I love sports. That’s an important statement to make in order to create the proper context here.

I love to play, watch, and I generally follow all kinds of sports. I play soccer, basketball, tennis, table tennis, volleyball, football and even a little softball on occasion.

I watch and follow all the major sports, too. There’s something about watching a professional or collegiate player perform in ways you will likely never be able to emulate. It gives the spectator a kind of rush that you really don’t get from any other kind of entertainment.

But that’s really where it ends. Sports, pro, collegiate or just plain recreational, are just entertainment. In this day and age, when Alex Rodriguez, Steve McNair and Allen Iverson sign multi-million dollar contracts, and the major networks stage serious campaigns for the rights to broadcast live sports, it might seem a little strange to think of sports as “just entertainment.”

As much as I love watching and playing sports, I believe that it’s about time that aspect of American life got put back in it’s place.

All the soccer moms yelling like crazy on the sidelines, all the little league dads yelling at coaches and threatening umpires, are symptoms of something that’s terribly out of whack, for lack of a better term.

With the horror of last Tuesday, and all the fallout in the sports world, it became clear to everyone how completely out of control we’ve been. The fact that anyone would dispute the canceled games is a clear testimony to that.

Yeah, we all heard the same explanation: “If we don’t play football/baseball/hockey, then the terrorists have already won”.

But playing games less than a week after thousands of people have been killed in that manner is also giving evil more control over our lives than it should. If the tragedy had been from a different cause, an earthquake or a hurricane, someone would still try to convince us that the Big 12 Conference was wrong to cancel all athletics.

Now, I’m not condemning those events that did go on, because I like to think that a choice like that would be made for good reason. But you can’t tell me that it would be catastrophic for the NFL to extend its season by one week, or for the World Series to end a few days later. And certainly, we aren’t going to be profoundly affected by Iowa State vs. Iowa being played on Nov. 24 rather than Sept. 15.

There’s been some notable news in sports of late.

This weekend, race car driver Alex Zinardi lost both legs in a crash during a race in Germany.

And heaven knows, we’d have been talking about Michael Jordan’s comeback more than any other news in the sports world.

Heck, the guy was ESPN SportsCentury’s #1 athlete of the century, yet he’s still just a guy who bounces a basketball on a hardwood floor, much like I do at Beyer Hall on the weekends. OK, not at all like I do, as most of those who’ve had the misfortune of playing basketball with me can testify.

So MJ bounces a basketball better than I ever will. That doesn’t mean we lose sight of what’s really important in life.

Last week, I pulled a hamstring during Taekwondo practice. And ordinarily, I would have been really upset with that, since we’re training for the National Collegiate Tournament in Austin, Texas this October. Add to that my setback last year, when I broke my foot in the middle of training for the same event, and you might be see why I’d be upset.

But considering the fact that we’d just had a candlelight ceremony that evening before practice, I had all the perspective I needed to realize that, unfortunate (and frustrating) though the injury was, it was far from being a calamity.

And that’s all I’m asking for from the sports world: a little perspective.

Emeka Anyanwu is a senior in electrical engineering from Ames.