This is very interesting.
Please forgive me for writing such a long post, but I think it will help you understand why I support this website (although I don't agree with every single statement on the home page).
You and I grew up in two different societies, culturally and timewise. (Well, not knowing your exact age, I guess you're still growing up.) With the exception of only my first- and second-grade years (which were spent in New York), I grew up in the state of Texas. I guess that says it all.
I was a high-school student from the fall of 1965 through the spring of 1969, residing in a district that was extremely conservative politically. I grew up under Jim Crow, which left me as a white man with a revulsion against racism and any sort of oppression. Fortunately for me, both of my parents had rejected racism before I was even born; and they raised me in such a way that I did not adopt the racist attitudes of my peers. I once was all but an eyewitness to a particularly vicious form of racial discrimination that haunts me to this day.
There still are great differences among different localities and communities in the United States. In 1991 my sister moved from Dallas to northern California. (What a contrast!) The red state vs. blue state phenomenon is very real. Even today California and Texas, for example, are quite different culturally and politically.
I recently posted a link to a You Tube video that you may have already seen of an interview with Brian Sims, who was a gay college football player. He was accepted by his teammates because he could play football well.
When I was a boy, the social climate towards homosexual boys and men was one of intolerance. When I was in high school, anyone who was merely
suspected of being gay -- by the way, as you know, homosexuals weren't called gays then -- was bullied terribly. Many of these victims of bullying weren't even gay. When I think about it today, I'm reminded of witch hunts.
Now here's where you might learn why some of us support the concept of this website -- which, as far as I'm concerned, is simply to allow individuals to sound off about the sports culture. Boys who were not interested in sports were stigmatized. All through school to my graduation from high school, I felt there was a social rift between athletic and nonathletic guys. If a boy wasn't interested in sports, he was considered to be a wimp or a sissy. Some "authorities" even today, Fitman's Brother, claim that a boy's lack of interest in sports is a sure sign of homosexual tendencies.
Several years ago a childhood friend of mine who played football in high school told me, without any prompting on my part, that most of his teammates had viewed the nonathletic guys at their school as inferior. A formerly active member of this forum who also was a high-school football player at the time he was posting (SportsGuy92) said that many of his teammates considered nonathletic guys at their school to be, to use his own word, fags.
Since I never had an interest in sports, I was subjected to that sort of negative stereotyping. And even though I never had an interest in sports, I was made to feel ashamed that I was not participating in any sport. Whenever I was in a department store and saw the Sporting Goods Department, I'd actually feel embarrassment and shame. As late as my early twenties, I was still slightly embarrassed that I had not participated in any sport until I realized that I was being illogical, since I had never had any desire to do so in the first place.
This stereotyping was accompanied by mandatory sports-only P.E. from the last two years of elementary school (which I'd call P.E. without the gym) through junior high. (Since I was a band student in high school, I was exempted from P.E. -- which was quite fortunate, as I heard tales of vicious physical bullying of nonathletic boys that was even worse than it was in junior high.) The policymakers claimed they were concerned about the students who were not physically fit, but their claim was proven to be a hypocritical lie. The class never should have been called "physical education," because there was no education. In none of my P.E. classes were we ever taught how the game of baseball or basketball or football was played. We were never shown how to properly throw a baseball or a football or how to shoot a basketball. Since I had not participated in any of those games, I knew nothing about them. Although I never had an interest in sports, I did feel ashamed of being physically weak and not having a muscular physique. But there was not even so much as any mention of exercise programs or bodybuilding in any of my P.E. classes, and all of the P.E. teachers and coaches viewed nonathletic boys with either indifference or outright contempt. Slightly built and overweight boys were often singled out for bullying. All I learned from P.E. was to fear coaches and athlete classmates.
One of the reasons why I mention this is because the "old P.E." is still a reality in many school districts, although there now is a movement to reform P.E. with innovative programs such as PE4Life that actually promote physical fitness. I get mad when I think of a new generation of nonathletic boys going through what I and others experienced. Some people need to learn from the mistakes of the past.
Nonathletic boys who are negatively stereotyped as supposedly being unmanly or unmasculine may actually internalize these attitudes, especially if they have no positive reinforcement at home.
Getting back to my situation, in the spring of my eighth-grade year in junior high, my parents started taking me to a clinical psychologist because I was being picked on at school and my grades had fallen. (Actually, the bullying was not the major cause of my misery. I had been depressed for years to the point of having no self-confidence, which is a red flag for bullies searching for the next victim).
The psychologist, who turned out to be abysmally incompetent in spite of his good reputation, decided to send me to a dojo to take judo lessons from an instructor who was not Asian, but was a white former university football player afflicted with machismo in the worst way. By the way, a martial arts expert who recently posted here briefly told me in an e-mail that judo is a very poor choice among the martial arts for slightly built boys.
I always felt like an outsider in his dojo. (What's interesting, though, is that he sometimes physically bullied the two teenage guys whose goal was to become Olympic athletes. I guess I should be thankful I was spared that sort of attention.) I felt like he was patronizing me. He promoted me to brown belt, despite the fact I was not qualified. Anyway, by the spring of my junior year, I finally got sick and tired of the charade and quit. I had expected him to protest, but I never heard from him.
Eight years later I paid him a visit at his home. I soon learned why I had felt like an outsider in his judo class. He claimed he had saved me from homosexuality! And why was that? Because he stereotyed me. The day we first met, I was an extremely shy, nonathletic boy who had no self-confidence, had no interest in sports, and was not physically aggressive since I knew the bullies were all stronger than I was. So, naturally, I just had to be gay; right? The sissy stereotype, see? This is what I'm talking about when I object to the negative stereotyping of nonathletic boys. He also said that only athletes and men in certain blue-collar vocations were "real men." He disregarded the courage of intellectual men who showed moral courage, such as the late Russian physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov. He also had no moral objection to bullying. I wish I had been in the position to tell him to soak his head; but I didn't dare, because he was a violent man. Certainly the coldest guy I've ever known or met.
There have been men of great courage who never participated in sports. (Incidentally, as if I needed to tell you this, courage is not a trait restricted to men. Women have shown great courage as well.) At the risk of boring those who have read my posts over the last three years -- and they know what I'm about to say -- one of the greatest heroes of World War II was not even a soldier. He was a citizen of Sweden, which was neutral in the war. Raoul Wallenberg was managing an import-export business with a Hungarian Jew, who informed him of the desperate situation of the Jews in his own country. As a member of an influential family, Wallenberg prevailed upon Swedish government officials to send him to Budapest under diplomatic cover to conduct rescue operations to save the lives of as many people as possible. Facing down Nazi S.S. officers and Hungarian fascist thugs (the Arrow Cross movement), Wallenberg risked his life repeatedly to save others, surviving several assassination attempts. I recently read somewhere that eventually he had to sleep in a different location every night. This man of extraordinary courage saved the lives of around 10,000 Jews. When the Red Army drove the Germans out of Hungary, Wallenberg was abducted by agents of Stalin's secret police to Moscow, where he disappeared into the notorious Lubianka prison never to be seen again.
This is a man who, according to his half-sister, "detested competitive team sports" -- not meaning, of course, that he hated athletes but that he had no desire to participate in sports. I wish I had known about Wallenberg when my former judo instructor shared his prejudice against nonathletic men. Despite the fact he was a slightly built man who had a mild appearance, Wallenberg was far, far more of a man than my former judo instructor ever could have hoped to be.
I've deeply resented the culture that wrongfully defines masculinity in terms of sport. Moral courage often results in physical courage. Wallenberg once saw a defenseless group of Jews who had been rounded up by Arrow Cross men, who were about to shoot them. Although he didn't even have a firearm on his person at the time, Wallenberg rushed over to the Arrow Cross men and told them those Jews were under the protection of the Swedish government. When the Arrow Cross men said they were going to kill the Jews, Wallenberg told them they would have to shoot him first. Fortunately for Wallenberg's sake as well as the Jews, the bluff worked. But Wallenberg was willing to die for those people.
I'm not saying nonathletes are better than athletes any more than I'm saying athletes are better than nonathletes. I'm simply saying there's no correlation between athleticism or a lack of athleticism, on the one hand, and traits such as homosexuality, heterosexuality, and courage.
Actually, what I really object to is machismo (properly defined), not sports. Incidentally, you might be interested in reading
InSideOut Coaching (subtitled
How Sports Can Transform Lives) by Joe Ehrmann, a former NFL player who is now a minister and a volunteer high-school football coach. I'm sure it would upset my former judo instructor!
I'm fat and sassy! I love to sing & dance & stomp my feet & really rock your world!
dear earl the recent post was in fact by wibberley junior.please dont be too hard on fat man both myself and my son are in hysterics over fat mans comments.i know you said there are forum rules to be observed but you said yourself that the forum is as dead as a door-nail lately(if a doornail can be considered the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade)fatman has consistently posted a high-standard of nihilistic remarks that have brought tears of laughter to both my son and myself(sadly,my daughter was watching a football match on her computer earlier this evening)
or you could get hold of a sports fan and press his head against an electric meat-slicer and watch slices of his face curl over with every successive pass of the meat-slicer