Emma Hwang

      The more I get hit in the head with balls from varying sports, the more I realize how sports have ruined my life. When I walk down the hallways at Pinewood, I am constantly being pelted from every direction by random balls. Sports are a blight to the modern world, in their similarity, and their family ruining powers. In order to identify why sports might ever be worth the cost of human talent, I talked to Yong Kim, a football coach at Pinewood who thinks sports build “connections” and “self-confidence.” 

   “Sports are a way for students to realize their self-potential and recognize just how capable they are as a collective and on an individual basis,” Kim said. 

   No matter who I talk to, they all seem to think there are “benefits” to “touching grass”. Paid off by big football, Kim here is on a mission to convert me to the side of sports. This argument falls apart when you consider that I don’t need or have self-potential.    

   No matter how they do it, sports are about moving a ball in some strange fashion involving randomly made-up rules. Take soccer, for example. Why can’t I just pick the ball up? Seriously, give me a reason why I can’t just pick it up. Do the hexagons on the ball serve a different purpose? Are they here to hypnotize us into watching it? Does touching the ball with my hand cause the spontaneous combustion of the refs? I think not. The one time I tried it, the referee told me I was not allowed to.

   “What are you doing on the field! You are not a player in this game! Leave!” the referee said.

   Payed off by big soccer, the referee here is on a mission to convert me to the side of soccer. I don’t trust one bit of what he said. I have yet more questions about the rules of varying sports. Why can’t I just run a smaller circle in baseball? Why can’t I use a bat in football? Or in soccer? Why doesn’t every sport have a baseball bat?

   In addition to their similar objectives and arbitrary rules, I don’t agree with how sports rip people apart. Great rage seems to fill every household in America at around the same time as the Super Bowl. Families argue over who will win the big football game, tearing American families apart. The crack of the television as a remote is flung into it. The sound of a car screeching as father Ted drives away. Can you imagine little Timothy being forced to reckon with his parents’ failure because his mother wanted the Packers to win and his father the Shippers?

   There is no question that sports are ruining my life and the lives of many people around me. Not only are families suffering, but players, too, as they are forced to exert themselves physically and move a ball in a frankly alien way. Why are there so many rules? The Greeks seem to have stumbled upon a good idea when they let people hit each other with sticks. I don’t remember if they actually did that. Sports pointlessly similar designs, useless rules, and family-ruining capabilities, are all evidence to how sports are a blight to my world.