The story talks about why so few men take paternity leave, even those who work for companies that will give them paid time off. It also touches on my own experience taking six weeks off from work last year with my (then) five-month-old daughter Isabella. Check it out.

This week, ESPN, the “worldwide leader in sports,” begins more than twenty hours of World Series of Poker coverage. Also this month, the network will cover the Firestone IndyCar 200 race, NASCAR events, and the “X-Games,” which features guys on skateboards, bikes, and motorcycles. That’s all fine, although a bit curious for the biggest sports network in the history of civilization, since not a single one of those events is actually a sport.

An “athlete” walks with his man-servant.

The argument over what is and isn’t a sport has raged in bars and parties since Roman times (gladiator fights yes; being eaten by a lion, no). I intend to clear all this up once and for all. I recommend printing out this article and keeping it folded up in your wallet just in case it’s needed to settle a debate on the subject somewhere in the future.

Let me start with a basic disclaimer. Many activities that are not sports are difficult, challenging endeavors that few people have the athleticism, talent, or skill to do well. Many non-sports are as physically tasking or as competitive as any sports. But they aren’t sports. They are something else.

So a definition is in order. Here’s mine: A sport is a competitive human athletic endeavor in which winners and losers are determined by objective scoring or time.

Let’s break that down:

Competitive. This one is obvious. Sports pit athletes or teams against other athletes or teams. Doing sit-ups at the YMCA isn’t a sport. Moving furniture into your friend’s new apartment isn’t a sport. Chopping wood is tough, athletic work, but a grizzled old coot whacking away at a tree in the woods isn’t participating in a sport. In fact, stay away from that guy. He sounds creepy.

Human. For an activity to be a sport, the primary source or power and motion must be the human body. If your “sport” depends on a gas-guzzling engine, a horse, or 60-foot sail, it is not a sport. That means NASCAR’s not a sport — the car’s doing most of the work. Horse racing isn’t a sport, either — certainly not a human sport — all the jockey is doing is riding; the horse is doing the running. And whipping a defenseless horse doesn’t help the weak argument that a short guy riding on top of an animal is a sport. Motorcycling and boat races? Nope. Some guy who rides a skateboard day and night is not a sportsman, he’s a curfew violation.

Athletic. At some point, a sport must be an activity that requires some measure of athletic power or speed. In short, moving isn’t enough. Some large muscles need to work. This instantly disqualifies table-top and pub games like ping-pong, pool, foosball, and darts. Shuffleboard and bocce ball are also disqualified. Don’t even show me that croquet mallet. I love poker, but playing cards isn’t a sport, it’s a game… or a gambling problem. Spelling words correctly is a great, but it’s not a sport, even if you jump around the stage after you nail the word “serrefine.” Playing a videogame is not a sport, even if that videogame simulates a sporting event. The athletic requirement also puts a serious question mark around any “sport” largely enjoyed by flabby, overweight, drunk men, such as golf, bowling, corporate softball, and eating contests.

Winners and losers determined by objective scoring or time. Here’s where about half the Olympic “sports” get dumped. No jury or panel should ever decide a sporting event’s outcome. The players in the arena should decide who wins. Any competition in which you can lose by not smiling enough or not charming the judges isn’t a sport, so kiss figure skating, diving and gymnastics goodbye.

That’s right, Gymnastics isn’t a sport. Gymnasts may well be incredibly athletic, graceful, and skilled, but if a bitter Bulgarian judge with indigestion and a hangover can deny you a win, your chosen activity isn’t a sport.

Does this mean that boxing isn’t a sport? Judges decide fights, don’t they? Well, if a fight ends in a knockout, it’s a sport. If it goes to a decision, it’s damn close to not being a sport. Maybe boxing can do away with judges and rounds, and just let the fighters brawl until someone’s sprawled out on the ground unconscious… oh wait, we already have that — it’s called “hockey.”

The second part of this rule is that winners and losers can be determined by time. Nothing is more pure than the brutal reality of the stopwatch. It’s one reason I love watching sprints. Winners and losers are determined by hundredths of a second. Same goes for field events like the high jump: either you clear a bar or you don’t. You squeak over a certain height or inch beyond a certain point… or else, you lose. No aesthetics are involved, no assessment of poise, and no bonus points for style. You either make a time or distance, or you don’t. This is sports at its most basic and pure. Imagine a panel of judges scoring Michael Johnson: “Very fast, yes, but I didn’t like the grimace on his face as he rounded the final curve, and his posture is very odd, so I give him a 7.5. Now that fellow from France did finish last, but what lovely strides! And his selection of red shorts with understated off-white trim is an inspired choice! 9.75!”

Other rules:
All good rules have their exceptions and fine print. The definition of sports is no different. Here are various additional qualifications and corollaries to the definition of “sports”:

Uniforms, not costumes, are part of sports. One more reason to reject figure skating. I’ve seen skaters dressed up in cowboy outfits, 1950s clothes, and Robin Hood costumes. The prosecution rests.

Killing isn’t a sport. Sure, Hemingway thought killing a bull in a stadium in front of tens of thousands of howling fans was a swell way to spend an afternoon, but it isn’t a sport. Neither is shooting down ducks, turkeys, rabbits, or deer. Jaws and The Deer Hunter aren’t sports movies. Suffice it to say that if your sport requires you to break one of the Ten Commandments, it’s not a sport.

Sports don’t have servants. Any sport in which you have a personal manservant or assistant who carries your gear for you on the field of play isn’t a sport. Golf was already in trouble because many golfers are so fat, drunk, or lazy that they drive from hole to hole in little carts rather than walking. But the use of “caddies” to carry gear for golfers disqualifies it as a sport. Besides, any “sport” largely dominated by chubby, middle-aged rich men can’t be a real sport (see the rule on flabby, overweight, drunks above).

Any “sport” with a script isn’t a sport. This means pro wrestling is out. But wrestling was probably already disqualified due to the excessive use of folding chairs as weapons. If pro wrestling is a sport, so is a Jackie Chan movie.

Summing this all up, you’re safe calling football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and tennis sports, as well as most track & field events. I’ll even concede that soccer is a sport. It may be a tedious, boring snoozer of a sport, but it qualifies.

But anything with the words “rhythm,” “synchronized,” “ping,” “figure,” “auto,” or “moto” in the title is probably not a sport.

If you see anyone holding up a scorecard, it’s not a sport.

If you can sit in a chair while competing, it’s not a sport.

If your sport starts or ends with the letter “X,” it’s not a sport.

If it involves drinking or eating anything, it’s not a sport.

If chubby, middle-aged men dominate it, it’s not a sport.

If you wear sequins, it’s not a sport.

If it requires bullets, it’s not a sport.

Finally, let’s be honest: if it’s something I like, it’s got a better chance of being a sport. If it’s something you like, but I don’t, it’s probably not a sport. Simple, right?

Here’s a snippet from the piece:

5. No matter what you do, some days everything will go wrong. Preparation and planning are important, but they won’t spare you from the brutality of bad luck and variance. If you flip a coin, you have a fifty-fifty chance of it landing either tails or heads. Sometimes, if you flip a coin three times in a row, you’ll get heads three times. Unlikely, but it happens. You might flip a coin ten times and get heads each time there as well — less likely statistically, but not impossible. In fact, if you flip a coin a thousand times, you’re bound to have several stretches where heads or tails lands ten or more times in a row. In short: bad luck happens, and it can happen in bunches. Just as you can have a day where you spill coffee on your shirt, wreck your car, and get dumped before dinner, you might have a night where you lose with aces in back-to-back hands, then flop a flush that gets beat on the river by a one-in-twenty long shot. It can feel like a conspiracy, as if supernatural forces are twisting the universe you crush you. And yet, in reality, nothing is after you other than the cold, remorseless cruelty of chance. The lesson: bad luck, like good luck, will come in streaks. Learn to take both in stride.

Read the rest here.

Five miles northeast of the Washington Monument, the National Mall, and the U.S. Capitol, a narrow, garbage-strewn road leads to a place that resembles the end of the world. It looks like the aftermath of a tornado, a hurricane, or a Godzilla attack. On an open dirt field behind a barbed-wire gate, dozens of crushed refrigerators, some still adorned with magnetic calendars and pizza delivery numbers, lay stacked on top of each other like dominoes. Black birds hover over a mound of demolished bookcases, smashed cabinets, broken office chairs, and metal desks with dented, mangled legs. This debris sits in the shadow of a twenty foot pile of cracked bed frames, unhinged doors, stained couches, shattered television sets, collapsed wheelchairs, splintered coffee tables, and crooked, rusty bicycles. And within a few days, everything here — these heaps of once-valued relics from homes, offices, backyards, and bedrooms — will be gone, shipped off to be buried or incinerated. But in their place, new mountains of garbage will rise up and fill this landscape again.

The Fort Totten Waste Transfer Station, hidden half a mile behind Catholic University, serves as a central hub for solid waste in Washington. Garbage trucks haul 1,500 tons of trash in and out of here every day. Residents also come here to drop off bulky, oversized junk. Dozens of city workers man the trucks, scales, grapples, and loaders that keep the endless flow of trash moving out of the city. If the Capitol and the White House are the heart of Washington D.C., then Fort Totten Station is its stomach. And the people who work here — who see every day what Washington consumes, uses up, and throws away — may know the city better than anyone else.

Few people have seen more garbage in a lifetime than James Riggans, a 65-year-old operation foreman who has worked here for 41 years. It’s hard to tell if James is short, or just stoops a bit. Brown-tinted glasses partially hide his eyes. His face is lined with age, roughened with stubble and a salt and pepper mustache. He wears two things that declare his loyalties: a burgundy Redskins baseball cap and a blue D.C. Government sweater.

In 1966, James got his first job with the city, “throwing trash” as a sanitation worker, before being assigned to Fort Totten. “Back then, you had to have muscles,” James says. Looking out his office window at sanitation workers one-third his age, he shakes his head. Workers today, he points out, use trucks with mechanized lifts that do most of the heavy work. “They’d never make it back in those days,” he says.

James worked here in the 1960s, when the place was just a massive incinerator. He endured long, sweaty days, throwing garbage into blazing furnaces, breathing in smoke and ash. Many old friends and co-workers, perhaps not coincidently, have already passed away.

In his five decades at Fort Totten, James has seen people throw away almost everything. He’s watched people abandon boats, broken-down cars, and mobile homes. In a city where one in five people live in poverty, Washingtonians routinely discard perfectly functional computers, printers, kitchen appliances, fans, heaters, exercise machines, televisions, and bicycles. Department stores used to dump truckloads of overstocked bedding, power tools, and appliances here to clear warehouse space.

James was here the night three inmates from Lorton Prison were dropped off among with the trash. They escaped the jail and climbed into a garbage truck stopped at the adjacent waste facility. But their getaway was short-lived. The truck left Lorton and came to Fort Totten, only to dump them into a trash pit, along with a truckload of garbage collected along the way. Workers noticed the fugitives in their orange jumpsuits, screaming for help as they struggled to climb out of the pit. D.C. Police arrived minutes later to help them out.     

John Carter, 43, the other operation foreman at the station, stands at the entrance of a storage bay — known as the “tipping floor” — joking with a few of his workers before sending them off to load their trucks. His job is to make sure everything passes through the station smoothly. Having worked here since 1984, there are few problems he hasn’t already seen.

The tipping floor is longer than a football field and looks like an airplane hangar. Massive yellow Caterpillar loaders, industrial machines straight out of a science fiction movie, rumble slowly across the floor of the bay past two stories of cardboard, paper, and collapsed boxes, a thirty-foot high pile of assorted bagged trash and loose garbage, and a massive stack of metal furniture, bed frames, and construction materials.

To John, getting rid of these towers of trash is a day’s work. At 4 a.m. every morning, trucks arrive and drop off tons of new garbage from around the city. “The challenge for me,” he says, “is to get rid of it”

John, once a running back for the Cardozo High football team, looks more like a lineman now, tall and heavy, with thick arms from years of physical labor. He wears a black skull cap, an inside-out black sweatshirt, dark jeans, two small silver hoop earrings, and a huge skull ring on his left hand, where he used to wear wedding rings from two failed marriages. His round, boyish face would make him look younger than he is, if not for the mustache and chin-beard, peppered with gray hairs.

In 1972, environmental regulations mandated that the station stop incinerating garbage and be re-tooled to serve as a transfer station. Until the station was fully rebuilt to better handle the storage, loading, and processing of trash, it wasn’t very efficient, smelled terrible, and sent foul odors into surrounding neighborhoods. Scattered garbage attracted unwelcome insects and animals. “We used to have seagulls as big as pit bulls around here,” John says.

John often gives a speech to his staff, especially the new employees, a pep talk where he hammers home the idea that their job is adversarial — it’s them against the garbage. “I tell the guys: ‘you’ve got to hate the trash!’” Trash is the enemy. If it isn’t gone by the end of the day, trash wins.

There’s no small irony that the man who gives speeches about hating trash has inherited it as a family business. As a boy, John often came here with his father, who worked at Fort Totten for thirty years. His mom used to warn him that if he wasn’t careful he was going to wind up at the dump like his father. She was right.

But John seems content with this fate. He doesn’t envy friends who hate their jobs, who toil away bored at keyboards all day. “This job,” he says, “you see where you make a difference. You see point A to point B. I know people that talk about their work, and they just feel like they’re going to a job every day, just to do time. I don’t feel like that. It’s always something different.”

In the corner of the office John and James share — a small gray room with phony wood paneling, cold fluorescent lights, and two metal desks littered with papers — several bright, abstract paintings lean against the wall. The canvases, salvaged pieces of wood cabinets and doors from entertainment centers, explode with splattered bursts of crimson, gold, and lime paint. They look like something a young Jackson Pollock might have done. John creates these paintings when work is slow. He calls them “recycled art.” Sometimes, when there are a few moments to spare from the business of getting rid of everything, it feels good to create something worth keeping.

Wisps of silvery steam rise up from below hundreds of orange-shelled Maryland crabs piled in front of Donny Pham. Standing next to his co-workers, two middle-aged men with deep wrinkles and tobacco-roughened voices, soft-spoken 36-year-old Pham, clean shaven except for a thin mustache and goatee, could pass for a crab-selling intern. That’s not far off, actually, as he’s only worked at Jessie Taylor Seafood for six months, a blink of an eye compared to some of his co-workers who have spent decades here, steaming, seasoning and selling hundreds of thousands of local blue crabs. Donny, wearing a black Yankees cap over a jumble of medium-length black hair, a frayed beige sweatshirt, and yellow gloves, fills a sack with a dozen crabs and hands it to a college-aged woman in a Redskins jersey. As she walks off, Donny rests his elbows on the counter and sighs. It is one of his first sales of the day, and just the start of a long weekend.

October is always slow at the D.C. Fish Market, but rain has been falling on Washington almost non-stop since Tuesday, so business is unusually light. The market consists of a square of asphalt the size of a baseball diamond, surrounded on three sides by massive floating barges that rise and sink with the tide. Right now, the tide is high, and fish mongers and crab sellers alike serve customers at eye level. The barges face the dock with overloaded storefronts that showcase huge bins of fresh seafood: live, wriggling crabs, tidy lines of tilapia, cod, and salmon fillets stacked on top of crushed ice, and massive piles of translucent pink shrimp, oysters, clams, prawns, and squid. On this murky, wet Saturday morning, only a few scattered customers, bundled in overcoats and clutching umbrellas, roam around the storefronts. Despite the weather, the market is ready for business.

“How you doin’, buddy?” Donny shouts, with a thick southern accent, trying to get the attention of an old man shuffling by. “Got crab sale here! Some shrimp? Hot soup!”

The man eyes Donny for a split-second, glaring at him as if he were a potential mugger, jams his hands deep into his coat pockets, and keeps walking. Donny isn’t offended — he’s used to being ignored. It’s part of the business. Some customers are friendly, he says, but others show up certain they are being hustled. “Some people just come up here irate,” he says with a shrug. “In their mind, you’re just trying to screw them over.”

Donny doesn’t have time to ponder the hostility from some customers, because a young Hispanic couple, huddled under an umbrella, walks by the storefront.

“How y’all doin’?! Crabs here! Hot soup!”

They look at him blankly, so Donny adjusts his pitch.

“Hola, Amigos, Hola! Camarones! Sopa Sopa!”

Despite Donny’s energetic attempt at bilingual salesmanship, the couple keeps on walking.

Donny works 14-hour days at the fish market every weekend. Rather than make the four-hour drive back to his home in Accomack County, Virginia, to be with his wife and kids, he stays on the boat overnight. And while some might not envy working elbow- and knee-deep in seafood all day, then sleeping on a barge that sways and bobs with the changing currents of the Potomac River, Donny counts his blessings. He has lived through far worse.

When he was two, Donny and his mother were among millions who fled Vietnam at the end of the war. His recollections are murky, but he remembers fragments. They sat on a beach for nearly a week, waiting for rescue boats to come. The boats arrived and they were squeezed on board with other scared, hungry, desperate refugees. Soon after the overcrowded boats motored out to sea, he says, the ships came under attack. He remembers chaos, mayhem, and screams.

“They started bombing, shooting people like crazy,” Donny says. “We were the only boat that made it out of there. Two of them got blown up.”

Damaged during the attack, overloaded with refugees, and ill-equipped for the journey, the boat took a month to sputter north to Korea. Many of Donny’s fellow refugees didn’t survive the trip.

“We were out of food. They were just throwing bodies overboard,” he says. “You remember stuff like that… you can’t help but remember something like that.”

Donny and his mother moved to America as migrant workers, settled in Virginia, and became naturalized citizens. He trained and found work as a heating and cooling technician. He married “a typical Eastern shore American woman,” had three children, and eventually moved into a house built by Habitat for Humanity. For Donny, everything seemed to be falling into place, until last spring, when he was laid off.

Donny and a friend, who had also been laid off, drove up to Washington, looking for work at the fish market. The uncle of Donny’s wife has sold seafood at the market for nearly 25 years and encouraged them to come up. Donny’s friend took one look around — overwhelmed by the noise, the shouting, the haggling over prices, the wafting stench of crab and fish and shrimp — and bolted back to Virginia. But where his friend saw long hours, sore knees, and headaches, Donny saw opportunity. He stayed.

Donny was terrible on his first day — he bungled orders, didn’t understand what people wanted, and had a hard time handling cash exchanges. “I didn’t know nothing from nothing.,” Donny said, laughing. “I didn’t know nothing about seafood. But I tried.”

After more than a decade spending his days working with pipes, furnaces, and thermostats, crawling under buildings and into heating ducts, it took a while for Donny to learn the tools of “a people business” — talking to customers, engaging them, and making sales. It isn’t a perfect job, he says, but it’s steady cash, something to pay bills while he tries to build his own business as an independent heating and cooling contractor.

Donny hasn’t told his children much about what he went through before coming to America. He’s relieved that they have the safe, stable childhood he missed. He shares with them a little about Vietnamese culture, but encourages them to think of themselves as Americans. “I tell them, be proud of your heritage, but you’ve got American heritage, too. Be proud of that.”

It seems he has given himself the same advice. Donny Donny’s life embodies the classic American story: an immigrant who works hard to build a life, a family, and a better future. It’s not always easy, or fast, or glamorous, but in his case, he works towards that dream, one crab at a time.

Donny notices a short, middle-aged woman in a zipped up puffy red jacket, standing about ten feet away and squinting at the steaming mound of crabs in front of him.

“How you doin’, miss? Help you today? We got a crab sale going on today!”

The woman scowls at him. Donny pretends not to notice.

“Give you a good deal… Two and a half for fifteen dollars?”

She turns and walks the opposite direction, but Donny doesn’t give up. He calls out to her, one more time, even though the sale appears hopeless.

“Well, what are you looking for, miss? I can help you out! Got a full barge here!”

Donny shakes his head and smiles. He doesn’t mind a challenge.