For a list of different sports and how they were graded, click here.
This summer, the Olympics - the planet's most important sports competition - gave us medal events in synchronized diving (i.e. falling together), floor exercise (judged tumbling), and dressage (regulated horse prancing). On TV, there's a sneaker commercial with the slogan: "The sport of fitness has arrived." The sport of fitness?
All which brings up an important question (at least to those of us who like to sit around and argue about these things): Haven't we become a little loose about what we're calling a sport these days?
What is a sport, anyway? Charles Barkley stirred debate in 2005 when he suggested that maybe golf, competitive cycling and NASCAR racing didn't really qualify.
"Tiger's got them all thinking they're jocks now. But they're not," he said. "Like Lance Armstrong and car racers. One guy is riding a bike and the other is driving a car."
Fans and participants might not go so far as to boot golf and racing off the sports pages. But where do you draw the line? Beer pong?
Once upon a time in America, we knew what a sport was. It was football, baseball, basketball, hockey. Even soccer. There were rules and goals and a defense out there to stop you. ABC's "Wide World of Sports" debuted in 1961 and became known for carrying "sports" that didn't always merit their own programs, like Acapulco cliff diving, ice-boat races, arm wrestling and demolition derby. ESPN padded its early-years schedule with slow-pitch softball and table tennis. Then, in the mid-2000s, ESPN debuted the "X-Games" to showcase "extreme sports" like skateboarding, BMX stunt jumping, and "street luge." ESPN next went big with poker tournaments and even televised championship dominoes. Meanwhile, the NBC Sports Network, which began as the Outdoor Life Network, continues to feature hunting, fishing, bull riding and darts.
So is shooting pool a sport? Or could it truly be a game - albeit a game that requires physical skill? Is golf so very different from pocket billiards because its holes are farther apart? Is darts more a game than a sport and, if so, where does that leave archery? Only a fool would say that figure skating or gymnastics are easy to do well. But are they sports? Could they instead be described accurately - and not disparagingly - as judged athletic performances?
Debate about the "Sportitude" of various pursuits has raged for decades in TV rooms and sports bars. But don't worry, we have it all worked out right here. We've cracked the code, concocted the calculus. We have the answer down to a science - and just like with legitimate science, this is sure to inspire even more heated, opinionated barroom debate.
So, what's a sport? According to our exclusive Sportitude formula, it's a combination of four basic elements. Two of them measure physical and athletic factors. Two measure competitive and gaming factors. Weigh any activity on each of these four scales (from 1 to 10 in each category), mash the numbers together (multiply them, actually) and you get a figure we are calling Sportitude - and a remarkably plausible ranking revealing what truly is a sport, and what - sorry - might not be so much.
Factor 1 is the physical effort an activity requires. Physical effort alone doesn't make a sport. Digging ditches is hard. But putting those muscles to work is what separates playing a sport from playing "Candy Land;" we assign a score of 1 to 10 for how much hard work an activity requires.
Factor 2 is physical skill required. That's expertise to excel, above and beyond what the layperson off the street would bring. It comes from natural talent, training and lots of practice. Again, by itself, physical virtuosity doesn't make a sport. Playing the cello requires physical skill, but you aren't going to see Yo-Yo Ma on the sports page unless the Phillies sign him to play third base.
Factor 3 is how objective the scoring rules are. Are points scored in a way that's standard and unchanging every game - like putting a ball into a net - or can scoring differ based on judgment calls? In the truest sports, scoring is clear and fair and the athlete is in full control of his or her destiny. In pocket billiards and golf, the ball is in the hole or not. In races, who crosses the line first? In arm wrestling - and chess for that matter - there's no room for debate about who won. Activities in which scores are left to judges provide less clarity. That includes gymnastics, figure skating, boxing and mixed martial arts, although the two combat sports do offer the chance for knockouts and tapouts, which rarely happen in figure skating (regrettably). Sports with baskets, goals, touchdowns and runs are clear in tallying up their points, although referees and umpires can add loose subjectivity with game-changing calls.
Factor 4: Defense! Level of opposition. Someone actively trying to stop you. The traditional sports we consider most legit have an offense against a defense at the same time. There's total resistance from your opponent in soccer, hockey, tennis, wrestling. Even billiards, with two players shooting on the same table, has its defensive strategy. There's no defense in gymnastics or golf. A race in which you get your own lane is less directly competitive than one where you need to jostle for running room.
Now, simply assign any alleged sport a score of 1 to 10 in each of these four metrics, mash up the scores, and you get its Sportitude, as the chart presented on page 25 shows.
Of course, some folks still define sports broadly. If you work at ESPN, for example, and you need to fill multiple TV, radio, and online outlets all day and night, an open-minded approach makes sense.
"For us, the word is competition," says Jason Bernstein, senior director of programming and acquisitions for ESPN. "True engagement between competitors, on whatever the battleground, to ultimately come forth with a winner."
Bear in mind that Bernstein said this while describing Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, which ESPN has televised since 2003, and which typically draws more than a million viewers. This past July 4, Joey Chestnut won his sixth consecutive title by swallowing 68 hot dogs in 10 minutes.
"There really is one true hot-dog eating champion every year," Bernstein says. "That competition is what drives the competitors, also known as gurgitators. And like it or not, physical skill exists in competitive eating. There is an undeniable skill set that these folks bring to the table - literally. They have to practice and deal with the effects on the body. Many hours of eating."
But is it a sport? Let's leave that to the Sportitude Formula.
Competitive eating makes no bones about how contestants score their points. That's good. It falls down on the athletic side. Other activities gave it the other way around. Take competitive cheerleading. The girls who succeed often start training at age 4 or 5.
"It's physically tough," says Mindy Spadaccino, coach of the Penndel Wildcats cheerleading squad in Bucks County, a team that has won the national Battle at the Capitol grand championship in its division for the past two years. The girls do pyramids, tosses, jumps, running and standing tumbles. "Imagine holding someone almost your same size over your head, with only two other people, and they are on one foot. And they switch to the other foot and still stay up there, without a bobble. And they're throwing that leg up and catching it stretched up to their nose."
The judging in competitive cheerleading is less consistent, though. Different competitions have different rules and scoring criteria. Maybe we should call it a judged athletic performance.
Recreational activities can move into legit sports territory when they nail down a standard way to keep score. Mixed martial arts - MMA - really wasn't a sport until 2000, when athletic commissions in New Jersey and California came up with a global set of rules that codified legal and illegal moves, judging criteria, length of rounds, weight classes, and so forth. Is it a coincidence that MMA got huge after that?
"Sports with clearly defined scoring systems and objectives to win are preferable for sure," says Bernstein. "The more a sport can be followed by average fans - those who may not have previously experienced it - the better off you are."
It's always been exciting to watch people riding on - and falling off - bulls, but bull-riding blasted off as a pro sport, drawing huge live crowds and a TV deal, thanks to the creation of a 100-point scorekeeping system and explicit rules. In the Professional Bull Riders tour (which comes to Philly's Wells Fargo Center Oct. 5-6), if a rider lasts fewer than 8 seconds atop a bucking bull, he scores no points. For every ride reaching 8 seconds, evaluations from four judges give a rider up to 100 points. Fifty are awarded based on how well the rider did, and 50 are assigned to the bull, based on how tough of a ride it gave (and the bulls are ranked separately).
"Bull-riding is a true sport," says Austin Meier, a top-ranking rider on the Built Ford Tough Professional Bull Riders tour. "It's not just a bunch of cowboys that wanna do something crazy. We are athletes and we train for it. It's very demanding on the cardio side, the physical side. A lot of people say, 'Well, it's only 8 seconds.' I've played a lot of football and not been too beat up after a game, but there's been times riding bulls that I've had a successful run, and it still feels like somebody ran over me with a train."
Expertise and training? Like competitive cheerleading and other sports, top-level bull-riding requires a lifetime of it.
"I started putting in mutton-busting when I was still in diapers," Meier says (yes, young buckaroos start out riding excited sheep). "I started getting on my first big bulls when I was 12."
In May 2011, NFL receiver Chad Johnson, formerly known as Chad Ochocinco, thought he'd give bull-riding a try. His career lasted 1.5 seconds atop a bull named Deja Blu. (In failing, he lost the right to rename the bull Marvin Lewis, after the Cincinnati Bengals coach.) "This sport does not get enough credit," Johnson admitted afterward. "These guys should be the highest-paid athletes."
Of course, in bull-riding, scoring is subjective. Judges are trained to look for specific things, but "it's a judged sport, it's not like air hockey," Meier says. "Sometimes a bull feels a little different than it looks."
And there's no direct defense from an opponent during bull riding. Some might argue the 1,600-pound beast you're trying to hang onto provides opposition, and yes, that's true. But that's not the guy you're competing against. And that sort of thinking just opens a can of worms anyway.
"In competitive eating, does the hot dog become the defense?" Bernstein asks.
No, it doesn't. Hot dogs don't play defense. (Everybody knows hot dogs play wide receiver.)
So what's a sport? Check out the chart and let the barroom debate begin! Barroom debate isn't a sport yet, right? Or is it?