Surveying sports today, be it in the newspaper, talk radio, ESPN’s “Playmakers,” or a real, live game, you might come away with the impression that athletic endeavor is nothing more than expletive-laced tirades, drug convictions, contract hold-outs and corporate sponsorship, with competition sparingly sprinkled in.

Even as you are reading this, Mike Tyson is out there somewhere, expressing his desires to eat children, stomp testicles and rape mothers. Somewhere, a player from the Portland Trailblazers is in a courtroom, entering his plea to charges of drug and weapons possession. Somewhere, a professional football player is lounging by a pool, watching a DVD in the back seat of his Mercedes or sipping Mo‰t champagne, perhaps even doing all three, while his agent angrily demands a contract with more digits in it. And just about everywhere, investment firms and airlines are plastering their names on everything even fractionally related to sports.

But fear not: There is such a thing as sports without felonies and multimillion-dollar contracts. There are sports played solely for the enjoyment of the game, and those sports can be found right here at Iowa State.

Intramural sports, organized by Recreation Services, are sports at their essence — they’re everything that professional and intercollegiate sports are not. With more than three dozen sports to choose from, intramurals are democratic. From the big, sweaty guy on the basketball court to the bigger, sweatier guy on the wrestling mat; from the lithe runner on the cross-country course to the un-athletic card shark at the Euchre table, everyone is welcome and everyone has a chance to win. While in professional sports the dollar is God and players play as much for bonuses that come with winning as for winning itself, intramurals are played for a free t-shirt and things that are worth more than money. The guys on the flag football team play for the glory of their fraternity. The girl in the swim meet competes to prove to herself she hasn’t lost her edge since high school. The broomball players play just for the experience of being drunk on ice at 1:30 a.m.

In this age where everything has a corporate name attached to it, where Chicago’s National Football League team is referred to as “Bears football presented by Bank One” and where boxers routinely have advertisements non-permanently tattooed on their bodies, intramurals are wonderfully un-sponsored. Basketball jerseys are not soiled with swooshes, but with the sweat of the people who wore them in previous games. Athletes play in State Gym, not All State Insurance Gym and at the Southeast Intramural Fields, not Southwest Airlines Field.

Such purity of sport is truly an anomaly in our society. At the professional level, even players thought to be respectable, like Kobe Bryant and Magic Johnson, are susceptible to the excesses of their wealth and fame. Bryant is currently accused of raping a 19-year old woman, while a decade ago Johnson’s post game exploits left him with HIV.

In intercollegiate athletics, each day seemingly brings a new scandal involving players, coaches and even administration. This past summer a player at Baylor University was charged with the murder of a teammate. As that story played out, Miami University and Virginia Tech ditched the Big East conference in favor of the Atlantic Coast Conference and the revenue to be gained from a football championship game. And who can forget Iowa State’s own scandals? The beer-swilling, co-ed-kissing exploits of our ex-head basketball coach, and the kiddie porn leanings of one of his assistants proved that even in the home of sport at its essence, corruption still exists.

Such corruption is not limited to just Sportscenter sports, either. High school sports, basketball in particular, are becoming nothing more than training grounds for professional athletics, teaching athletes not so much how to shoot or pass or be a team player, but how to give interviews and acquire Hummers.

Intramurals know no such scandals. The heated arguments of recreational sports take place on the field, not in courtrooms or ESPN studios. They involve missed calls by student referees and misplaced t-shirts, not point-shaving and performance-enhancing drugs. They are simple arguments, ones that can be solved with the reminder, “Hey, its just a game.”

Perhaps the problem is that sports have become too big, too profitable and too omnipresent in our society. Among the stacks of money, court documents and TV schedules, the joy of the game has been all but lost. Intramural sports are one of the few places where this joy thrives, one of the few places where one can compete in sports “just for the fun of it.”