Not a blood sport?

Reader question:

Please explain this quote: “Basketball is not a blood sport.”

My comments:

Even without context, we can be pretty much be sure what the speaker is trying to get at.

What’s implied here is, you see, that a basketball game should not lead to bloodshed.

Bloodshed?

Yeah, such as players leaving the game with a broken nose.

And, whenever you see a player throwing an elbow to the face of another player, you understand how a basketball game can actually lead to bloodshed.

And an elbow thrown to the head should always be accidental, of course. It should never be thrown on purpose.

Basketball is a contest of skills and athleticism. It is not a brutal sport like a contest between gladiators in ancient Rome. A gladiator is a man, usually a slave, trained to fight another gladiator or a wild animal in an arena as a sport (for entertainment).

Which brings us to the term “blood sport”.

Blood sport literally refers to sports such as the fight among gladiators and fox hunting, bear hunting, chicken fights as well as, if you will, modern-day boxing or bull fighting.

All of the above sports necessarily result in one thing in common – bloodshed.

Bloodshed, that is, if not outright deaths.

All of which is, of course, a shame, pun intended.

It shouldn’t be that way, right? To watch people and animals die for sport and entertainment is perverted, don’t you think?

Anyways, basketball is thankfully not such a sport. In other words, it shouldn’t be a sport which leads to people getting bloodied and injured.

Anyways, I think that’s what’s being implied by “basketball (or any other fair-play ball game) is not a blood sport”.

All right, let’s read a few media examples to examine “blood sport” in greater context:

1. In an ideal world – by which I mean one that lives up to my most energetic fantasies – Paul Theroux and I would be meeting in some far flung and exotic place: on an empty platform in a distant railway station, or under a date palm in a dried-up desert oasis. Both of us would have dust on our boots. One of us would be wearing a bad hat, or even a good one. Our conversation, which would unfold like an old map, would come with a soundtrack comprising the cries of market traders, the whistle of a train and the bellow of a camel.

Alas, the world is not ideal. Neither one of us is going anywhere today. Theroux and I talk via video call, his summer-tawny face at first a little blurry on the screen of my laptop. He lives, for most of the year, in Hawaii. But he spends the summer at his house on Cape Cod, which is where he is today: in an attic, from the look of things. And I suppose this is appropriate, really, albeit a bit (for me) disappointing. While he has always made much of his escape from his Massachusetts roots, a process that famously began when, after university, he joined the Peace Corps and went to live in Malawi, he continues to be bound to this part of the world as if by invisible rope. Not only is his extended family still here, or some of it; New England is also the setting for his extraordinary new novel, The Bad Angel Brothers, a manic tale of sibling rivalry that owes its small town setting mostly to John Cheever, and its seething resentment mostly to William Shakespeare.

Theroux is 81 now, but you’d never know it. He seems barely to have changed physically, and by all accounts the man who made his name first as a travel writer is still madly vigorous. When he celebrated his big birthday last year, he wrote in the New Yorker of paddling his outrigger canoe offshore, and now he informs me that when Canadian truckers mounted their blockade of Ottawa in February – a protest against a mandate requiring them to be vaccinated against Covid-19 – he drove from Cape Cod through deep snow to take a look at what was going on.

“A policeman was going to arrest me,” he says, proudly. “But I told him: I’m not loitering, I’m witnessing history. I’m stoic, you know. The snow was blowing across the road, but I have a four-wheel drive car, and I love to make road trips.” His last book but one, On the Plain of Snakes, was an account of his travels in Mexico by car, a journey inspired by Donald Trump’s disparagement of the country, and it seems that he isn’t done yet so far as adventure goes: “I’d like to go back to Malawi, and to Congo, the Philippines, India, Guatemala, Papua New Guinea, and to be a teacher for, say, two or three weeks in each place. In every country, I would teach the same story to my students, and I would ask them: what are your worries, and what are your dreams?” Is he serious? “Yes. I would love to go back, and I intend to go back.”

His new novel is like nothing else I’ve read: at once maundering and intensely emotionally violent. But you can also draw a fairly straight line between it and some of the books that preceded it (at least 56). Theroux has always been good at enraged men (see The Mosquito Coast), and family angst is a speciality, too (see Mother Land, among other novels). As for fraternal love gone wrong, who could forget his memoir Sir Vidia’s Shadow, in which he describes, ruthlessly and with utmost brilliance, how he fell out of love with his (megalomaniacal, racist, sexist) friend and mentor, VS Naipaul? Fights are, you might say, a theme, in his personal realm as well as his writerly one. Readers with long memories may recall that, in 1996, Alexander Theroux, also a writer, unaccountably reviewed his brother’s patchwork memoir, My Other Life, delivering an acidulous little bit of criticism in which he described Paul as a snob, a know-it-all, and a star-fucker.

I want to ask if The Bad Angel Brothers is based on any relationship in particular – does Alexander haunt its pages? – but this is awkward; such a question might suggest I’m also wondering whether Theroux has murderous impulses. So I mutter instead something feeble about how visceral his narrative is. But of course he knows what I’m up to, and while he happily agrees that his own large family is complex (he’s the third of seven children), the more horrible of the two Belanger brothers, Frank, a boastful lawyer, really is no one in disguise – or so he insists. He saw Alex only yesterday; they’re friends, and have long been so.

“What has bound us together is reading and writing – reading, especially. Writing is a blood sport [in our family], so you do battle, and it’s hard feelings at the time. But Alex has read this novel, and he thinks it’s my best book. We’ve had our differences. One does have differences with people. Naipaul’s a perfect example of that. But a second act is possible.” He and Naipaul were reunited in the years before he died. “After 2011, I reconnected with him, though this was against all his principles. He always said, if a person lets you down, you’re done. Don’t give them a second chance.” Their relationship was, he says, both familial and non-familial. “He wasn’t my brother. But I understood his relationship to his brother [the novelist Shiva Naipaul, who died too young] because I have four brothers of my own, and he also understood mine to them.”

- Paul Theroux: ‘Writing is a blood sport. One does have differences with people’, by Rachel Cooke, October 2, 2022.

2. The days of war between late-night hosts like David Letterman, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien are long gone.

It’s a full détente, it seems, as a skit on the final episode of The Late Late Show with James Corden will highlight.

Deadline understands that Corden got together the likes of The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert, The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel Live!’s Jimmy Kimmel and Late Night’s Seth Meyers for a sketch. The group apparently filmed it together, though we hear that Kimmel filmed his bit remotely.

While Letterman and Leno fought it out in the ratings and before that a chance to host The Tonight Show and O’Brien had his own battle with Leno at NBC, this generation of hosts have been brought together during the past eight years by such things as the pandemic and the Donald Trump presidency.

They regularly appear on one another’s shows, as evidenced by Meyers, Corden’s time-slot rival, turning up recently on The Late Late Show, and Corden going on Jimmy Kimmel Live! this week. Even John Oliver, who has beaten them all for the late-night Emmy each of the past seven years, has appeared regularly with his former Daily Show pal Colbert and with Meyers.

“I’ve certainly never felt any ever,” he said. “When I got the job, I read both Bill Carter books [The Late Shift and The War for Late Night], and it was like, ‘Oh, f*ck.’ Then you get there and you meet all these people along the way, and they have just been nothing but loving, kind and supportive. I feel like as a group, we have really been through a time which is unmatched.”

The Late Late Show exec producer Rob Crabbe, who has worked with Fallon and Letterman, added there’s a “mutual respect” among the hosts.

“Generationally, they all grew up watching their parents fights in the sense of the previous generation, they didn’t necessarily get along,” he said. “But it doesn’t need to be that cutthroat. There’s something there for everybody. This isn’t a blood sport. Everybody works in comedy and has pretty amenable personalities, so why not just get along?”

- Late-Night Wars? It’s All Quiet On Talk-Show Front As Rival Hosts Get Together For James Corden’s Exit, Yahoo.com, April 27, 2023.

3. Elon Musk dismissed the idea that he was a Nazi and insisted people were simply attempting to assassinate his character.

Sitting down with Fox News’ Lara Trump, Elon Musk dived into a whole host of topics, including the accusations that he was a Nazi.

This in references to the slews of accusations that came up against the billionaire over a rather odd gesture he made during Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Taking to the stage to praise Trump, Musk appeared to make a “Nazi salute”.

The billionaire tech mogul commented: “Thank you for making it happen. Thank you, my heart goes out to you,” before turning back to the audience and repeating the bizarre gesture towards the American flag.

This spread quickly on social media and resulted in a barrage of criticism against Musk.

Musk has repeatedly denied that he is a Nazi and argued the term was losing meaning since “Democrats” are so regularly accusing people.

Speaking with Lara Trump, Musk argued people were using this accusation to undermine him as well as Trump.

He said: “It’s a relentless propaganda campaign, which obviously President Trump has experienced for a very long time.

“Twenty years, maybe longer. And politics is a blood sport. So they’re going to come up with whatever attacks they can to destroy the public perception of someone.”

- Elon Musk addresses rumors that he’s ‘a Nazi’ following controversial salute at Trump rally, UNILAD.com, May 5, 2025.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）