Sports educate our morals and passions:
Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic -- in a word, moral -- undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind's noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage. By witnessing physical grace, the soul comes to understand love and beauty. Seeing people compete courageously and fairly helps emancipate the individual by educating his passions.
Watching sports can be intellectually demanding:
Being a serious baseball fan, meaning an informed and attentive and observant fan, is more like carving than whittling. It is doing something that makes demands on the mind of the doer. Is there any other sport in which the fans say they "take in" a game? As in, "Let's take in a game tomorrow night." I think not. That is a baseball locution because there is a lot to ingest and there is time -- although by no means too much time -- to take it in. [...]
In a sense, sports are not complicated. Even the infield fly rule can be mastered, in time, without a master's degree from MIT. The object of a sport can be put simply. You put a ball in an end zone or through a hoop, or you put a puck in a net, and prevent the other fellows from doing so. Sports are not complicated in their objectives, but in execution they have layers of complexities and nuances. There is a lot of thought involved, however much many players deny or disguise the fact.
As much as I would like to rationalize my sports watching habits, I would challenge George Will to explain how watching sports, even for the so called "serious fan", is any better than watching sitcoms or movies, or even playing video games as they seem to me to carry at least as much potential for intellectual demandingness and moral education.
While one can find value in all these activities, it's not a question of absolute value but relative value, and watching sports seems to me to fall pretty low on the relative scale, even within the entertainment domain. (The survey I just posted was inspired by this, wanting to know others' perceptions of the relative worth of various activities.)
