Jim Morris
Jim Morris has worked for newspapers, radio, television and various Websites for more than 47 years. He has been a writer, an editor, an editorial writer and a columnist. For 23 years, Morris worked for the Troy Daily News as sports editor, managing editor and executive editor. In 1994 he began working at the Dayton Daily News as an outdoor sports columnist and night sports desk editor. He retired from the DDN in January of 2010 and is now a freelance writer with his own Website for outdoors stories.
CONTACTIf you think you know, you’re probably wrong. Is it fishing? Is it golf? How about football or basketball? Chances are you are or have at one time been a participant in the nation’s most popular sport.
What is the most popular sport in the nation? If you go by participants, you might be surprised to know, the most popular “sport” is simply exercising with equipment (treadmills, steppers, etc.).
According to statistics from the National Sporting Goods Association, 55.3 million Americans took part in some kind of exercising with equipment in 2010.
Next on the list? Swimming, with 51.9 million. This must take into account all the people on all of the beaches in the country, because its number of participants is surprising, and considerably higher than that for runners/joggers at 35.5 million.
Here is the group’s top 10: 1. exercising with equipment 55,300,000, 2. swimming 51,900,000, 3. camping 44,700,000, 4. bicycle riding 39,800,000 (add 7,200,000 for off-road biking), 5. bowling 39,000,000, 6. running/jogging 35,500,000, 7. fishing 33,800,000, 8. weightlifting 31,500,000, 9. basketball 26,900,000, 10. billiards/pool 24,000,000.
Wait a minute! Where’s golf? And hunting?
Golf comes in 11th with 21.9 million participants and hunting (with firearms) ranks 12th at 16.3 million. I don’t know why they didn’t include archery hunters, because they are a significant number in the total of overall hunters.
Here are a few other numbers you might find interesting: tennis 12,300,000, softball 10,800,000, soccer 13,500,000 (you could probably divide that by 2.30 or something like that to find out the number of soccer moms), football 9,300,000 and baseball 12,500,000.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association for the firearms industry, took the numbers provided by the sporting goods association one step further, showing which sports are the safest from an injury standpoint and which were the most dangerous.
The safest? Camping, where .01 percent of each 100 participants suffered some kind of injury. Second was billiards. I can’t really picture a billiards injury. Coming in at No. 3 in the safest category was hunting with firearms.
It’s not really a surprise for the National Shooting Sports Foundation to point out hunting with firearms came in third with a percentage of injury per 100 participants at .05 percent. And it’s also understandable to see that of those rare incidents, probably two thirds were not gun accidents, but were tree stand mishaps.
The sport with the highest injury percentage per 100? Football at 5.27 percent, followed by basketball 1.96, skateboarding 1.70, soccer 1.68 and wrestling 1.47.
What none of these statistics addressed was the seriousness of the injuries. Football might have the highest chance of injury, but it is very rare to see a football injury result in a fatality. Hunters might experience considerably fewer injuries, but more deaths. The NSSF said statistics showing fatalities in sports were “unavailable.” I thought that to be a bit convenient, but, in fairness, I spent several hours on the Internet without being able to locate such a table.
“Many people have the misconception that hunting is unsafe, but the data tells a different story,” said Jim Curcuruto of the NSSF.
“Comprehensive hunter education classes that emphasize the basic rules of firearm safety and a culture of hunters helping fellow hunters practice safe firearms handling in the field are responsible for this good record.”
Yes, hunter education is credited with building that safety record, but even more than that I believe the tradition of families passing firearms along from one generation to the next involves significant care and safety instruction.
Having covered the Grand American Trapshoot during its final 12 years in Vandalia, I never heard of a single gun accident occurring on the grounds during the tournament. I heard of only one that took place there many years before. And yet there were thousands of people carrying shotguns and ammunition around every day.
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