asl speech on sports and sportsmanship
Answers
Sports events are essentially social in character. They facilitate the coming together of people from various parts of the country, at a national level, and various parts of the world, at the international level.
Sports make people cross cultural barriers and speak a language that is understood by all.
The World Sports Congress, held in New Delhi, emphasised that sports could play a major role in promoting and propagating peace, provided one understood the spirit of global participation and the philosophy of sports.
This philosophy of sports is based on the assumption that a “game will be played in the spirit of the game”. Rules of decency and decorum will on no account be violated by all those related to sports.
The spirit of sports is to embody a combination of qualities such as fairness, courtesy, generosity, grace and decency or in one word ‘sportsmanship’.
Sports does not simply involve players, spectators, sports authorities, media, sponsors, in fact each and every group or faction that is even remotely associated with sports is a fundamental part of an event. And all of them, then, are expected to maintain a code of conduct and nurture the sporting spirit.
Sportsmanship is the soul or essence of sports. It is a mental or psychological altitude that arouses a sense of fair play. Unless this psychological set-up is maintained, sports would become a testing ground or a show of mere physical prowess and virility. Sports sans sportsmanship is a war, a combat, where winning is an end in itself. If sports encourages the development of a fine character, sports sans sportsmanship encourages outbursts of foul and animal instincts.
When Roman satirist Horace commented around 2,000 years ago—”Sports begets tumultuous strife and wrath, and wrath begets fierce quarrels”—he probably meant sports devoid of sportive spirit. George Orwell, in the modern context, remarked: “Serious sports has nothing to do with fair play.
It is bound up with hatred, jealously, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence, in other words, it is war minus the shooting.”