Giving NASCAR, golf and racing a sporting chance

A few weeks back, I was scrambling for a column topic, so I turned on the TV to find the most sizzling sports news of the day.

Trusty ESPN will help me out. I punch in 33 on my remote. Bowling. Uh, that's not gonna work. ESPN2. Maybe a rerun of "Outside the Lines" is on. Nope, Motocross. MSG? NASCAR. Last chance. YES Network? No. European soccer.

Well, at least that last one was undeniably a sport. Kudos to you, Mr. Steinbrenner. I tried a few hours later, and I got nothing but horseracing and figure skating. Oh well, I thought, I might as well go with the flow and write about pool.

Well, I have come full circle to my predicament, so I will come back to my original search.

Why are four major "sports" networks broadcasting bowling, motocross, stock car racing, horseracing and figure skating? Are any of those sports?

Let's examine. Three involve serious amounts of sitting; three involve riding something else for propulsion in a race; machines do most of the work in two of those; and two require careful negotiation of a slippery surface in funny shoes.

I don't think any of those qualities preclude those, let's say, "exercises" from the world of sports.

Bowling is competitive, which is criterion No. 1 for being a sport. Even the lamest pretenders — I'm talking to you, varsity jazz band — for sportdom usually have that figured out. The hurling of a ball has been a major part of sports for millennia. Some of the bigger bowlers even accrue some serious sweat.

I'd say that fat guys being a staple ingredient to a sport would automatically disqualify it, but there have been some hefty hurlers in Major League Baseball over the years, and I think that's pretty undeniably a sport — though I wouldn't be averse to an argument, since half the game is spent on the bench, and nearly all the rest is spent standing and eating sunflower seeds or chewing tobacco or gum. OK, back to the task at hand.

The thing about bowling — and poker, another recent ESPN favorite — is that most experts are able to smoke at the same time. Though it's illegal in the World Series of Poker, in order to promote wider appeal, players have been known to lay down their chips with an unlit cigarette in their mouth because they are so used to it. And it's not banned in most competitions. Sorry, smoking during competition has to be a disqualification. Drinking is also a relatively acceptable activity to accompany these exercises. I know some old-timers smoked at halftime of football games, and the great Mickey Mantle was quite the lover of cancer-causing substances, but those guys weren't smoking on the bench or drinking in the dugout.

Smoking on the field of play brings me, regrettably, to golf. I know the Masters was thrilling and that most golfers nowadays cross-train and bench press, but as long as players can remain even marginally competitive at the highest level while smoking on their walk up the fairway, this exercise will lie just off the green of sports, in the bunker of "skills" that includes bowling and darts, pool and most other weekend entertainment wannabes (sorry poker fans, but you're still stuck at the tee box).

Golf also allows non-athletes to succeed on a regular basis. Phil, though you claim your middle-aged-man gut is a glandular problem, it could be fixed if you competed in a real sport — I heard this from a specialist, so it's not just me being insensitive.

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I'd like to also point out something Tony Kornheiser once mentioned on ESPN's "Pardon the Interruption." If a 14-year-old girl (Michelle Wie) is among the best in the world at it — even among men — it's not a sport.

From fairways and clubhouses, we get to infields and tracks — not the warning kind.

Racing rivals wrestling for the earliest practiced sports. But those were footraces. Horseracing, "the sport of kings," has a rich history, though it gets no points for Academy Award nominations. I think it makes the grade because jockeys have to be in shape to go through some major physical rigors, and they usually get dirty on top of it. Regardless, the horse is doing a heck of a lot of work, and I'm going to be liberal here and say that the animal's contribution pulls horseracing into sportdom — by a nose.

Motocross is obviously an evolution of horseracing. One could call it an extreme sport, but that splinter category is still open to consideration itself. The added danger gives motocross a boost, but the added octane drops it out of contention — despite all that horsepower.

NASCAR? Horsepower increases, but I've already determined that that doesn't help. I'm sure they get pretty sweaty in those cars. But that is just too much reliance on nonhuman propulsion. At the risk of bringing the ire of most of the southern United States and some of the rest, NASCAR gets knocked out, though my sports-illiterate girlfriend thinks it should count because it involves "physical skill, prowess, if you will. I mean they move their arms and stuff." But then again, she considers the Dannon game a sport — when you open your yogurt and check to see if you won.

I think the toughest exercises to categorize are those that involve competition but are judged, rather than determined strictly by what happens between the lines and the whistles. This includes the aforementioned extreme sports, but it's most famous manifestations are in gymnastics, diving and figure skating.

While I am tempted to say that an exercise whose outcome can be seriously affected by the contemporary political climate should be axed from the list of sports, that only comes up in these exercises because mainstream audiences watch them almost exclusively in international competition. If you recall the 1972 Munich Games (or just a rerun on ESPN Classic), the Soviet Union was able to steal an Olympic gold medal from the USA thanks to some of the most biased officiating in recorded history. Don't get me started on those commies.

Let's use figure skating as the example to define these exercises. There is intense competition. The participants are self-propelled to a sufficient extent. I can't complain that they skate, because hockey is certainly a sport. Figure skaters are undoubtedly, repeat undoubtedly, athletic.

But even having athletes as participants is not sufficient to be a sport. Frankly, judges deciding the outcome is too subjective for me. One could argue that wrestling is similar in this respect, but its rules are more uniformly enforced, and pins are unilaterally decisive. Figure skating has tried to migrate to this system with mandatory point deductions, but the scandal (among many) of the Salt Lake City Olympics pairs competition demonstrates the subjectivity of this kind of judging.

So there you have it. Competition is necessary but not sufficient. So is athleticism — except for some non-steroid-using major leaguers. Near objectivity in the execution and outcome of the game is a must. Finally, 14-year-old girls cannot be among the world's best.

All right, I've got to go. Bassmasters is on.