Iknow how most sports got started.

Take golf. Golf began when a bunch of ancient Scottish shepherds got bored and started hitting rocks at things with their crooks. If you give a bunch of guys crooked sticks and a lot of free time, something is getting beaten on, and it’s probably better it was rocks than each other. Mostly that’s because a trip to the emergency room at that time involved being treated by someone who was painted blue. And you thought the Affordable Health Care Act was scary.

Baseball evolved when Americans looked at cricket and said, “No. That’s … not correct.”

Football is the natural, Darwin-esque and absolutely intuitive progression of soccer into what it was always meant to be and proof the universe has some order and purpose. We all know it’s only truly a sport if everyone involved gets to use his or her hands.

However, the Winter Olympics are upon us, and basically, I have nothing.

I mean, I sort of have the idea that originally there was some sort of transportational motivation for all of this skiing and skating and sledding and such. What started off as how folks got around quickly morphed into who could get the pizza there fastest, and that evolved into competition. As anyone with siblings will tell you, everything eventually evolves into competition.

Still, I don’t understand, basically, anything about the Winter Olympics. Not the events, not the competitors, not the rules, heck, not even the outfits. I tried to watch the first night, and I’m pretty sure I saw a skater dressed up like a nutcracker and a snowboarder with epaulets.

Not sure if they were at the games or Fashion Week.

This used to be so much easier when the point of the Winter Olympics was much more clear and easy to comprehend. Namely, it was for us to beat the Russians.

It didn’t matter if we didn’t understand half the events and thought the other half were insane. As long as, at the end of the thing the scoreboard showed us with more medals than the USSR, the games were a success.

Then we could safely go back to ignoring all the competitions that made them up for four years.

Now the Evil Empire has broken up into about a thousand little countries with names that all look like someone spilled alphabet soup and stuck “stan” after it, the fire has sort of gone out of it.

It just doesn’t feel the same to get all excited about beating Norway. Mostly because, if you live in Norway, a place where it snows 13 months of the year, you really ought to be able to get something out of that besides smoked fish.

On the other hand, if you live in a place where it snows 13 months of the year, you really don’t have much of an excuse if you’re not better at winter-related stuff than folks who have other leisure-time options.

But we have a phrase for people who think skiing down a multi-story ramp into oblivion just to see how far they can go, and it involves blind, flying mammals, natural fertilizer and an unpleasant slang term for mental illness. You can call that a game if you want, but it leaves me with three questions: How do you know if you’re good at a thing like that, why would you want to do it and then why would you want to do it again?

In fact, respected sports journalist Bob Costas may have caught heat for it, but he was basically right when he said most of the newest events in the Winter Olympics look like something from the movie “Jackass.”

However, I’m sort of on the horns of a sporting dilemma here. Football season is over (OK, this is the South.

Football season is never really over. There just aren’t any games for a little bit). Basketball hasn’t sufficiently revved up yet (See: Longest. Season. Ever). And pitchers and catchers are reporting. I have a little athletics-watching hole here, and a snowboarder just flew through it.

For the next few days at least, I’m going to try to figure out what kind of drugs it took to get four people in a bobsled, what the Bulgarian judge could possibly have been thinking and if there’s a full pipe competition to go with the half-pipe events.

It’s either that or “Downton Abbey.” And I really don’t understand that.

GARY SMITH IS A RECOVERING JOURNALIST LIVING IN ROGERS.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 02/13/2014