is very useful at 100,000 feet. It might be utterly useless on the ground in Panama. The closer you look at something or the more you think about something usually the more it resembles a spectrum rather than a dichotomy—especially if we are modeling it or categorizing otherwise. This is all a Straussian way for me to say the typical sports fan’s desire to declare “this is a sport” and “this is not a sport” is almost always too shallow to consider for half a second as a serious thought. Ignore these opinions. They are silly.