by Shai Nir

George Carlin once said that the only three true sports are Baseball, Football, and Basketball. Well, Carlin’s dead now, so fuck him.¹ I will decide what is and isn’t a sport, and I will do it not with a scalpel or with a hatchet, but with a chainsaw. A chainsaw named Awesome.²

FOOTBALL Football isn’t a sport. Football is a way of life. Deal with it.³

BASEBALL Baseball is pretty obviously a sport. There’s a lot of running and eventually one team wins. Duh.

GOLF There’s a sad lack of consistency between ball size and field size. In a better world, we’d play Basketball with Tennis balls, Baseball with Volleyballs, and Olympic Swimming with Bowling balls.⁴ Accordingly, Golf ought to be played with balls about eight feet in diameter. Until that happens, I cannot call it a true sport.

VIDEO GAMES Video games are too a sport. In fact, I’d love nothing more than to see video games taken as seriously by colleges as they are by college students. I want full intermural conferences, gaming scholarships, and cheerleaders. Also, so as to not block the screen, they should be sitting on the gamers’ laps.⁵ I think everybody wins there.

WAR War can’t be called a sport. War can’t even be called a game. I mean, you pull out the cards in order — there’s no strategy. Whichever player happens to have the winning deck wins the game. This is the only card game where a five year old could beat me. Unacceptable.

OLYMPICS I shudder to call many of these games sports. Some people run a hundred meters. A lady drops in the water. Some guys try to get a ball into a basket. A lot of events happen to fall just bellow the sport threshold. Fortunately fixing them up is pretty easy:

• WRESTLING Instead of man against man and woman against woman, wrestling matches should be man or woman against bear. As a concession to ancient Olympic tradition, bears will compete in the nude.
• LUGE Luge consists entirely of people lying down on boards. What a waste! As long as they’re up there, they might as well do something. Play a few rounds of chess. Juggle. Wrestle a bear. Anything beats lying down.
• FENCING The problem with Fencing is that swordfights in the real world have largely been outmoded by newer technology. If I want to see people try to poke each other to death, I have Facebook. Fencing needs to tech up to keep up. I propose replacing sabre with lightsaber, épée with AK, and foil with chainsaws.⁶

¹_{Even when he was alive I could beat him up.}
²_{Sometimes Awesome talks to me in the night.}
³_{Note for international readers: replace ‘Football’ with ‘Football’.}
⁴_{Ping-Pong can stay.}
⁵_{And feeding them Doritos when necessary.}
⁶_{Chainsaws named Brad and Madeleine.}