The Chronic Curmudgeon

Wow. You don't get it at all.

This is X Games #10, so I think your hope is destined for failure. Pity.

Sports in this country are big business and big money. They are entertainment. That's how pro athletes can be paid as much as they are. Some X-games sports are now Olympic events, such as snowboarding.

The X-games programming on ESPN is all about money in the end. ESPN needs programming and advertisers. There is not much else they can show this time of year besides basketball and hockey among the popularly watched sports. A trend in these new sports was noticed and the businessmen are capitalizing on it. Kids buy stuff, alot of stuff.

While it is true that team sports do build a feeling of teamwork, most people do not regularly participate in team sports after high school. Sure, there are YMCA, gym leagues, and church league sports, but the conditioning done while in school sports isn't usually done in these team sports. So people don't stay as fit. Not everyone who wants to be on the team (football, baseball, basketball,etc) always makes it or is good at the sport. Particularly in junior high and high school sports.

Individual sports are often what people will continue to do the rest of their lives. This is important for fitness. With the obesity epidemic, anything that helps people get active is probably worthwhile. I don't usually see indivdual sports on TV every week. Many Olympic sports are individual sports.

Sports evolve over time. The popularity of sports also changes. Baseball, basketball, and American football didn't exist 200 years ago. And these sports have also evolved over time. The forward pass wasn't always allowed in American football. So who knows what the popular spectator sports will be in the next 100 years.

I personally don't care for the X-games. But then, I don't care for a lot of other popular sports as well, such as boxing, golf, and NASCAR. What I would like to see is more coverage of track and field and other sports.

And here's where you're flat-out wrong, 'mudge: watch the X-games. Watch the athletes on the sidelines. Watch them applaud and cheer for their fellow competitors. Watch them practice and push themselves to pull-off ever-increasing difficult tricks that, in turn, push their competitors to do the same.

Now watch a game of pro football. Watch the receiver answer his phone in the end zone. Watch the running back get blasted at the 2-yard line while he's showboating. Watch the umpteenth athlete screw his team because of greed.

Yeah, I guess it amazes me, too, why kids growing up today shun "team" and "professional" sports.

Yeah... watch them applaud for more "look at me" show-off-manship and more contrived "rebllion" (oh look! he's a rebel because he mogul jumps or does a half-pipe or can do a backflip on his motocross!).

Your point re: professional athletes in traditional sports is dead-on... unfortunately, X Games participants aren't any different. Terrell Owens and Joe Horn may pull out cell phones in the end zone... X players have to try and do showy, flashy "my way" versions of other sports. Come down on either one, and they'll whine about how you're crimping their individualism.

Whether it's a cell phone in the end zone or a gnarly rad half-pipe backflip, it's still all about "pay attention to ME."

I resent that. Many of the snowboarders you see winning the Winter X Games go on to win Gold Medals in the Nagano Olympics. (Kelly Clark). As snowboarding is a sport that many hateful and unfeeling people do not accept, the Winter X Games are quite similar to the Olympics for a great many riders.

For example, before I injured myself enough snowboarding to make myself permanetly paranoid, I had dreams of winning the X Games.

Snowboarders: you mean the irresponsible and dangerous people who keep coming perilously close to injuring me and other skiers when I go to Vermont every year with their reckless habits on the mountain? ;-)

As for the Olympics, they do test-trials of new sports all the time. Doesn't mean the sports'll stick around.

Why is it, do you think, that snowboarding isn't accepted by so many? Surely we're not all "hateful and unfeeling." Gotta be a reason...

Not that I want to belittle you having dreams. Dreams are good. Aspirations are good. I just think there are more productive pursuits, is all. But, enjoy what you will, and all that..

Snowboarders kick ass. Don't be an uptight pretentious skiier.

A couple of random thoughts--but first let me point out that I'm married to a skater/surfer/bmxer/snowboarder who works as a mechanical engineer/production manager for a snowboard manufacturer.

1) It's attitudes like yours that actually created a need for activities like skateboarding and snowboarding. Kids being alienated by jocks and shunned from team sports.

2) My thoughts were exactly the same as SpinMD's--you've obviously never been to a skate competition. The competitors are just as excited for their opposition's success as they are for their own. And just as disappointed for their opposition's failures--and really excited to see new or difficult tricks being attempted.

3) What do you think about bullriding as a sport?

I think some of what you're saying is true, and I also think it can be flipped around and applied to team sports as well.

But there's more to extreme sports than winning and losing. There's a sense of everyone that is competing is lifting each other up. When someone succeeds, it doesn't mean everyone else has lost. Everyone's rooting for each other. Yes, everyone wants to come out on top and do the best tricks and win first place, etc. But when someone pulls off something amazing, everyone is stoked about it.

And I'd like to see you try a backflip on a motorcycle! :)

Hmm, I've been thinking about this a little more. You're not really objecting to skating, bmxing, snowboarding, motocross, etc. being sports, otherwise you'd have to object to diving and figure skating and boxing as well. What you're objecting to is the personality type that extreme sports attract.

I'm ok with that. Lots of people can't stand my husband--or at least, he used to generate extreme reactions from people, but he's mellowed out a lot. (He still likes to confuse people though--hence the current mullet haircut.)

If asked, he would say he's glad your opinion is what it is, because he wouldn't want people with your personality type becoming part of his sport. He's really bummed that some people are trying to turn surfing into a team sport.

Actually, I'm not a fan of diving or figure skating either. (except for occasionally watching specific skaters.) Boxing, I enjoy because somewhere in the primal, neanderthal part of my soul I enjoy watching people beat the hell out of one another for no good reason. ;-) It sates the same urges that playing linebacker once did.

As to your supposition about the personality type being at issue for me, there's probably something to that... no denying that once a jock, always a jock (as far as mentality goes, anyway). I just have never been able to get folks who, to show how non-conformist they are, conform to a system and culture that demands just as strict adherence as the mainstream they allegedly reject. ;-)

Beyond that though, I guess we're all a product of what we're brought up in, sportswise. I grew up from the age of 6 onward playing baseball... hockey and football soon followed. Every sport I played, every sport that taught me the things that for better or worse made me who I am, were predicated on Team -- on sublimating your own desires for attention and individual glory for the betterment of a collective goal.

It used to be that in football, if you started showing off and preening, you were likely to get slugged or bitten in the next pileup; if you showed off after hitting a home run in baseball, the first pitch you saw the next time up would be drilling your ribs or your butt. In the sports I grew up playing, there were consequences for flamboyantly promoting yourself over the team.

And things were deadly serious. Sports weren't about "performing tricks," they were about mastering the fundamentals and consistently doing what you were supposed to do in any given situation, coming through for your teammates by being where you were expected to be, making your block, taking out your defender, advancing the runner, or whatever.

That's the antithesis of X activities. Sure, they can cheer for each other's tricks (roll over, Fido!), but at the end of the day it's still about standing out as individuals in order to achieve. That may be simply another interpretation of sport, one different than mine, but it is so foreign to me -- in fact, in my sports it's the kind of thing that invited phsyical retribution -- that I cannot accept it. Hence my reaction of loathing.

Generally, I find the Bode Miller/Tony Hawk types of the world annoying carbon copies of one another. I'm also sure they find people with my personality type similarly annoying, and similarly cloned. It's undoubtedly true that I don't know them, have never really spent any time talking to them, and thus have no sense of who they are or what makes them tick. Then again, they don't know me or anything about me, and yet there are stereotypes that exist about those who play(ed) team sports as well... and I'd venture that the reaction among X gamers to people with my personality type is probably similar to the reaction traditional sports guys have to Xers. (Possibly even more dismissive, since I'm one of those who plays/played traditional sports and "conforms.")

Obviously, I've never met your husband and can't claim to know anything about him... and I neither could nor would make any suppositions about "can't standing" him. I doubt that we'd have much in common sportswise, but then again we just might. I think we'd be able to at least be civil to one another long enough to figure it out... though I doubt we'd be watching the same stuff on ESPN. ;-)

Thanks for reading and for sharing your opinions. I'm sure you've become Doc's new hero. ;-) Please extend my best wishes to your husband as well...

Hawk - you're right about individual sports becoming far more important as we get older... but I don't watch golf or rock climbing on TV either. ;-)

Didn't finish reading that tome of a response to Susan M., 'mudge, but I did catch a glimpse of a line that said something about gravitating toward sports you grew up with. So, I'm to assume you are a huge fan of curling?

these dorks need to get on their Mongoose or RedLine dirt bikes and go back to the 7-11 parking lot where they can hangout and be annoying to a smaller pool of people

I had to cover a "Dew Action Sports" event in Orlando last year to talk to (name withheld) and a few others. It was gonna be a cool spread because the events make for nice photos.

However...and I'm putting this as nice as I can, those guys were some of the biggest cocksuckers I've ever had to deal with. Arrogant pricks that smelled like a cross between cheap ganja, Surge and a dog's rectum. I spent the whole days hoping those assholes would seriously wipeout.

I'd deal with Keyshawn Johnson 24/7 before I ever talk to another one of those pansy fucks who got "scared" away from team sports because of the drug tests.

Corey drops the hammer!!!!!!

I stumbled across this site by accident, I find your oppinions quaint and somewhat uninformed. Just because the way these "sports" are portrayed by espn, mountain dew and whoever else thinks they can make a quick buck. There are just as many bmxers and skaters who care more about personal progression, having fun and would prefer to be left alone and out of the spotlight.

I was going to comment on this one before but I misplaced the post & couldn't find it.

Anything the average person can get up and do w/ a drink in one hand (or intoxicated) = not a sport.

That is all.