Spelling bees and sports (and other competitions)

After a particularly punishing weightlifting workout today, I found myself in the gym locker room watching ESPN's coverage of high school football. A man standing nearby expressed his surprise that a station like ESPN would be showing this, since normally, high school football is a bit on the amateur side. I said that perhaps the games were played by teams that show particularly excellent players with promise for a good college career.

But then he said, "You know what really gets me? Why does ESPN show spelling bees? I mean, what in the world does a spelling bee have to do with sports?" I couldn't help but immediately blurt out, "You're talking to a national champion here. Spelling bees have TONS to do with sports. Much more than you realize." He seemed chastened, then turned back to talking about high school football on ESPN.

Part of me wishes I hadn't been so quick to shut this guy down. I might have been able to explain things further. But I'm not so sure if he was in a space to listen so much as he just wanted to express his opinion and leave it there.

On the surface, yes, spelling bees are pretty cerebral and inactive compared with, say, basketball or football. But here are some similarities that, in my mind, qualify them unequivocally for primetime viewing on the biggest cable sports channel.

• Competition. Fundamentally, the National Spelling Bee is a full-out competition, not a simple cake-walk for fun.
• Adrenaline. Anyone can tell you how nervewracking a bee is. The silence that ensues when a speller gets a word he or she doesn't know, and stands there, sometimes in terror, can split a heart. Talk about getting your adrenaline pumping...this matches up with any other sport. Plus, you have the added component of not being able to physically act out on your stress...you need to stay calm, alert, and focus, using only your wits to maneuver through each round.
• Coaches. This is a relatively small aspect of preparing (or training) for spelling bees. Not every speller has a coach. The majority of spellers only rely on parents or teachers for training. But on the national level, many spellers with sights on primetime ESPN or even hoisting the trophy in victory are increasingly enlisting the help of coaches (including yours truly).
• Preparation. Anyone who has achieved the national level of competition has put in hours upon hours of preparation.
• The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. Enough said. (Incidentally, those of you of a certain age will probably remember this.)

Now, it is true that there are other cerebral competitions on par with spelling bees that share each of these traits. The National Geographic Bee and MathCounts come immediately to mind. Neither of these have the same prestige or exposure that the National Spelling Bee has, and I believe this is for a few reasons. First, the spelling bee has a much longer tradition in American culture; you could argue that it is as American as baseball, Mom, apple pie, and the archetypal little red schoolhouse. Second, the competition itself has been around since 1925, whereas Mathcounts had its first national competition in 1984, and the National Geographic Bee followed five years later. Although I haven't seen either of these competitions, I suspect these would be as riveting as a spelling bee for the more cerebrally-oriented. (Apparently, the National Geographic Bee is televised on PBS, and takes place in late May; the national MathCounts competition takes place a few weeks earlier, and the decisive part of the competition is usually webcast.)

So maybe the National Spelling Bee is not a physical "sport," per se, but the similarities with other sports do qualify it for an annual presence on ESPN...at least unless a new cable channel is developed that could be specific to more cerebral competitions. But in the meantime, I believe that competitions of all sorts will do just fine on ESPN.