Many (perhaps even most) hackers don't follow or do sports at
all and are determinedly anti-physical. Among those who do,
interest in spectator sports is low to non-existent; sports are
something one does, not something one watches on TV.
Further, hackers avoid most team sports like the plague.
Volleyball was long a notable exception, perhaps because it's
non-contact and relatively friendly; Ultimate Frisbee has become
quite popular for similar reasons. Hacker sports are almost
always primarily self-competitive ones involving concentration,
stamina, and micromotor skills: martial arts, bicycling, auto
racing, kite flying, hiking, rock climbing, aviation,
target-shooting, sailing, caving, juggling, skiing, skating,
skydiving, scuba diving. Hackers' delight in techno-toys also
tends to draw them towards hobbies with nifty complicated
equipment that they can tinker with.
The popularity of martial arts in the hacker culture deserves
special mention. Many observers have noted it, and the connection
has grown noticeably stronger over time. In the 1970s, many
hackers admired martial arts disciplines from a distance, sensing
a compatible ideal in their exaltation of skill through rigorous
self-discipline and concentration. As martial arts became
increasingly mainstreamed in the U.S. and other western
countries, hackers moved from admiring to doing in large numbers.
In 1997, for example, your humble editor recalls sitting down
with five strangers at the first Perl conference and discovering
that four of us were in active training in some sort of martial
art - and, what is more interesting, nobody at the table found
this particularly odd.
Today (2000), martial arts seems to have become established as
the hacker exercise form of choice, and the martial-arts culture
combining skill-centered elitism with a willingness to let
anybody join seems a stronger parallel to hacker behavior than
ever. Common usages in hacker slang un-ironically analogize
programming to kung fu (thus, one hears talk of "code-fu" or in
reference to specific skills like "HTML-fu"). Albeit with
slightly more irony, today's hackers readily analogize
assimilation into the hacker culture with the plot of a Jet Li
movie: the aspiring newbie studies with masters of the tradition,
develops his art through deep meditation, ventures forth to
perform heroic feats of hacking, and eventually becomes a master
who trains the next generation of newbies.
Node:Education, Next:Things Hackers Detest
and Avoid, Previous:Physical Activity and
Sports, Up:Appendix B