Because this simply has never been bettered, and probably never will.

Good grief, this is older than I am.

Wishing everyone a terrific 2013!

And presaging what’s ahead while riffing on an Olympic theme, as only Kyle Whelliston can.

The nephew of a British World War I veteran has come across a letter his uncle wrote about the famous 1914 Chrismas truce in the trenches around Ypres that included an impromptu game of soccer between the warring sides. Says Imperial War Museum historian James Taylor:

‘Various accounts of the truce exist so to have one surface after not been seen for almost a century is quite remarkable.

‘This letter is of great historical value and the truce was the last bit of chivalry of the First World War.

‘The war had already been costly but it was about to get far worse.

‘One of the reasons they were playing football was because they weren’t able to communicate very well due to the language barrier.

‘This was a way for them to share something. It wouldn’t have been an organised match or anything, more of a free-for-all kick around.

‘There is something appealing about the idea that nations could settle their differences in sport rather than war.’

The truce and the deceptive impressions it left would come to symbolize, in the estimation of many, the death of the pre-modern world and the belief that the war would soon be over.

Sgt. Clement Barker was among those who was overly optimistic. He survived the war, which continued on through three more Christmases without another truce, or another football being kicked out of a trench in a similar fashion.

On behalf of my fellow heathen secularists, we’re taking this day to indulge in our annual Airing of the Grievances.

Enjoy!

Only a few hours after Jovan Belcher of the Kansas City Chiefs shot his girlfriend to death and then took his own life, grand pronouncements about the cause of this tragedy predictably made their way into publication, and on television airwaves.

With only threadbare facts available to them beyond the deaths that left an infant girl an orphan, the sports media rushed swiftly into high gear, tapping into touchy social and political terrain. This isn’t unusual, given the competitive 24/7 environment that demands instant reactions to feed page views, propels ratings and positions sports media figures prominently in the “conversation” still to come.

I won’t wade into the gun control comments made by Bob Costas on NBC’s Sunday Night Football, and similar sentiments expressed by Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock. This is a controversy that, not surprisingly, is taking on a life of its own, and now the expected pushback has commenced.

Lost amid this debate is an even more dubious claim by ESPN’s Jemele Hill. For her, the murder-suicide was cause to dust off stale gender feminist arguments about athletes and domestic violence dating back to the fractious 1990s.

Before I dig further into her column, it’s important to note two things: Her missive was posted on espnW, the Worldwide Leader’s female-oriented site.

Also crucial here is a sentence that Hill writes high in her piece, but only in passing and doesn’t bother to revisit:

“As of now, it does not appear Belcher had any history of domestic abuse.”

Kasandra Perkins was the victim of a violent act — a fatal shooting in her home at the age of 22, just three months after she gave birth to Belcher’s daughter.

But instead of stopping there, realizing that writing anything more along these lines would amount to sheer speculation, Hill descends down an unfortunate cultural rabbit hole:

Regardless of whether we ever learn the full story behind what led to this unspeakable tragedy, violence against women is a significant problem in our society. In sports, it’s sometimes met with indifference until something like this happens.

Hold on here. In the space of two sentences, we have an admission from Hill that we don’t know if the Belcher-Perkins relationship was a physically abusive one, to her broad-based lament about domestic violence in society, including the macho world of organized athletics.

The “full story” be damned — a deadline looms, after all — Hill’s argument spirals dismally from there. She cites former Syracuse quarterback Don McPherson, who proudly describes himself as a “feminist” member of the College Football Hall of Fame. Always prepared with the evergreen quote, McPherson bemoans how the sports world doesn’t want to grapple with these issues.

Next, Hill goes to another leading male critic of the male sports culture, professor Jeff Benedict, who tracks arrests of athletes, and who found a high percentage of them in a recent survey period involved domestic violence. Nowhere in her piece does she question how many of these arrests led to actual convictions. As during the ’90s, when this issue first resonated — including the debunked Super Bowl and domestic violence connection — accusation is tantamount to guilt.

Hill drops numbers from a National Coalition Against Violent Athletes survey — a survey from 1995, seventeen years ago, during the height of the hysteria that Benedict, among others, helped to foment.

More recently, she mentions a domestic violence case against former Oregon running back LaMichael James, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, as well as a nasty, threatening text message sent by former Florida running back Chris Rainey to a woman.

And then there’s the 2010 murder of Virginia lacrosse player Yeardley Love by George Huguely, a member of the Virginia men’s lacrosse team, which Hill references to set up her essential point:

“It also raises questions about how violence against women is marginalized by the legal system and how some coaches, based on the weak punishments, desensitize athletes to the issue.”

That we still don’t know anything about whether there was domestic abuse between Jovan Belcher and Kasandra Perkins doesn’t stop Hill from indicting the male sports culture on a platform designed for the consumption of female readers. It is a cheap and easy appeal to their sense of outrage before any relevant facts are known, and it prompts an emotional response instead of cultivating understanding:

“Sports is supposed to teach men the proper values — leadership, teamwork and accountability — but locker rooms also sometimes promote a twisted sense of masculinity and pander to jock culture that is firmly rooted in being anti-woman.”

To use a still-emerging story to rehash this litany of woman-as-perpetual-victim is disgraceful. It insults every actual victim of domestic violence, regardless of gender and whether it’s at the hands of an athlete or not.

As I wrote earlier this year about hockey players at Boston University, the culprit is not a “male sports culture.” To blame external forces for criminal behavior is to absolve individuals of responsibility for their own actions. Rae Carruth is sitting in a prison cell because he murdered his pregnant girlfriend. That he was a player for the Carolina Panthers at the time generated voluminous coverage, but he did not kill her because he was an athlete.

We may never completely know what drove Javon Belcher to do what he did on Saturday. Other speculation centers on mental illness, and the effects of concussions. But that’s all it is — speculation.

Jemele Hill would like for you to think, without any evidence, that the football universe he inhabited may have played a part in the murder of a young woman before he turned his gun on himself.

But from the Chiefs’ post-game locker room came this response from quarterback Brady Quinn, also a product of the “jock culture” denounced by Hill. His dignified and deeply humane thoughts, devoid of ideology and rampant speculation, have been largely ignored amid the hot air coming from the sports media:

“The one thing people can hopefully try to take away, I guess, is the relationships they have with people. I know when it happened, I was sitting and, in my head, thinking what I could have done differently. When you ask someone how they are doing, do you really mean it? When you answer someone back how you are doing, are you really telling the truth? We live in a society of social networks, with Twitter pages and Facebook, and that’s fine, but we have contact with our work associates, our family, our friends, and it seems like half the time we are more preoccupied with our phone and other things going on instead of the actual relationships that we have right in front of us. Hopefully people can learn from this and try to actually help if someone is battling something deeper on the inside than what they are revealing on a day-to-day basis.”

With college football rivalry games on the slate this weekend, The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Futterman takes a long look at a signature event that’s threatened by continuing realignment, conference championship games and, starting in 2014, a four-team playoff for the national title.

As of this season’s there’s no more Texas-Texas A & M game, nor a Kansas-Missouri game. Saturday’s clash involving Notre Dame and USC is notable only in that the Irish are ranked No. 1 for the first time in nearly two decades. Futterman writes that while “rivalry games are selling tools,” the larger national imprint for enticing regional matchups is making increasing and unrelenting demands:

“Given all that passion, one might think college football would do everything to preserve it. But the theme of big-time sports the past quarter century is that more is better, especially when it comes to television money. The new TV contract for the football playoff is likely to be worth as much as $7 billion during the next decade.

“The test of whether that investment is worthwhile will be if the regional passion can continue to evolve into national obsession. The traditional rivalries clearly have their enduring appeal. But the tide appears to be turning. Population growth and the growing popularity of football, especially among young African-American children, have fostered a boom in talent. Now there are enough good players to build quality teams at Florida and Alabama, but also at Boise State and Kansas State, the season’s biggest surprise.”

Read more: “The Battle for the Soul of College Football”

The addition of Maryland and Rutgers to the Big Ten sent off shock waves throughout the college athletic world, and prompted some sharp, white-hot commentary right off the bat. Dana O’Neil of ESPN.com:

“The NCAA will have you believe that runners and agents are the most insidious cancer in the game today, that the notion that athletes are on the take has disenchanted the fan base to the point of no return.

“The NCAA is wrong.

“The commissioners are the ones on the proverbial take and everyone knows it.”

Read more: “Do caretakers of college sports care?”

Pat Forde of Yahoo! Sports drives down to the level of the athletic directors at the two schools to lay the biggest blame:

“Two largely underachieving, financially irresponsible athletic programs are parlaying their geographic proximity to major metropolitan areas into membership in the Big Ten. They’ve done very little on the field of competition to deserve it. But that’s not what drives conference affiliation these days.

“College Sports, Inc., is no meritocracy.

“Rutgers and Maryland might as well be the airline and automotive industries. They’re losing money left and right, but because they have inherent value (thanks to their TV markets of New York, Washington D.C. and Baltimore), here comes the institutional bailout.”

Read more: “Maryland, Rutgers cash in on their incompetence with move to Big Ten”

At Sports on Earth, Patrick Hruby lights into the NCAA in the wake of the Shabazz Muhammad “investigation” and likens its enforcement of amateurism to the War on Drugs:

“If all of the above seems unfair . . . well, that’s because it is. In college sports, justice isn’t blind; it’s a blind, trembling man throwing darts in a pitch-black room, hoping to strike a coveted recruit getting a free pair of shoes, or maybe a star player receiving a cash-stuffed envelope from an overzealous friend of the program. And things can never be otherwise. Not so long as the NCAA continues to promote and defend a false ideal rooted in ersatz morality; an unworkable mandate that makes no practical sense; a corrupting system that turns legitimate, well-meaning oversight (specifically, looking out for the safety and welfare of campus athletes) into a risible, dispiriting wabbit hunt, an endless, unwinnable war against both human nature and basic economics.”

Read more: “It’s past time for the NCAA to put an end to amateurism”

Unless you’re a Dallas Cowboys fan, it’s hard not to like Washington Redskins rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III, who had an outstanding Turkey Day game on Thursday. At The Washington Times, Rich Campbell explores the qualities the reigning Heisman Trophy winner inherited from his father:

“Robert Jr. met his son’s desire with a commitment just as deep.

“He would go to the library and watch videos of great quarterbacks. He studied Dan Marino’s quick release, Ken Stabler’s scrambling ability, Joe Montana’s poise and John Elway’s strength — to name a few — and contrasted what he saw with videos the family shot of Robert III’s games and practices.

“When he took over the local AAU track and field program when Robert III was 12, he taught himself the mechanics of field events. He studied how Olympic gold medalist hurdlers Edwin Moses and Allen Johnson ran and jumped. Father and son analyzed the video, always striving for that perfect amalgamation of skills.”

Read more: “RG3’s traits passed down from father”

When I created Extracurriculars two years ago, I set out to explore away-from-the-field matters in sports.

Since that’s just as expansive a category as the games, I realized I was risking becoming too broad and unfocused. And for a while, it did seem that way.

In the last year or so, I’ve devoted much of the space here to women’s sports as I prepared my e-book, “Beyond Title IX,” which was published in June.

While blogs are testaments to the power of a niche, this blog’s niche was meant to be a bit more wide-ranging.

My fresh emphasis on non-playing topics comes via sports books and history, documentaries, reviews, arts and culture.

I won’t be delving much into sports business and sports media, subjects with many excellent blogs and websites devoted to them. Too many, I think.

They also don’t fit into the approach I’m taking, and it is an experimental one, which includes exploring the connection between sports and the imaginative arts, twins of a singular creative impulse.

It sounds like a difficult connection to make, and I’ll likely stumble around a lot along the way. But my best childhood memories and experiences derive from a blending of these two worlds.

I grew up in an Atlanta suburban home within walking distance of a public park and a public library. When I wasn’t playing softball or tennis, or swimming, I was at the library, browsing and checking out books.

These activities sparked the passions for sports and reading and writing that still make me feel like a kid as I settle into middle age. I don’t think of them as separate spheres, despite our contemporary, media-imposed divide.

My thoughts about this also stem from a passage in Michael Novak’s excellent book, “The Joy of Sports,” that has been a massive influence on me:

“I cannot forever split my life into two, half in love with sports, half in love with serious thought. Life seeks unity.”

Novak was on to something that has gotten lost since he first expressed those sentiments in the late 1970s, as big-time sports have become hopelessly corporate, bloated and disposable, relentless spectacles for passive entertainment consumption.

I also was reminded of the connection between sports and the larger, broader culture — and not just pop culture — when I read, right before the London Games began, about the Olympic medals given for art between 1912 and 1952. The Cultural Olympiad that exists today was created because then-IOC dictator Avery Brundage couldn’t tolerate professional artists being rewarded in what was to be a purely amateur endeavor. (h/t for this link from @agirlasmoke)

With our popular sports world now so dominated by commercial imperatives, and with the jaded media landscape wallowing in celebrity, scandal and 24/7 publishing schedules, I want to take a few steps back — as well as a few deep breaths — and get back to why we’re drawn to sports in the first place. And why many of us can’t live without them.

The answers aren’t to be found in the distraction of constant Tweeting (guilty as charged!), sounding off on talk radio or speculating on which pro athlete a Kardashian sister will target next. What a very wise observer calls “sportz” has sadly become the media-contrived default for our sports experiences.

Real sports are far more elemental to authentic human culture than anything you’ll come across in “Booyah” culture, which Novak anticipated when he wrote:

“If sports were entertainment, why should we care?”

I lost my Christian faith a long time ago, and detest the holiday shopping frenzy that turns many decent, intelligent Americans into Pavlovian dogs.

But I try not to take all this too seriously as the day that secular humanists like me dread the most. I’m not an “avid atheist,” just a doubter trying to understand the appeal of religious tradition that many find comforting.

So while I “mark” Festivus by carrying on with my usual routine of writing, Tweeting and media saturation (no Airing of the Grievances here), I’ll let George Costanza and friends have the appropriate fun with all this.

Happy Holidays, no matter how you’re observing. And even if you’re not.