wibberley wrote:i agree with th the above,and i would like to engage in more conversation with you.i am 46 years old and i have pathalogically hated sports all my life.even on this forum i was once banned as i hated it that much ,even to the point of wishing death upon all sports fans.if you read the letters board you will observe someone called glen who says all sports fans should be put against a wall and shot and killed
Hi, wibberley!
I'm glad you've chosen to post here again, and I hope you continue to do so.
I've thought about the occasion when you were banned (albeit temporarily). I'm embarrassed to say I now don't remember why I banned you. I owe you an apology. I should never have banned you. Your statements are no more extreme than some of Fat Man's. I now recognize that I didn't treat you fairly -- although I will say that as a moderator of this forum (Oh, what am I saying? Currently I'm the
only moderator of this forum) I did personally delete several of Fat Man's posts, such as the one in which he thought bullied school kids should murder their bullies. So, again, wibberley, I apologize to you. I was unfair to you.
I admit I'm a moderate. But I do recognize that this forum is not my own. I didn't create this website; so, I have to allow the expression of extreme views, even though I may not agree with them. In order to remain true to my own convictions, I should counter views I consider to be extreme with my own. I'm not going to ban a member on the basis of extreme views because this forum is not my personal property.
I would like to say, though, that even though I'm a moderate, I don't have a passive interest in sports, which means I have no desire to ever participate in any sport. In fact, I never had any interest in sports, except when I realized that the sports culture was hurting some kids. I have committed myself to a bodybuilding program and have even hired a personal trainer at a local health club, but I don't consider bodybuilding to be a sport. It's a fitness activity, an exercise program -- not a sport. A sport is a physical game or contest, not an exercise program. (Incidentally, one of the links featured elsewhere at this website features a post from a guy who's very much a bodybuilder, certainly a great deal more advanced in his bodybuilding than I am at this point in time. He says many of the fellow members at his health club who considered him to be a "man's man" because of his muscular development are amazed when they learn he has no interest in or use for sports. He actually speaks scornfully of "pear-shaped" sports fans who spend hours in front of their TVs eating fattening junk food while he himself, the bodybuilder, spends the time making love with his wife -- the bodybuilder's own wife, that is.
)
Also, as far as a passive interest in sports is concerned, I do have a strong interest in the negative aspects of the school sports
culture. I'm very concerned about the sports culture marginalizing nonathletic boys. Sports also ruined the mandatory boys' P.E. of my generation. The only justification for a mandatory P.E. class is to encourage students to be physically healthy. There is absolutely no valid reason for sports to be mandatory. A child who is not even interested in sports should never be forced to participate in team games in mandatory P.E. classes. A sure recipe for bullying, if there ever was one. The child doesn't even get any exercise, anyway. Some sports, incidentally, aren't exactly conducive to good health, to put it mildly. I once read a comment by a medical doctor in his syndicated column during the 1980s that the human body was not designed for playing football.
There are individual athletes or men with athletic backgrounds whom I will defend, including several who are close friends. (The one who played football at the university where he earned his degree in sociology recently told me, to paraphrase, "There are two different kinds of guys in sports. There are athletes; and there are jocks, who are the bullies. I am an athlete, not a jock.") There are a few who realize the sports culture has harmful aspects to it, and they speak out against them. I'm not a moderate in my view that the sports culture must be changed.
Anyway, keep posting, wibberley. I encourage you to do so.