Steve Christilaw: All sports are competitions, but not all competitions are sports

I admit it: I am a creature of habit.

I have places I like to patronize. I have a spot I like to frequent whenever I’m in the mood for a particular breakfast, another I like to hit when I need a comfort-food lunch. I don’t have a particular coffee stop, but there are a few I frequent when I’m in the mood to linger over a good cup of joe.

And I have a good barber shop that I’ve been going to for a couple years. It’s not one of those that will cut your hair for a couple bucks more than my venti caramel macchiato. It’s more like a large popcorn and a couple medium drinks at the movies.

Unlike some of my colleagues, I still have a full head of hair and a visit to my barber doesn’t include a finder’s fee. But neither does it include paying extra for mousse, pomade or anything else that sounds more like dessert. I tend to keep things simple.

Like most hair-cutting places these days, there’s an array of televisions mounted on the wall showing sporting events of some kind. Personally, I’d be just as happy if they were all tuned to the cooking channel, but I’m in the minority, apparently.

It’s an occupational hazard. You watch sports for a living, you tend to look for something else to watch on your down time. And not everything they show on those 24-hour channels is what I would refer to as a sport.

As I was sitting in the barber chair this time around I gave the woman cutting my hair a more difficult time than usual navigating around the old cowlicks.

You see, they were showing a competition from some mountain resort – these daredevils were doing aerial tricks with snowmobiles. They ran them off ramps to perform flips and spins. And every once in a while, one of them would short the landing and faceplant on the hood of their bright-red ride.

It was cringeworthy and I have a nasty habit of giving a sympathy cringe.

I can understand the viewer appeal, but I can’t call what I was watching a sport.

A teacher once explained to me the difference. All grizzlies are bears (no, he wasn’t talking about the ones who go to school in Missoula), but not all bears are grizzlies.

Same rule applies to sports. All sports are competitions, but not all competitions are sports.

Auto racing, to my way of thinking, isn’t a sport. A competition, yes. A sport? No. Does that distinction take away from the enjoyment millions get out of it? Not at all.

A sport requires a level of athleticism, and driving a race car doesn’t rise to that standard. What auto racing requires is an incredible level of skill at designing, building and tuning a race car.

Professional poker as a sport? No. Just, no.

Someone once tried to refer to the guys stuffing hot dogs into their faces at Nathan’s as athletes. Just the thought of dunking a bun into a glass of water in order to get it down is enough to immediately disqualify that notion.

When I was younger, I used to make the argument that a sport required a ball. A puck worked for the sake of debate, but overall the argument fell flat. Track and field is the first sport – as in the first Olympics. Wrestling is a sport. Boxing is a sport.

My dad, a former rodeo cowboy himself, used to make the argument that rodeo is the ultimate sport because there’s no way to cheat at it. You can’t bribe a bull to throw a competition, he said.

When I pointed out that you don’t need to bribe the bull to rig a rodeo, all you’d need to do is rig the draw – rig who gets which bull – he stopped talking to me for a week.

But rodeo is a gutsy sport. I’ve never had a decent interview with a bronc or a bull, but rodeo cowboys are some of the best athletes in the world to interview.

To me, a sport is about a competition. You race each other. You race the clock. You keep score. More importantly, you have a winner and a loser.

Where things start to change from sport to competition, in my own view, is when you need judges from five different countries and a set of sophisticated criteria set forth in a rule book the average fan has never seen and wouldn’t understand if they did. If you have to use a mathematical formula to factor degree of difficulty into judging a performance, do you leave the average spectator out of spectator sport?

I have covered my fair share of gymnastics and figure skating over the years. In fact, I covered Rhythmic Gymnastics at the Goodwill Games back in the day. That was decades ago and I still can’t tell you who won and why. When you spend as much, if not more time explaining the decision of the judges than you do what actually happened among athletes, you’ve lost me.

I’m not sure that the athletes themselves could explain why one competitor’s triple toe loop is worth more than another.

That’s not a sport; it’s the start of a debating society.

What saves both gymnastics and figure skating as a sport, in my mind, is the incredible athleticism it takes to compete.

The only tumbling I have ever done is when there’s ice in the parking lot. That effort, by the way, has a degree of difficulty of zero but gets 10s from the Russian and Albanian judges every time. Too bad you still have to throw out the high and the low as well as your back once you stick the landing.