Response to No Pain No Gain

Although the topic has been discussed at great length, your post about sports struck me as very interesting as it commented on the very tricky relationship between sports and religion, especially Christianity. As you mentioned, people like to see winners and losers, and from the time we are very young we learn to play games against each other where someone always ends up the winner. 

As such, competitiveness can be seen as an element in human nature. However, as you said, it is the fact that people raise athletes to demi-god like statuses that cause the problem for a variety of reasons, one being the prominence of violence in sport. 

“People like to see other people get hurt.” That line stuck out to me because most people don’t admit that they enjoy watching someone get injured. If someone trips and scrapes their knee, not many people will want to see the blood. But, as you mentioned, if the blood is spilt in order to win something or to injure the opponent, then many people are all for it. For instance, in the video below, fans cheer as Chara gets hit in the face with a puck so hard that he starts to bleed and falls. They cheer as he has to walk off the ice due to this injury.

Why is it that we like to see this type of bloodshed? As you asked at the end of your post,  I do think that children watching sports with a lot of violence may end up feeling as though to be the best player, they need to get up from injury. Of course it is different when young children are playing sports as they are often protected better from parents, as well as the fact that they are not strong enough to hit very hard. But nevertheless fighting and violence seems to be encouraged in many sports.

As for your comment that all violence should not be removed from sports, it brings to mind Don Cherry and his outrage on the use of armor like shoulder pads (as they cause far too much pain to the attacked and not enough to the attacker), yet he fully supports fighting in hockey and in no way believes it should be removed. So again, where is the line to be drawn?