To truly understand the essence of something the most effective thing you can do is to take it back to its very first moment of being and ask what started the whole thing and what was the point?
Sports are fascinating when looked at through that lens. Think of the very first moment a sport comes into existence. Even before it comes a sport.
The very first moment is nothing more than an activity. Just some kids throwing an object around to start. Playing catch, even though the concept of playing “catch” hasn’t been invented yet because the game of baseball doesn’t exist. Same goes for the ball. Nothing is anything yet.
Then one day someone decides to grab a stick and starts swinging at this object being tossed about. Eventually he makes contact with the ball and the game – or at least the idea to create a game – begins.
So, then they feel a need to formalize this activity a little. They decide to place the guy with the stick between two of the people playing catch. Now we have a premise. The initial aim is for the guy with the stick to hit the ball and for the people playing catch to not let him.
The first problem emerges when the guy with the stick is either too successful at this hitting thing, or he’s so bad he never connects with it. So, they decide to set limits. The hitter (they now have a name for him) is given a certain number of chances to hit this thing. Let’s call them pitches. And if he doesn’t hit the thing after say, three pitches (another name they came up with) he needs to go away. Or get out. That’s it. He’s out.
We now have rules for a game that doesn’t yet exist.
No sport ever starts out with the explicit aim of becoming a sport. They never start with the rules. The activity is always first, and the structure only comes once there’s enough interest in taking this concept somewhere.
Rules, in their infancy, are nothing more than a basic framework meant to guide a voluntary physical activity shared between different human beings, whether that’s throwing an object or chasing a disc across the ice that will one day be known as a puck.
Sports are completely arbitrary inventions and really nothing more than a shared acceptance of an alternate reality. One where people do things, or hit things, or chase things in a manufactured human activity. And for these things to work – and remain competitive – they need guidelines which are rules in sport and laws in society.
The premise is exactly the same. Only the repercussions are different.
At some point we were little more than hunters and gatherers. Just a collection of random disconnected human beings occupying a planet. Then one day we started getting together and, before long, we were pressed into some sort of moral dilemma (like war) that demanded a framework, so we created laws.
These laws follow the same hierarchy as the rules in sports, starting with the question: Is it fair? Neither society nor sport can function properly if there’s a deliberate imbalance, so we enact rules to level the playing field in both realms.
Like, is everyone safe? To ensure safety we make rules that provide peace of mind to the herd. Cross the line and you’ll face the penalty whether you’re a citizen of this land or just a guy wearing skates.
Do these rules preserve the identity and spirit of the enterprise? This is where things get complicated because amorphous concepts like the “spirit” of something are very hard to define and even harder to legislate. Yet we must.
And that leads us back to the very beginning, which is our epicentre – or at least it should be. This is why modern rule changes of any kind are so contentious because we can never agree on a starting point. We make micro adjustments in an attempt to solve a problem when the premise may be tainted from the very beginning. Thus, we may be “correcting” something that doesn’t need correction but rather a re-thinking of the subject.
Like pitch clocks in baseball, for example. From a modern baseball point of view, they make sense. People complain the games are too long and broadcasters have scheduling issues with a sport that can’t guarantee the realistic duration of a game. So, we institute a time element to game with no clocks.
But, in the big picture, does the length of a game matter? It’s always been that way yet in today’s world it’s considered too long. From a traditional point of view there’s nothing to fix although contemporary critics would beg to differ.
Again, it all depends on where you want to start.
Should a sport be pliable from only the modern era forward or is it okay to alter a rule that’s been on the books since the very beginning?
Changing rules isn’t just a matter of fixing problems. It’s also about maintaining stewardship – to know what’s pliable and what isn’t. Sometimes not changing a thing is the best thing you can do.
This isn’t to say that rules can’t be changed. They aren’t sacred but changing a rule should be justifiable because big changes aren’t always the result of a massive fix. Seemingly minor tweaks done in succession result in the same thing which is why it’s vital to not only know where to start but what to look for. To ask ourselves what was the big idea in the first place?