Greetings heathens, zealots, web denizens and the rest of you!

As you may recall a recent decision by the Canada Winter Games to give boxing the boot in favour of trampoline (withering sigh) ruffled my feathers somewhat.

My argument was basically this: boxing is a vastly superior sport – I actually have hard time considering trampoline a sport in any real sense anyway – is a truly global sport, unlikely trampoline, and is the biggest draw at the games. Moreover, Canada’s rather weak national boxing program, often its own worst enemy, needs the games as a way to help it improve.

And yes, I did mock trampoline as a sport. To wit:

I’ve never understood trampoline as a competitive event. It’s always struck me as gymnastics for gymnasts and divers that didn’t quite make it. To put it another way trampoline is to sport what air guitar is to chess. Sure it might be a bit of fun, but it’s not exactly one of the great endeavors of the species.

I might also have later called trampoline as a sport “dopey.”

This assessment has annoyed a few trampolining types. In particular Keiran Crouch, a competitive trampoliner from North Bay who responded to my rant about the winter games with a passionate defense of trampoline by saying, in part, that trampoline didn’t do anything to me, it’s fun, kids like it, it helps keep them active so they don’t morph into little Jabba’s and he has a six pack! Shazam!

He also suggests I watch Youtube videos of Canuck trampoline champ Jason Burnett, because if I did it would surely change my point of view.

Well in fairness to young Keiran, here is Burnett in action. Witness the drama!

Consider me officially….underwhelmed. Ok, yes, I can say with a high degree of certainty that if I tried even one of Mr. Burnett’s daredevil flips I would break my neck and spend my days drooling and eating pre-blended steaks.

That said, even recognizing the obvious talent of someone like Burnett, I still don’t think that trampoline is a sport that ought to have replaced boxing. Boxing should not have been given the boot in the first place, but if it had to go, trampoline simply isn’t a worthy successor.

As a spectator sport it lacks everything boxing has: compelling personal stories, high drama and the testing of the human body and spirit that is exactly what the games (based off of the Olympics after all) are supposed to be about. Legendary trainer Teddy Atlas (whose commentary can be heard on the recently released Fight Night Champion. Let me know when trampoline gets its own top selling video game) calls the boxing ring “the chamber of truth.” Once you are in the ring, under fire, there is nowhere to hide from yourself. Who and what you really are will emerge whether you want it to or not.

Compare the beyond (I will say interesting) performance of Burnett to the high drama of something like Gatti vs. Ward I:

But let us for a moment consider something that young Keiran said about fitness. Trampoline is fun (hard to argue against that) and it helps keep kids fit. Well, those are both great things. Certainly, in a time in which kids exercise less, fill their bodies with junk and spend more time playing something like Fight Night than they do working out in the gym. So Keiran has a point…only to a point.

Yes, any kind of exercise is better than no exercise. But as I have argued before, setting the bar low doesn’t get us very far. I mean, its like the new national fitness standards which appeared to designed to get people doing SOMETHING, but the bar is so low that something is pretty close to nothing.

Now to be fair to Keiran and the trampoline crowd, what they do has to be well above the national standards. But where does it rank among other activities, and boxing in particular?

Not very well.

I came across this study, thanks to my trainer Terry Fowler over at Fight Fit in St. Catharines, that ranked the physical demands of 60 sports against each other to find out which was the most difficult sport in the world.  ESPN got a gaggle of scientists together to measure demands on strength, agility, endurance, and to eye coordination and other indicators. Boxing won by a knockout.

Hockey, wrestling, football and basketball ranked near the top after boxing. Gymnastics, the vastly more difficult cousin of trampoline (which is not ranked at all) ranked a distant 8th. And given that gymnastics requires insane feats of strength like the iron cross on the still-rings, it’s not really fair to compare it trampoline. By my non-scientific eye, it would be closer to cheer-leading, which ranked 52 out of 60.

So it’s true, doing trampoline is better for you than say, eating a bag of cookies, but if the goal is get kids fit and healthy – and do it in venue that can inspire them onto to great things – then boxing is a measurably better fit that trampoline and yet another reason why it should not have been booted from the games. I am sure the committee could find it in its heart to include both, but if a choice has to be made, the chamber of truth should win out.

(By the way, there is a online petition going around to try and get the game’s committee to change it’s mind. Check out here.)

So, now that we have seen the admittedly amazing Mr. Burnett in action, I give you Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Shane Mosely, who are titans by comparison: