It’s the Groundhog Day of arguments about sports. Some guy in a Steelers jersey is getting red-faced about how Formula One isn’t a real sport because “the car does all the work,” while his buddy, who bowls league every Thursday, is trying to explain that rolling a sixteen-pound ball with precision down sixty feet of oiled wood is absolutely athletics. The guy nursing his third Iron City chimes in that if you can do it while eating nachos, it’s not a sport. The bartender, who played Division III lacrosse at Washington & Jefferson College, just shakes his head and changes the channel from ESPN8 showing cornhole to something everyone can agree on: football highlights. But are we talking the explosive North American version played by sumo-sized linemen or the graceful, stamina-centered sport known to the rest of the world as football?
We argue about sports the way medieval scholastics argued about angels dancing on pinheads — with absolute conviction about something that seemingly doesn’t matter, yet also matters more than anything else. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, who probably never threw a decent curveball in his life, spent a whole book trying to figure this out back in 1938. In Homo Ludens, he argued that play came before culture, that all the serious things we do, from war and law to poetry, started as games. Play, he said, has to be voluntary, separate from ordinary life, uncertain in outcome, unproductive (creating neither goods nor wealth), governed by rules, and make-believe. Interestingly enough, but for our purposes, modern sports aren’t play at all. They’re work. They produce wealth (college scholarships count here). They’re as real as a mortgage payment for the guys whose knees are shot by 35.
Then Allen Guttmann came along in 1978 with From Ritual to Record and explained how modern sports aren’t just games anymore — they’re what happens when capitalism gets its hands on play. Where pre-modern societies had ritualistic contests tied to religion and community, we’ve got codified rules, standardized records, and an obsession with quantifiable achievement. Your local softball league might feel like a community ritual, but it’s really about who can hit .350 (and most good leagues, like the one my stepdad dominated in the 1970s, do track those stats). Everything that can be measured gets measured, everything measured gets compared, and everything compared becomes an argument about legitimacy.
Interestingly, the argument about what counts as a sport might be the most accessible sport of all. It has rules (unspoken but rigid), teams (purists versus inclusionists), victory conditions (getting everyone in the room to agree with you), and most importantly, it requires the one thing most of the agreed-upon sports require: someone else to play against.
Take bowling. I bowl. Not well, but I bowl. The purists will tell you it’s not a sport because corpulent Walter Sobchak (John Goodman’s Vietnam-obsessed character in The Big Lebowski) could roll strikes between bites of a hot dog. But watch Elise Bolton, the PWBA Regional champion and NCAA title winner turned Instagram bowling influencer, throw with enough precision to average 221 over eight games while nursing an injured ankle, adjust her approach by millimeters based on oil patterns invisible to the casual observer, and tell me that’s not athletic mastery.
A simple hierarchy of legitimacy, at least for me, might go something like this: Violent sports at the top — boxing, amateur wrestling, MMA, football — where the body serves as both tool and target. Then running sports, because that’s what we did when we chased after woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers chased us. Then, the gentler ball sports with teams and strategy. Then precision sports — golf, archery, shooting — where it’s you against physics. Then machine sports — racing, sailing — where death lurks around every corner, but technology is helping you turn those corners. Then bar sports — darts, pool, bowling — where taking beta blockers and abstaining from bar temptations can make all the difference. And at the bottom for most people, e-sports, where a few teenagers can make millions while their parents ask when they’re getting real jobs.
But every classification breaks down. Is gymnastics a sport or a judged performance? What about figure skating, where a Romanian judge’s breakfast disposition can determine Olympic gold? Professional wrestling, which disgraced impresario Vince McMahon redefined as “sports entertainment” to avoid paying fees to athletic commissions — requires incredible athleticism and tells predetermined stories, making it either the fakest sport or the most honest one, depending on your perspective. Competitive eating? Slap fight chess, which is exactly what it sounds like and somehow still makes more sense than cricket (actually an incredible game, as recounted in C.L.R. James’ wonderful Beyond a Boundary)?
The masculinity policing is the best part. “Real men play football.” Yes, men will certainly dominate on the gridiron, basketball court, and soccer pitch. But back in 1997, Stevie Case from Kansas University beat Quake’s co-creator John Romero at his own game, later becoming not just the first woman but the first professional gamer signed to the Cyberathlete Professional League. The toughest athlete I ever knew was my father’s fourth wife, who did Ironman World Championship triathlons in her 60s. Indeed, ultramarathons and open-water swimming are among the few sports where women regularly beat men. After 195 miles of running, women are faster on average. In ultra-distance swimming, women dominate outright, owing to better insulation, better fat oxidation, and more fatigue-resistant muscles.
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Meanwhile, the most precisely skilled athletic performance I’ve seen lately was watching 24-year-old Chovy (Jung Ji-hoon) dominate League of Legends, winning his fifth consecutive Korean championship and taking MVP at the 2025 Mid-Season Invitational, cementing Gen.G’s dominance with mechanical micro-maneuvering perfection while millions watched online. F1 legend Michael Schumacher and Eagles star running back Saquon Barkley are certainly adept at fine movements, but they’ve got nothing on Chovy.
Every time someone says “that’s not a real sport,” what they’re really saying is “that’s not what I value.” And that’s fine. That’s probably why we started playing games in the first place — to figure out what matters when nothing really matters. The argument will never end because it’s not supposed to end. The argument is the game, and the game is what makes us human.
Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and cohost of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.
