Transgender Sports
The purpose of sports is not crushing the opposition but celebrating the capacity of people to play. The rules aren't arbitrary.
The distance to first base is chosen to maximize the recurrent crisis in throwing the runner out, but so that it happens slowly enough to be followed by the human eye.
Three strikes is in service of making getting a hit have a certain difficulty range.
Men's and women's sports celebrate the capacity of men and women respectively to play.
Scott Adams himself said tennis, his game, was ruined by new raquet technology - the serve is too fast. You could say it no longer celebrated the human capacity to play but just went mechanical. The version where you lob the ball into play on the third return celebrates play much better.
So mixing men and women destroys the respective sports, against what Scott Adams wants to claim.
The distance to first base is chosen to maximize the recurrent crisis in throwing the runner out, but so that it happens slowly enough to be followed by the human eye.
Three strikes is in service of making getting a hit have a certain difficulty range.
Men's and women's sports celebrate the capacity of men and women respectively to play.
Scott Adams himself said tennis, his game, was ruined by new raquet technology - the serve is too fast. You could say it no longer celebrated the human capacity to play but just went mechanical. The version where you lob the ball into play on the third return celebrates play much better.
So mixing men and women destroys the respective sports, against what Scott Adams wants to claim.
Modern tennis solved the problem of the too-fast serve ( nonexistent problem on clay courts, btw) by altering the emulsion used on hard courts to make it grittier. Now, only a superb serve (by a physically normal player) wins the ace. The physically abnormal players (over 6'8") can still blast away, but the entertainment value derives from their struggles to achieve the agility employed by their opponents.
ReplyDeleteAs for the "good old days", I happen to play tennis with someone who, as a teenager, was good enough to regularly be used as a practice and hitting partner by Pancho Gonzalez. He tells me that the courts Pancho played on were very smooth. Pancho hit the ball on his serve at mph closely comparable to the pros today, according to my friend.