Complex Numbers

Athletic Non-Supporter

PROMPT September 16th

Another prompt from Elle - on hiatus !

Have you ever played a sport? Were you any good? What did you like about it? Why did you stop playing (if you did)?

Not really, no, nothing, because I hated it.

There, done.

Okay, maybe not done. I'll just take this opportunity to rant.

I hate sports. I don't like watching them, and I especially don't like participating in them.

I'm not a competitive person. "But, Waltz, you're always entering contests here on Writing.Com! In fact, you're entering this into one right now!" Yeah, and winning is nice and all, but I don't enter them to be competitive with other people; I enter them to practice writing. Sure, I could do that without entering contests, but I tend to get more feedback by entering. And I can, to some extent, track my improvement. Most importantly, the only parts of my body that move are my fingers.

With sports, though, I hate everything about the things. I don't like physical activity. I don't like the risk of injury. I don't like how the other team, or individual players, try to psych you out. I don't like winning. I don't like losing. I'd rather simply not play.

Some things that may be considered sports aren't so bad. Bowling, for example. Not a lot of moving. Hard to injure yourself unless you overdo it or do something monumentally stupid like dropping the ball on your foot. You're mostly just trying to improve your own performance, unless you're in a league, which you don't have to be.

But I really, really hate being ranked. If you're near the bottom, people mock you. If you're in the middle, people taunt you. If you're at the top, people try to outdo you.

Goddamn primates.

And yeah, maybe I have lingering resentment over always being the smallest person in the class, and thus was always picked last for the teams, because everyone expected I'd be crap. Consequently, I was crap. I was a year behind everyone else, physically. Hasn't mattered for decades, but that shit stays with you.

Most sports are zero-sum games. One winner, one loser. There's no in-between. Oh, people talk a good game about "playing with heart" or "doing your best," but the only thing most people care about is winning.

It leads to the philosophy that life is all about competing. It's not. The basic process of society isn't competition, but cooperation. This is true even in sports - you focus on Team A vs. Team B, but there's an implicit cooperation even between the competitors; that is, the people involved agree on the rules first, and rule violations are penalized. But no one gives a shit about that; they only see the competitive aspect.

And I think that's fundamentally unhealthy.