What do Paintball and Sports have in Common?
If anyone has ever gone paintballing they know just how fun the experience can be. Getting suited up in protective clothing and arming oneself with a very powerful paintball gun with their vision blurred in a visor and running around trying to shoot people on a crazy course is an extremely enjoyable thing to do. Not only does one get a great workout in the process of enjoying a paintball session but it is usually a great day out for a bunch of friends. But how is a day out at paintball like a competitive team sport?
Paintball has its origins from warfare, but it is a less violent and much more fun experience than actual warfare. Wikipedia gives the following insight into the game, “Paintball is a game first played in 1981, in which players compete, in teams or individually, to eliminate opponents by hitting them with capsules containing paint from a gas-powered device called a paintball marker. The game is regularly played at a sporting level with worldwide leagues, tournaments, professional teams and players,” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paintball). So paintball has been around for a long time and it is referred to as an extreme sport because it involves a lot of physical exertion and as anyone who has ever been hit by a paintball will tell you; it really hurts. People come away from a paintball session with big bruises from being hit by paintballs. All this is good but it doesn’t explain how it is like competitive sports.
Competitive and team sports are when one team goes head to head against an opposing team and tries to defeat them and become the winner. Well what I am proposing that even competitive and team sports had their origins in warfare because if we go back to ancient history, we can see some interesting facts emerging. Warfare in ancient times involved hand to hand combat and fighting with weapons of various kinds and so in order to train people, they probably had mock battles and training fights. These over the years became less violent and lost their warfare edge and as people saw that they could generate an audience of fans to watch these games or mock battles, they decided to give them rules and regulations and modern sports were born. From these origins sports developed and evolved to resemble the current form of sports that we enjoy every day today. Even today sports are basically a contest between individuals or teams vying for victory over an opponent. The same principle in a much more violent and harmful way is practiced in war with individuals trying to defeat an enemy and win the contest. Many sports probably developed as well because ancient people needed something to keep them fit, in shape and trained during times of peace. So they invented sports to keep them in shape and fit for whenever a war was announced. As the peace times got longer and people were not at war for longer periods of time, sports became more popular and people would then come and watch them more often and so a culture of sports was born out of a war training effort.
Paintball similarly had its origins from modern warfare because the concepts of both are very similar. The objective of paintball is to protect your team and defeat an opposing team to claim victory in the contest. The objective of war is to protect your troops and defeat an opposing enemy and claim victory in the war. They are basically the same thing with a few terms changed here and there. Sports and paintball both have origins in warfare; one in ancient warfare and the other in more modern warfare. Even though no one would compare sports to war there is a connection if one looks deeply into the origins of sports competitions in ancient history. It is a lot easier to compare paintball and warfare but at least in one no one dies they just get a few bruises.
Tags: