I have a very mixed relationship with sports.
I can’t say I outright hate sports, like some people can.
It’s fun to go to a basketball game or to a Super Bowl watch party. It’s fun to put on a baseball glove and throw the ball back and forth. It’s fun to watch the Olympics when they come around and see the figure skaters and the discus throwers and the curlers and the beach volleyball players.
The sports themselves and the entertainment value of watching them are benign.
No, what I hate about sports comes down to two words:
JOCK CULTURE
Note how I’m not saying “jocks” as people. An individual who chooses the “jock lifestyle” is still an individual. And plenty of them can be fine.
But way too many of them are not.
By “jock culture,” most people probably know what I’m talking about, but let’s make it explicit, courtesy of our pals at Merriam-Webster:
I fucking hate macho men.
I despise men who who need to exagerrate and pump up their masculinity.
I don’t even regard them as men. They’re overgrown adolescents — still teenage boys mentally and emotionally. Real men don’t need to exaggerate their masculinity and turn themselves into cartoons.
He-Man was a toy, not an instruction manual.
Sports are totally poisoned by macho men.
And it’s not simply a stereotypical case of “oh, the jocks picked on you in high school and you just never got over it.”
But that’s not really it. I had friends who were jocks. Now one of the best friends I have from high school is a guy who was a jock. But he was always kind to me and we loved to joke around. There were people who played sports who were fine. And it’s the same now, plenty of people who choose to become personal trainers or make their careers in fitness are totally wonderful.
No, much of what bothered me then as a child and what bothers me now is the extent to which men with exaggerated masculinity — who just happen to be born big, strong, and tough — achieve celebrated positions in culture and the social order, largely because of the accident of their genes.
Yes, of course, there’s plenty of training and hard work that goes into becoming a great athlete. But for those of us born short or not as strong, we never even have the opportunity to be competitive. I did play plenty of sports for years. And I learned quickly that I was not one of the stronger players and never would be no matter how much I practiced. My “working hard” to get better at a sport simply could not compensate for the boys who simply had stronger bodies than I did.
In high school, what I most came to resent was that there were mandatory school pep rallies that we had to attend in order to honor the athletes. The whole school would regularly have to gather in the basketball arena in order to watch the athletes parade around. I hated so much that I had to stop writing, stop working on the school newspaper, in order to be forced to watch a bunch of jocks be celebrated for how strong and tough and more manly they were than me.
Want to know the most famous and celebrated person from my graduating class?
Apparently he just retired. The tennis player Rajeev Ram is the great shining star for Carmel High School’s Class of 2002:
Now, I’ve been thrilled like the rest of the members of my class to see Rajeev succeed at the level he has. I didn’t really know him, but I don’t recall ever having any negative interactions with him, nor him having any sort of reputation as anything other than a decent guy. But what about the other 850-or-so members of my class?
Surely some of them must have done something of note or consequence?
I’m in the class’s Facebook group still. Who else is worth talking about? Nobody.
Beyond him, after 24 years since graduating, it’s hard to find or recall anyone else in our class who did anything consequential or worth celebrating. I’d have to pull out the yearbook and go googling to try and find something, but for now Gemini seems to agree with what I understand:
The jocks were held up in high school as all that really mattered, and 24 years later, so it remains.
Big, tough, macho men remain the idols of American culture.
Joe Rogan.
Andrew Tate.
Pete Hegseth ordering the public execution by firing squad of a terrorist who is now disabled from the waist down and uses a wheelchair
Big, big man, there.
Absurd, cartoonish portraits of machismo continue to dominate the cultural imagination, as they likely always will to one degree or another.
I think this is the real reason why I have discovered my new favorite sport, which is surely the greatest, most entertaining ever invented.
Ladies and gentlemen, behold POWER SLAP:
The sport is very simple: the two competitors bitch-slap each other until one of them gets knocked out.
If one of them flinches before receiving the slap, then that counts as a foul. And there’s some sort of points system too which I don’t yet understand and really don’t care about at all.
The reason I now love this sport is also very simple: it’s one of the absolute funniest things on YouTube I’ve ever seen.
The extreme humor is primarily because of the slow-motion, instant replays:
The whole premise of the sport is hilarious and the tough, macho men participating and taking it as seriously as boxing or football or any other “real sport” don’t realize it at all.
When a man slaps another man, he is emasculating him.
He is treating him like “a bitch.” He is “bitch-slapping” him or “pimp-slapping.”
Here is Snoop Dogg smacking Suge Knight in “Pimp Slapp’d,” my favorite track from his sixth album, 2002’s Paid tha Cost to Be da Boss:
In machismo, misogynistic culture, the Big Man asserts his masculinity by slapping the women in his life, in order to make them submit. The Big Man asserts his patriarchal dominance over the weak — both women and less masculine men — through violence.
When a man respects another man and wants to do violence against him, then he punches him in the face.
When a man wants to also humiliate and disrespect him in addition to the violence, then he “smacks him like a bitch.”
One of the most hilarious things one can see is a machismo man who is acting tough and macho who then gets “put in his place” by having his masculinity taken from him in one way or another, often through humor.
To demonstrate the gendered nature of the smacking phenomenon, it’s worth comparing the men’s Power Slap competitions with the women. Here’s an example:
When you’re watching two women slap each other, then it becomes a more traditional sport and much more boring, perhaps even a little disturbing.
A woman getting slapped is a tragedy.
A man getting slapped is a comedy.
It is absolutely hilarious seeing these tough, macho badass men who take themselves so seriously, who want to pretend they are real athletes participating in a real sport like Rajeev, transform into real life cartoon characters.
These strong, manly men who parade out like pro wrestling stars don’t realize they’re actually fucking clowns.
This is what you want to make your profession? Letting other men make you their bitch by bitch-slapping you on TV? Are you fucking stupid? Have you taken so many bitch-slaps that you can’t see how ridiculous you look?
I know many people are filled with anxiety today about the state of the country right now with the AI bubble inflating and our commander-in-chief’s frontal lobes crumbling into little piles of gold-flaked ash.
Well, here’s a new source of endless entertainment and relief. And it hits just as hard as it did in 2004 when Dave Chappelle released his classic:
“Charlie! There’s a new joke going around, have you heard it? What did the five fingers say to face?”
“What?”
“SLAP! I’m Rick James, Bitch!”
Appreciations to Seth for inspiring this piece: