Definitely football.

I've been watching football for a long time and I can tell you that no game has the ability to generate in me the kind of passion and adrenaline rush that football generates.

It is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, sports on earth. It is also extremely lucrative and has propelled a lot of struggling youths that would otherwise have been outcasts to the very top of success.

Of course you can argue that a lot of sports do this too and you'd be right, so I'm going to tell you the peculiar reasons why football is my number one sport:

1. I'll start by admitting that I was rasied on football. My parents my whole extended family, including my mother, all loved the sport. And growing up first thing I learned about football is its ability to unite a family, people of a city, a state, and an entire country.

Oh my country has gone through a lot of tough patches, and is still going through them, including a brutal case of seccesion in the Biafra War where a lot of people lost their lives.

But when football comes on. When the national team plays, the WHOLE country unites! The brotherhood becomes so strong, that you'd think we all have the same collective brain. We stand by each other and encourage each other. If our team should fall behind we rally around them and around each other; we give each other hope.

And you start to see the beauty in it and wonder why we can't be like this every single day!

And if the team loses you'll see a man from the north consoling a man from the south, and everyone engrossed in the same uniform sadness. We feel each other's pain, and in that pain we learn to love each other--all because of football.

2. Uniting the whole world. Another beauty of football is that it has the ability not only to unite people from the same country, but people from ALL OVER the world!

It's remarkable any way you choose to look at it. The FIFA World Cup is the largest event in sports. It's one of the event with the highest congregation of humans around the world, and it is a beauty to see.

In the same city you find folks from all over the continent, with different race, ethnicity and creed, all coming together to support their countries, and then uniting with others--even those not from their country- - in that support.

Isn't that just remarkable? You see people different from you on three grounds of color, race, height, preference etc, but you don't see any difference at all, all you see is someone with the same passion as you, wanting to support his country as much as you want to support yours. And you not only understand that, you admire it! You unite over it!

You don't believe me? Ask anyone who attended or watched the recently concluded world cup in Russia. A friend of mine who attended can't stop telling me about the different beautiful ways of life he learnt from his Mexican friends and Russian Friends and Brazillian friends he met over there. He even cooks Russian food now!

3. Immense pain and joy. I'd be lying if I said as a football fan it will all be a rosy journey. Because truth is IT WILL NOT. Oh you'll be heartbroken. You will feel the pain of your team losing. And it is such a huge pain, I tell you, to have your team lose a final, or come back from two goals down only to lose at penalties. All these are remarkably painful and heartbreaking, but that's what makes it interesting. The hurt is what makes life worth it. Without the pain and hurt you can never learn to appreciate life's joy and happiness.

Oh and there is a lot of joy and happiness in football, way more than the pain and hurt. The joy and happiness you know when your team comes back from two goals down, when your team scores a last second winner, absolutely terrifi . I've experienced this joy and I tell you there's simply nothing like it!

4. And lastly, I love football because it is a game of endless possibilities. The underdog can upset the giant. Nobody can be written off. A team can come back from a five goal deficit. And all these I take as the game's commentaries on life, telling us we can achieve anything, even if life is against us. Even if we're the underdogs, even if we've failed a million times.

Football shows us that as long as we believe, and keep trying, NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE.

Cheers.