Doc,Nov 22 2004, 10:13 PM Wrote:Strong feelings. And sports is but a small piece of a larger problem.
Americans used to be known for heartiness and grit. As old as I am, I can remember a much tougher generation. This was our greatness. We had hard caloused hands and cold steely stares. Now we have metrosexuals and male make up. Winning used to mean something. Now, in little league, or what ever kids are playing, "everybody is a winner" and "you are special." This coming generation is a bunch of mollycoddled miksops with all the determination, conviction, and backbone of a wet noodle. The other day I saw helmets, elbow, and knee pads that were specially made for children learning how to walk. For crying out loud... AAAAAAAAAAARGH!! With out PAIN there is no MOTOVATION to do better. And how the hell does a toddler learn to walk with all that encumbering gear? Let them fall and take their lumps. Let them split their chins on the coffee table corner. They do it once or twice and they learn to never do it again.
As it should be in sports. Losing should hurt. Should be personally painful as a motivator to go out and kick ass next time.
Or you could just be "special."
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In that case, you and me are way off. Does being "tough" make people better smarter or better at analysing things? The "tough" people don't seem to learn much problem solving besides being "tough". You see walking pads, but haven't looked around enough to see people learning different and more effecient ways of solving problems than just the brute force way. And of course there are people who can analyse things better than just picking one way and sticking to it all the time without thinking about it. Sure there are some whiners, there are also some smart tricky people that can get what they're looking for. For your walking analogy, instead of people falling down several times, they see how other people walk and learn from it.
In sports, I expect things like tackling in football and checking in hockey, and of course regular bumping and grinding in sports, those are part of sports and sometimes good game strategies, the prolem I have is with the fights.
I will probably agree more about htings like swearing and sex in movies for example, and the general complaining about "family values". In some sports, starting fights can be considered a "good" thing, where in the rest of life, it isn't. Things like sex and swearing are things people will have to understand one time or another, so they might as well learn and understand them. I also think kids in general are smart enough to understand that movies are movies, which may sort of take away from the srports argument, but I still think they are both good. And of course with any "family values" arguments, It's hard to believe that people aren't smart enough by themselves to handle their own situations.
I may be dead, but I'm not old (source: see lavcat)
The gloves come off, I'm playing hardball. It's fourth and 15 and you're looking at a full-court press. (Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun)
Some people in forums do the next best thing to listening to themselves talk, writing and reading what they write (source, my brother)
The gloves come off, I'm playing hardball. It's fourth and 15 and you're looking at a full-court press. (Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun)
Some people in forums do the next best thing to listening to themselves talk, writing and reading what they write (source, my brother)