Sports is the sandbox of life

Let's play!

You’ve likely heard the expression “Sports is the sandbox of life.” It’s one of those bromides that sounds good until you give it a little thought. For most little kids, a sandbox is a place where they can engage in creative play in a very forgiving, safe environment. You can try building a castle, and if you don’t like it, you can easily start over.

When you move on from there to Legos, for example, starting over is not nearly so forgiving, and besides, you must follow instructions to succeed.

One AI-generated explanation of the sports/sandbox saying describes it as a…

metaphorical expression that highlights the importance of sports in our lives. It suggests that sports are a microcosm of life, where we can learn and practice important life skills such as teamwork, perseverance, and discipline.

Author Daniel Adam Freeman takes a different tack:

When we were little children and the sandbox lay before us, what did we do? Did we talk ourselves into playing, in our heads? Did we argue with ourselves? Did we put it off until later? Did we wonder if we knew how to play? Or if we would get hurt in playing and stop short? No, we did not. We stepped into the sandbox and played with abandon.

Freeman advises us to “[S]tep into the sandbox of life and play with abandon. That is how we experience life. That is how we love others. That is how we accomplish our dreams. Step in… and play with abandon.”

What happened to the teamwork, perseverance, and discipline?

I first heard the sports/sandbox expression many years ago, as it was uttered by Howard Cosell on “Monday Night Football,” in what I now understand to have been bitter sarcasm. He was commenting on a boneheaded play that earned a big penalty, which was immediately followed by an ill-conceived protest from that team’s head coach.

In this situation, the offending player and his coach were acting like stupid kids fighting in a sandbox. Thus, sports/sandbox becomes more fun when we observe and comment.

In a recent USA Today column, Nancy Armour dishes on four-time NFL MVP Aaron Rodgers. Spoiler alert: Armour is described as “frequently writ[ing] about the intersection of sports and social issues.”

Rodgers had already earned Armour’s disapproval because he didn’t mindlessly follow the idiotic government guidelines on COVID. We could cut Armour some slack since the link in the previous sentence dates from 2021, except she cites that article in the December, 2023 piece. One wonders what rock Armour has been living under to not have any inkling of the vaccine disaster, including the horrific finding that they are contaminated with significant amounts of DNA. (cf. here)

Her current beef with Rodgers is that he was (gasp!) self-promoting by proclaiming that he would be able to come back from a devastating ankle injury to play this season. Imagine that! A four-time MVP quarterback having an ego. Only, why does such criticism not apply to a mockingbird media hack whose main contribution to sports is to criticize it against a background of faux social consciousness? Just what a true sports fan would like, right?

And, then there’s the matter of Clay Travis offering a $1 million bet that the WNBA championship team would be soundly defeated by any boys’ high school state championship caliber squad. Travis’ challenge dropped in late October, and beyond a few silly insults, there has been no response from the WNBA. My take is that their puppet masters at the NBA have ordered them to be silent.

The sandbox of life, indeed.