samvaknin
Registered user
Global user
Registered: 11-2008
Posts: 1266
Karma: 15 (+15/-0)
|
|
Reply | Quote
|
|
Be thankful for everything sports provide us
http://www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2103305
Be thankful for everything sports provide us
By DON BARRIE
Don Barrie is a retired schoolteacher, former scout for the NHL's Buffalo Sabres and a member of the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame and the Peterborough and District Sports Hall of Fame.
Sports fans have so much to be thankful this Thanksgiving weekend.
The NHL has just started; baseball has entered its playoffs; NBA basketball teams are at training camps; NFL, CFL and college football teams are going full throttle; European soccer is at its diving best and locally, lawnmowers are off the Morrow Park track and back to mulching leaves.
Hockey is still on life support in Phoenix after former Peterborough resident Jim Basillie tried to terminate it. Locally, we have a renovated grandstand, a new hospital, more soccer fields and stop lights than we need. But maybe most importantly, a lot of great sports teams and individuals and based on a recent U.N. study, we're living in a country with the fourth-best quality of life in the world.
Not surprisingly, many psychologists and sociologists believe sport, more than any social phenomenon, best hold people and societies together.
"The love--nay, addiction to --competitive and solitary sports," one of these experts, Sam Vaknin, Ph. D, recently wrote, "cuts across all social-economic strata and throughout all the demographics. Whether as a passive consumer (spectator), a fan, or a participant and practitioner, everyone enjoys one form of sport or another."
Vaknin believes sport contributes to more of one's emotional and physical needs than any other activity. He contends, "sport provides instant gratification of primal (base) instincts, such as the urge to compete and to dominate."
Sport allows individuals to confront other athletes, natural situations, or their own limitations in a win-lose situation.
Vaskin wrote, "Winning or overcoming these hurdles can be interpreted as good over evil or superior over inferior."
Every time one competes or participates in a competition in some manner or form, they are putting themselves in a position to receive immediate feedback for an achievement. Obviously, lack of success produces a negative response but by its natural, sport offers practically immediate opportunity for redemption.
In sport, regardless of how competent you or your team is, athletic competition continually renews your chance for small amounts of success. There's always another shift, period, game or season to do better.
With society seemly driven by random events--most out of one's control--sport offers predictability. Sport is rule-based. It is an island in society where inane behavior and uncontrollable impulses are not allowed. As Vaknin says, "Sport is about how the world should have been." It is a comfort zone -unless of course you are on the ice against the Petes' Zack Kassian.
Sport allows for learning in a relatively safe environment. Qualities like teamwork, striving, even winning and losing can be experienced by participants and passed on to those observing with a mini-mum of risk. As Vaknin said, "Better (to) be defeated in a foot-ball match than lose your life on a battlefield."
To that end, sport always gives a second chance, often denied by life or nature. "No loss is permanent and crippling; no defeat is insurmountable and irreversible."
Sport allows one to take that chance, extend one's comfort zone, go that preverbal extra mile without risking much more than a little humility.
For anyone who has been directly involved in a team sport and faced the highs and lows of competition, they know that feeling of team--the closeness among the members a championship or big win gives.
Sport gives gratification immediately. Results are instant relative to what an author must work through for recognition, the body of work a scientist must build, the years of successes a businessman must accrue, to come close to the idolization, recognition and remuneration an athlete would receive for a relatively moment of success.
Even fans can feed off the successes of a team, claim some ownership, reflect in their accomplishments and thereby gain some admiration from peers. That same fan can be a complete bust in other aspects of life but claim respect for his choice of teams.
"Sports provide a shortcut to accomplishments and rewards," Vaknin wrote, "As most sports are uncomplicated affairs, the barrier to entry is low."
That is very obvious any Sunday afternoon in a NFL stadium. One's position in the outside world means little within the confines of a stadium, rink or park. One is measured strictly by the loyalty, enthusiasm and recklessness one supports a team or individual.
Those at the bottom of society's food chain can still hold exalted positions dressed like a Halloween reject acting the fool in the end zone of a football stadium on a Sunday afternoon.
So on this Thanksgiving week-end we should be grateful that if it wasn't for sport, all the obnoxious, grating, often idiotic behaviour we see at sporting events might very well be played out on the street in front of our homes.
Better to be watching the jerks playing to the TV cameras inside an arena than seeing them through your front window on your front lawn!
---
Copy-paste these links:
Encyclopedia of Narcissism and Psychopathy
http://samvak.tripod.com/siteindex.html
Buy 9 books about narcissists, psychopaths, and abusive relationships
http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/thebook.html
|
