Let’s get a quick Canon Fodder definition out of the way.

sport – A game or competition between two or more willing opponents where each side has the ability and opportunity to react and impact the other’s actions. The final result should leave no room for judgment or interpretation.

You won’t find this definition in Webster’s. It’s completely my own creation.

Most fans probably won’t agree with my terminology, but I feel it makes more sense than the terms we as fans often toss about without consideration.

I’m a fan of sports. Baseball. Football. Hockey. Basketball. Tennis. Curling. Chess. Sports one and all.

Golf? Bowling? Figure skating? Gymnastics? Entertaining and difficult to master, but non-sports across the board.

So now you’re sitting there digesting my seemingly preposterous few lines of blather and thinking, this guy is nuts. Tiger Woods is clearly an athlete but doesn’t play a sport? What about all those Olympians we trot out every four years? Surely they are all athletes.

Well, yes. There are plenty of folks considered athletes that don’t actually play a sport. (Go Check out www.Canon-Fodder.com for another article where I come up with the definition of an athlete.)

I think the best way to approach this is to look at games we don’t consider sports and work forward. Let’s start with something involving a certain measure of skill and can be performed competitively, but lacks the qualities of a sport. Take juggling. It’s definitely a skill. With practice, one could become an extraordinary juggler. A person could “challenge” someone to a juggling contest. Maybe the most balls (or flaming pins or chainsaws, the material doesn’t really matter) in the air wins. Keeping half-a-dozen running chainsaws airborne is certainly a feat of considerable skill, but that hardly makes it a sport. If your opponent is not permitted to impact your performance then does it even matter if there’s an opponent? Whether in a competitive setting or in a relaxed practice setting, the act would be exactly the same – the performer can either juggle a designated amount of items or he can’t. The only real opponent to juggling is gravity, not another juggler.

Bowling and golf are excellent examples of this principle. In bowling, the biggest impact a player can have on an opponent’s game is by drying out a certain area of the lane. (And bowling facilities do their best to combat this.) On approach, one bowler isn’t allowed to distract or impede the other. There are rules strictly against that type of behavior. The same goes for golf.

Another telling aspect of these “non-sports” is how opponents don’t even have to play against each other simultaneously. A golfer could shoot a 68 and then have an opponent come back and beat them by shooting a 67 the following day. The only thing the two players had in common was playing the same course. Bowling is similar in that a bowler throws 270 on lanes 1-2 and loses to a guy throwing a 280 on lanes 23-24.

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