What is sport?

Here’s a definition of SPORT, from Cambridge dictionary: 
‘a game, competition, or activity needing physical effort and skill that is played or done according to rules, for enjoyment and/or as a job’.

Okay, I accept that tennis is a sport…but, we have recently been put through days of mind-numbing media reports and analyses concerning a multi-millionaire sportsman who didn’t wish to endure a couple of necessary injections - allowing him to hit a ball over a net.
It was hideous the way this story took over the News. It surely set more than me wondering about sport…and the meaning of ‘News’.

But, back to SPORT: Sure, there are different modes of SPORT in everyday life. Every type of football can easily be identified as SPORT, even though I cringe at the money aspect of professional teams.

But football and other activities do qualify as SPORT, by needing skill and having rules – no matter what you think.
Rugby looks like what we used to play as nine-year-olds, called “Keepings off”, where we tried to wrest a ball from our ‘opponents’.
Some folk enjoy watching grown men, with thick necks, play that game. Each to his own, I suppose.

Cricket is a SPORT – and I admit that I enjoy watching a small amount of it on tv occasionally. But it is just a game where someone throws a ball at someone else, who then tries to hit it ‘effectively’. And a game can last for days!

There are individual SPORTS activities such as all forms of athletics, involving running and jumping as well as swimming and surfing, etc.
So, I accept there are many SPORTS around that people enjoy watching as well as participating in.

But…as for (professional) golf: How anyone can walk around a golf course, (as a spectator) watching grownups hit a little white ball into a hole and consider it an enjoyable way to spend a day eludes me. Apparently, the person who uses the lowest number of hits to get the little ball into a hole is the winner!  There’s a person called ‘Tiger’(!) who is a multi-millionaire from doing just that!

Then there are activities some call SPORT, that I can’t equate with the word, ‘SPORT’. I’m referring to car and motorbike racing.
How can something like that be considered a SPORT? Beats me! Yep, skill, maybe – but SPORT?

What about shooting? Yes, shooting. It’s an Olympic SPORT! All about accuracy, I imagine…but SPORT?

Over a hundred years ago, pigeon racing was an Olympic SPORT! Even now, some people refer to it as a SPORT! Poor pigeons do all the work, and some human being gets all the praise!

Enough!
I’ll comment more on the topic of sport in the next blog as I am getting off the track of my original question of WHAT is SPORT? – the starting point being the rogue tennis player who thought he was ‘The Greatest’ in too many ways.