Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Give Me A Break...
Douglas Groothuis, writing at Culture Watch: Thoughts of A Constructive Curmudgeon has been a welcome addition to the blogosphere. I don't always agree, and I think his tone can be a bit "superior," but on balance his contributions to the blogosphere have been valuable.
I try to make a habit of not writing critical posts in the heat of passion, but the Construcive Curmudgeon's Saturday offering is both too inflaming and too silly not to address quite directly and succicntly.
All I can say is that Mr. Groothuis has a very low definition of "violence" if football is inherently so. It is a game of physicality and of force, but I did not realize force equated to violence. I played the game for years, never hated my opponent, never tried to injure him, my goal was never to harm, and I can state emphatically that is true for every person I have ever met playing the game - and I participated (not played, my skills were too low, but as scholarshipped manager and trainer), albeit briefly, in Division 1 college football.
I should also add that the two worst injuries I have ever seen in sports happened in baseball -- one of the them intentionally inflicted -- spiking while sliding into second base. The other was when a guy sliding head first caught his thumb on the base and...well, you don't really want to know.
As to his contention
They are both games. That's all, and while Groothuis' contention that they have great cultural impact cannot be refuted, the idea that there is a moral superiority of one over the other is silly. This is a proclamation from someone that for sure does not understand football, and from the shallowness of his statements has likely had little participation in sports in general in his life.
There are issues with the role football plays in American life, but they are not intrinsic to the game itself. They are what we have made of the game.
Related Tags: football, baseball, morality, violence, Douglas Groothuis, silly
I try to make a habit of not writing critical posts in the heat of passion, but the Construcive Curmudgeon's Saturday offering is both too inflaming and too silly not to address quite directly and succicntly.
The argument is brief, sharp, and probably unpopular. Baseball is both aesthetically and morally superior to football as a cultural form. Moreover, football is not only inferior to baseball, but possesses deficits that should cause Christians to consider their participation in the sport - whether as players, managers, owners, or fans - in principle. As an ideal, a team sport should evince aesthetic beauty, moral virtue, and intellectual value. Now consider baseball and football.He then goes on to make his argument in a fashion more reminiscent of a George Carlin comedy routine than a genuine argument for his thesis.
All I can say is that Mr. Groothuis has a very low definition of "violence" if football is inherently so. It is a game of physicality and of force, but I did not realize force equated to violence. I played the game for years, never hated my opponent, never tried to injure him, my goal was never to harm, and I can state emphatically that is true for every person I have ever met playing the game - and I participated (not played, my skills were too low, but as scholarshipped manager and trainer), albeit briefly, in Division 1 college football.
I should also add that the two worst injuries I have ever seen in sports happened in baseball -- one of the them intentionally inflicted -- spiking while sliding into second base. The other was when a guy sliding head first caught his thumb on the base and...well, you don't really want to know.
As to his contention
Baseball is intellectually superior to football, because of the degree of strategy, finesse, and intelligence required to play it well. Football knows of many plays and patterns, but most of them reduce to speed, strength, and coordination--as opposed to intelligence.The man obviously has never stood on a football field in his life and has no understanding of how a football play works, how complicated the formations are, and the simple fact that the best plays work by deception on some level (a great intellectual challenge) than on the application of brute physicality. And while the pyschological game playing between pitcher, batter and catcher can be quite intense and cerebral, it ain't rocket science to play left field.
They are both games. That's all, and while Groothuis' contention that they have great cultural impact cannot be refuted, the idea that there is a moral superiority of one over the other is silly. This is a proclamation from someone that for sure does not understand football, and from the shallowness of his statements has likely had little participation in sports in general in his life.
There are issues with the role football plays in American life, but they are not intrinsic to the game itself. They are what we have made of the game.
Related Tags: football, baseball, morality, violence, Douglas Groothuis, silly
