The Idiocy of Sports Nationalism

Daniel Larison is correct:

This lack of understanding is the crucial part in any tiresome exercise in sports nationalism: “Our manly sport has subtlety and form, and it reflects the true nature of the universe, whereas their stupid children’s game is pointless and boring.”… Europeans can make the same boredom charge against baseball (and they have), we can say it about soccer or cricket (and we have), and no doubt almost everyone outside Canada has said it about curling (but not, I think, about hockey!).

As a teenage curler myself I cannot let it be said that only our Canuck friends appreciate the Roaring Game or, more seriously, that it lacks drama. But the point is well taken nonetheless. It always surprises saddens me how partisans of Sport A decry any attention being given to Sport B, let alone their bone-headed insistence that Sport B is no sort of sport at all.