Athletics Are Not Brutal, Life Is

To the Editors:

Two weeks ago, Channing Joseph made the suggestions that sports are violent, brutal, and that the world may be better off without athletes.
I don’t view athletes or athletics as brutal, but yet a humane form of competition evolving from its more brutal form, war. In war, death is the objective. In sports, there is an alternative objective, to win in accordance with the rules. The brutal acts the writer mentioned occurred outside of the rules set by the different sport. Sports likely became a part of our life when people started realizing that it wasn’t great to have loved ones killed in battle. Someone probably came up with the modern idea that an athletic competition could settle an argument and rules would prevent individuals from death. Individuals still died, but in far lesser numbers than in war.
What is brutal is a competition involving mismatched opponents. Not often seen in organized competition, this most often occurs when an athlete competes with a lesser athlete, or, in numerical mismatches. Even still, the brutality of such a situation is lessened in athletics where rules and referees govern competition close at hand. In all my days of sports I have never witnessed anything as brutal as a street fight between an athlete and a lesser athlete. I have never witnessed a guy getting his head split open on concrete in a boxing match. The rules and referee prevent such a thing. An equally brutal situation occurs when there is a numbers mismatch. In the notorious Rodney King beating this is what happened. There were five guys (referees) with weapons vs. one without weapons. King was brutally beaten by the referees. That is brutality.
Sports may be violent. Depending on the definition of violent one chooses, all sports would qualify in one way or another. However, to suggest that brutality is related with all sport, especially boxing, is quite difficult for me to accept. Organized competition is not brutal, it is humane. It is not sport that leads to brutality, yet it is the lack of enforcement of our human laws that lead people to believe that they can get away with acts of brutality.
Furthermore, a world without athletes is not possible. We are all athletes. Athletics are born of competition. We all have a drive to compete. We compete against those we think we are better than or equal to. If you take away the best physical specimens on the earth today, you create a vacuum in which lesser physical specimens will soon occupy. They then become the athletes. The world will never be without athletes.

–Rob Oldham
Lacrosse and Assistant Football Coach