HugeFanOfBadReligion, in your very first post you suggested that each of us explain how we began to hate sports. I prefer not to call myself a sports hater. I'm actually a critic of what I believe is a negative culture that is
not intrinsic to sports, but is
associated with
certain sports. I'll have more to say about this later. I have not finished mentioning all the reasons why I have taken a rather critical view of the sports culture. I've already covered one of the reasons: the role of sports in mandatory physical education, which clearly has shortchanged nonathletic students and even encouraged bullying. I have other reasons for not appreciating the sports culture.
Once again, I draw upon my own personal experience. And I apologize to those members of the forum who have already read what I'm now about to say. When I was in the eighth grade, my grades had fallen; and I had been picked on at school. My self-confidence was at an all-time low. So, my parents sent me to a local clinical psychologist who had a good reputation (which I'm now convinced was totally manufactured) but was abysmally incompetent. He came up with the great (sarcasm intended) idea of sending me to a judo instructor -- and not just
any judo instructor, but a particular one who turned out to be a rather bad choice for me, indeed. Incidentally, years later I discovered that the incompetent psychologist was in the habit of sending just about all of his teenage male patients to this one judo instructor -- as if he were a cure-all for all the problems of these teenage patients of his, which the judo instructor definitely was
not.
If the psychologist had done his job and made a thorough evaluation of his latest patient (me) instead of arrogantly making false assumptions, he would have discovered that I was suffering from low body
self-image, which could have been solved by placing me on a bodybuilding program at a gym. Just so no one will misunderstand me, I have no problem with judo. I appreciate the martial arts, and I respect those who have attained a degree of proficiency in them. But judo is
not a bodybuilding activity, nor was it ever intended to be a bodybuilding activity. The problem with the psychologist having me take judo lessons is that they did not address the problems I actually had. There really was no point at all in taking judo lessons. I never had an occasion to use judo at school because the bullying I was subjected to was verbal, not physical. Judo offers no defense against words anymore than it does against bullets. Besides, judo is entirely self-defensive. Actually, boxing would have been better for me. That way, I could have challenged jerks in my classes to a fight after school.
Getting back to the instructor, I shall refer to him as "Sam" (as I did in a few e-mails that I submitted to the "Letters 2009" column). (Hey, the thought just occurred to me that "Sam" is short for "Samdaman."
) Sam was not Asian; he was a white man who had played football at a university in Texas. This fact alone would account for a considerable cultural difference. Anyway, even my initial impression of the man was a letdown. Since I was alienated from my dad at the time, I actually would have been receptive to bonding with a supportive coach. There was something subtle about Sam that I didn't like. I didn't know what it was. But I respected him at the time because I was just a kid and he was an adult. (Of course, I don't respect him at all now.) And I was doing what the good doctor told me to do because, as I thought at the time, he surely wanted to help me. Or was he merely interested in all the money my father would pay him for doing essentially nothing? To me taking the judo lessons from Sam was like medicine prescribed by the good doctor, who turned out to not be good at all.
I always felt like an outsider in Sam's judo class, and years later I would find out why. I was promoted to brown belt, but I felt like he was patronizing me. I have always been convinced that I did
not deserve to be promoted to brown belt. There is another interesting fact. Here I was, a scrawny teenage boy. Two of the other teenage students in the class (who would later become Olympic athletes and, incidentally, were considerably more decent than Sam) were well-built. I can assure you that they did not build up their physiques by just taking judo lessons and doing nothing else. Strangely enough, Sam never even suggested that I start pumping iron. Since I knew absolutely nothing about bodybuilding, I needed to be referred to a personal trainer for instruction. But Sam just didn't seem to care. By the spring of my junior year in high school, I decided that the charade and all the pretense had lasted long enough. I quit taking judo lessons from Sam -- which were, after all, just a waste of time. My heart had never been in it. I had thought that Sam would object to my quitting, but I never heard from him.
Eight years later (when I was 26 years old), I looked up Sam and visited him at his home. Without any prompting from me, he expressed some rather peculiar views. He let it be known that he was not morally opposed to bullying. I had not even mentioned bullying. He made that statement just out of the blue without any prompting from me.
Have you ever heard of a martial arts instructor who condoned bullying? Is there something wrong with this picture? Well, actually, those who subscribe to the macho mentality have no problem whatsoever with bullying, sad to say. Sam also said that one day without any provocation he lashed out at his son and hit him hard,
without cause. He said that he still didn't know why he did it. Again, Sam just made this comment in a casual sort of way. Can you believe this?
Then he really floored me when he said, "Earl (not my real first name, of course), I saved you from homosexuality." To quote my first personal trainer at my health club when I told him about this incident: WHAT?! I had always thought that you cannot save someone from something he does not and never would want to do, unless it's about to be forced upon him against his will (you know, like mandatory
sports-centered P.E. being imposed upon nonathletic kids). Do you understand what was going on in Sam's warped mind? When he first saw me, I was a shy, scrawny boy who liked to read books about "herptiles" and fiction by H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe. He saw a boy who had no interest in sports and lacked the self-confidence to stand up to bullies. So, naturally, I just had to be gay; right? What a jerk! Let me repeat what I said ealier. I've been happily married for 30 years, and I'm the proud father of two daughters. You see, he subjected me to a negative stereotype that is false. I'll have more to say about this negative stereotype later (probably in another topic).
Sam then let me know that he considered only athletes and possibly men in certain blue-collar vocations to be "real men." In other words, in his view, nonathletic men are not "real men." This was absolutely hilarious because he seemed to be obsessed with just how successful my decidedly nonathletically inclined father was in his career as an architect. In fact, I think Sam was jealous of him! I say this because I've noticed that some football fans (many, actually) -- if you point out that the conduct of some individual football player off the playing field is less than exemplary (to put it mildly) -- react by saying, "You're just jealous." Well, Sam was jealous of my "wimpy" dad!
What particularly galled me was that Sam refused to recognize instances of great courage on the part of nonathletic men. During the Cold War there was an eminent Soviet physicist -- who, incidentally, was often called "the father of the Soviet H-bomb" -- named Andrei Sakharov. When he was young, he was an unquestioning Communist; but when he saw labor camp inmates forced to work around nuclear reactors under totally inhumane conditions, he turned against the regime and started to speak out against the horrendous violations of human rights by the Soviet Union. When you consider the fact that Sakharov had grown up in an authoritarian culture (unlike in the United States, for example, where just about anyone can start a protest movement for the most trivial of causes), his courage is all the more remarkable. Sam actually denigrated Sakharov, saying that he really wasn't all that brave. Well, Sakharov had more courage (and compassion) in his little finger than Sam does in his entire misshapen body. Sam expressed unbridled contempt for feminists, whom he referred to as castrators. Well, when it comes to the psychological castration of boys and men (especially those who happen to have no interest in sports), Sam is one of the biggest castrators there is. Again, what a jerk!
I will now take the liberty of mentioning a particular website that I came across last year in a random Google search. I wish I had bothered to write the website down, because it now seems to have been removed from the Internet. It was set up by a man who had played football in high school. He was sitting in a fast-foot restaurant one day when he overheard a local high-school coach talking to another man whose son was a student at the school where the coach was employed. In the course of their conversation, the coach said, "Athletes are a better class of people than nonathletes." To his credit, the man who would later set up this website was quite perturbed by this coach's bigoted comment. He said it was like hearing the needle of an old-fashioned record player scraping across the surface of an LP record that had just been put on the turntable to be played. He then gave a detailed list of individual athletes who had committed crimes or had engaged in otherwise shameful conduct.
This brings me to a particular aspect of the sports culture that I find to be rather objectionable. I have cited two examples, one of a judo instructor and the other of a high-school coach, of what is undeniably
prejudice directed against nonathletic boys and men. Polite24 is one of our formerly active members who was a critic of this website. At first I didn't know what to think of him, but I actually ended up liking him. Now I wish that I had defended him against Fat Man's name-calling, which was unjustified. There was one comment that Polite24 made, though, that was absolutely wrong (well, actually, more than one; but I'm not going to talk about those now
) and that was that nonathletic boys are never bullied because they are not good at sports. I hate to say this, but he is absolutely wrong about that. I once read a letter in the Ann Landers or Dear Abby column from a mother who said that her young son was being bullied at school because he wasn't good at sports. Her son was depressed, and his grades had fallen. Of course, nonathletic boys frequently are bullied for not being good at sports. I definitely was picked on because I wasn't good at sports, and over the years I've met many other men who were bullied for the same reason. Do you really think that this does
not happen in our sports-crazed culture? It really is an expression of intolerance. No doubt some boys' P.E. coaches are decent, but way too many of them look down on nonathletic boys. They have the same mindset that Sam does. When they see a nonathletic boy, they don't recognize the fact that he may have strengths in other areas of his life. Instead, what they see is a wimp or a sissy or a boy who has homosexual tendencies, which is even more demeaning a negative stereotype than the "dumb jock" stereotype (which, as I've said before many times, I haven't believed since junior high). And this stigmatizing often starts before the boy is even a teenager. So, why should nonathletic boys suffer the indignity (and sometimes outright abuse) of being forced to take P.E. classes that are useless to them and are taught by coaches who look down on them simply because they're not "jocks"?
). You might not see us much, but we're there. Watching. From the shadows. 
I'm fat and sassy! I love to sing & dance & stomp my feet & really rock your world!
Of course, I don't think he's serious anyway. He's just a troll.) The former college football player Brian Sims and the former professional player Esera Tuaolo recently admitted that they were homosexuals. (I take that back. Sims never attempted to conceal his homosexuality when he played football in college.) No doubt there have been others who chose, quite understandably, to stay in the closet. The point is that facts such as these give the lie to the wrong negative stereotyping done by guys like my former judo instructor; namely, that boys who don't like sports are "fags." 
) Iâ??ve gotten to know them personally through PMs, e-mails, and phone calls. Theyâ??re decent guys, too.