About a month ago, I posted something similar about darts. In hindsight, I didn’t really explain my point clearly, so hopefully I can make my point better. Idk if I’ll be kicked off/banned for reigniting this debate, but given I’m quitting Lemmy in a day or two anyway, I really couldn’t give a flying fuck anymore.

Nonetheless, here is why I don’t think I should be compelled to agree that snooker (or darts, or golf or anything else) is actually a sport, just hear me out.

First of all, who gets to define whether something is a ‘sport’ or not? Is it the WPBSA? The IBSF? The dictionary? Someone else? Who?

Think about it: why do they get to define anything as a ‘sport’? And what makes them right? Is the definition of ‘sport’ a fundamental universal truth, or is it a creation of man that is defined by man? If it is the former, show me proof. And if it is the latter, why do some of man get to make the definition, whilst others don’t? Is it not true that these men only get to do so because we let them do so?

The simple fact is that the definition of anything as ‘sport’ is not some great fundamental, indefatigable universal truth — it’s a matter of opinion. There is no fixed universal definition, we only call it so because some bloke somewhere in history said ‘it’s a sport’ and other people went along with his opinion — but we can have opinions also.

To be absolutely and perfectly clear: this is not a question of whether snooker or whatever is a sport — that’s, as I explained above, a matter of opinion (I’m not going to critique you if you believe that they are a sport, even though I personally don’t, and I’m not going to discuss that axiom of the topic at hand). No, what I’m saying is we should be allowed the opinion to say that snooker is not a sport — if we believe it’s not. I know technically we could be said to have that, though I don’t think so, if even we are aware of it.