Okay, so here's a thing, tell me if I have it wrong: Someone informs me that they are going to beat me up. Sport: I meet them at the sandpit after school, or in the pub car park or wherever, and we have a mano a mano "square go" in front of our friends, in proxy tribal warfare. A winner is decided by KO or conceding defeat, and so the rivalry is sated in the short term, but fuelled in the long term. Survival: I concede before the fight ever happens, make myself scarce and wait for people to cool down. At a later date, I meet with the aggrieved party in a more relaxed atmosphere and befriend them. Now my tribe is bolstered by additional allies and the threat of sneak attacks on the weaker members is diminished. Or even: Which really doesn't sound very sporting, unless you fully embrace the concept of cheating in sport, but it does sound like a much more sensible way of dispatching a potential threat than the "square go" in the car park. The concept of overwhelming force in survival is not the same as overwhelming aggression in a fair fight. It is best served cold, with highly stacked odds, and is the penultimate resort, just ahead of a fair fight. Making an ally of your enemy is the ultimate victory, and that goes against the very basis of sport, where there must be winners and losers. It isn't competition that has made us the most successful mammal on the planet, it is cooperation. Play fighting, or simulation, can have competitive elements, but unless there is a codified system of determining winners and losers, and spectators to be entertained, those games are not sports.
Think of something like running a marathon. Sure there is a first place, but there may be thousands of non-first place participants that don't consider themselves the losers.
Good example! Still though, I don't think Olympic marathon runners think that way. What you're describing is more of a fun run than a competition.
I should point out that I teach a fighting system, and do not go in for full-on LARPing in the same way that JWT does. It's more like TMA to be honest, but without any of the deference, forms or pyjamas.
Well there are only a few best in the world, the other seven billion must be losers then... just kidding. Okay, let's look at competition as something personal and not about others. Back when I took training from an ex-Army Ranger, he told me about a training exercise where they had to swim laps. It was impossible to complete the exercise without drowning. They would drown, get pulled out and revived by teammates, then back in the water to finish the laps. Some drowned several times before they finished the laps. It was an exercise to build trust in the teammates. This is competition, this is a test in skill. Some were better swimmers than others and showed it. At the end of the day, it didn't matter who was best, just who finished.
That is not sport. I've heard a similar story about selection exercises where the "winners" lose and the ones who choose to "lose" by stopping to help team mates are the actual winners.
It is not sport, but it is a form of competition. I've been saying that sport isn't what is important, except that sport does make things more accessible to the masses. What is important is competition. The question I was addressing was that you can have competition without winners and losers in the sense that the best is the winner. You can have competition where the winners are the ones that make it through the challenge.
But you are talking about people beating their own expectations of themselves. I think that is a noble pursuit, the most important even, but I don't think it's the kind of competition these guys are talking about.
Wrong I'm afraid because again you are conflating the sport itself as a final context, the training and the tactics. Training a sport like Thai boxing doesn't mean that you will try to turn a self defence encounter into a duel in the sandpit. I disagree that sport has to have spectators too. If you and I play squash alone are we playing sport. If I train Thai boxing but never complete am I not training sport? Sports training can be the process as much if not more that the outcome. If I was in your hypothetical Id attempt to verbally deesculatevand leave the area. If I was unsuccessful I'd have the tools to attempt a defence which may involve preemptively striking. As much as you think I am broadening the parameters and definition of sport you are certainly narrowing them in the extreme to maintain your position.
Sorry, I should have been clear, that was in response to Dead_pool's "intelligent design" post, and concepts of winning and losing. He was the one introducing meta concepts of sport to evolution, not me. It had nothing to do with my position against your use of the word "sportive" to describe training methods, which was left here: http://www.martialartsplanet.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1074987319&postcount=215 Although, yes, I will concede that you can have a game of squash without spectators (if you win at squash and no-one is around to see it, did you have a match? ). If you are training Thai boxing but never compete, I don't think you could be said to be a sportsperson or an athlete. If you are only doing a fraction of the training that a competing sportsperson is, and you never actually have a match, then I would say that you are just aping certain aspects of an athletes training regimen, which is not the same as "training sport" to me. That's like saying people who do British Military Fitness are undergoing military training. It is somewhat analogous to boxercise in that respect, I suppose.
Yes, that's my implication. You need a rules based and widely practiced form of physical competition to generate innovation and specialization. As people have pointed out, if you're not playing sports and you're just trying to win, why bother with an x guard to a stand and base to a single leg sweep? Why not just catch him while he sleeps and stick him with the pointy end? There must be some crucible within which 1) rules isolate competition such that both members are bringing a knife to a knife fight 2) opportunities for reproduction of technique are possible 3) there is some reward for success and some punishment for failure. Under this sort of lens, even samurai duels become a sport, but even they have agreed to a rules based competition. I'm just not sure how a martial art forms without some kind of sportive cultural base, unless it's a synthesis of techniques from those sports. Maybe some sort of culture that just engages in continuous warfare? I feel like even those practice nonlethal forms of competition - in fact I'm trying to think of some culture that doesn't have something like that to train their warriors with, except for those without warriors altogether. Maybe I'm fuzzying my definitions though, I mean, sport meant to train for warfare includes football (gridiron), y'know?
This reminds me of how I used to try and express this. In my opinion any self defence scenario and "endgame" is for all intents and purposes a competition anyway. You and other(s) are essentially competing over an outcome, whatever that may be. You want x, they want y. I thought I had stepped back in time when I read a few posts here yesterday. edit. could be something like you getting to safety.
I think you are seeing nails everywhere because cool shiny hammer. I think you just defined this as sport: [ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc_vSuCI0OE"]TWO CATS PLAY FIGHTING - YouTube[/ame] Duels are not sport, either. They are more a legal dispute than a sport. Codified rules of conduct do not define a sport, or then military RoE would make an active war zone a playing field. Sport is, by definition, for entertainment, whether that is the entertainment of spectators or participants.
I dunno - why wouldn't a duel to see who has the best swordsmanship be a sport, but kendo is? Would gladiatorial combat be a sport? The idea of sport being just for entertainment seems a little restrictive - we see it also to honor gods and such and as a proxy to outright warfare.
Again, I have no problem with that. But it is an open rule set that you can change as much as your imagination or skill allows. There is no set way of winning, no point system, no sport as far as I can see. It is much more similar to improvise theatre than sport. Your character has objectives and you LARP them out. It's rougher than most people's idea of LARPing, but you are playing a role in a live action environment. I said this earlier, but if you consider scenario training to be sport, then you also have to accept improvised theatre as sport. Having said that, I would watch the Olympics if they had an improvised theatre event, so maybe I should do a Trump and switch my position on the subject
Blame the dictionaries, not me! If it were a duel just to see who's better, then yes that could be sport. If it is a duel over a point of honour, then it is not. See, this is my point. "Sport" doesn't necessarily describe an activity, it can also describe your reasons for pursuing an activity.
I don't mean to be pithy, it's just, man, how weird is it how invested people get in their sports games? I mean, enough to riot, kill, learn arcane statistics, dress up weird, have themed marriages after their sports teams. I mean, that's some serious cultural investiture we've got going on!
Yeah... I think that might be more descriptive of the attitude of the US to war than descriptive of war itself. If I try to steer this train back to the original point; the sparring I do is like the play fighting cats do. It is a continuous flow exercise with the intention of inculcating principles and techniques meant to survive violence, or control the outcome of physical altercations. There are no winners or losers. When I spar my students the greatest joy comes from them successfully exploiting my openings, and I get no entertainment from "beating" them. This is because it is not a competition, but a cooperative exercise. If you think that all violence is sport, then why don't wife beaters get any medals?
Not all violence, I think that codified, ritualized and rule based violence is what leads to martial arts. So wife beaters have broken the codes, rituals and rules of violence - I wouldn't be nearly as upset to hear that a couple had knocked each other about in a boxing ring during a mutually agreed bout as I would without that structure. As to your approach, that sounds suspiciously like play - if you add a code of 'now we're practicing hand to hand combat and not knocking each other out' - I'm not sure how the activity is substantially different than a low key game of basketball, something I think we would recognize as a sport.
