The truth of the matter is exactly the opposite, in that, for many, sport is as important as life, and often much more exciting.
All sports have their ways of holding a mirror up to life, but cricket seems, more than any other, to tell us about the society we live in – in the ex-colonial world, anyway.
Americans do their own thing, but it is noticeable that even there the same issue applies to baseball.
Both sports are a curious mixture of team and individual.
In the main football is a team sport, tennis is an individual sport.
But cricket and baseball throw up intense individual duels within a team context.
In cricket it is 11 players against one as the bowler prepares to bowl.
This has lent itself to the use of psychological pressure to test the strength of the one individual batsman.
More recently, in the 20/20 version of the game where every ball can be utterly vital and change the course of a match, that pressure can descend on the bowler, and so far they haven't stood up to it as well as most batsmen, who have always had to contend with that pressure ball by ball.
The latest row to have erupted within a sport that is well-known for hitting the headlines has had the effect of focusing people's minds on these moments of psychological testing, nowadays termed 'sledging', where the fielders indulge in a sort of verbal bear-baiting of the batsmen to try to unsettle him and lead him to make a false stroke.
The incident at the centre of the row can be seen as the Indian batsman fighting back against the Australian bear-baiters – who had doubtless questioned his parentage many times – by saying something to one of the Australians – the only non-white one who has so far managed to get into the world champion team.
What he said, which may or may not have contained the term 'monkey' has been interpreted as racist, and the Australian captain immediately reported this to the umpires.
The Indian, who denies having used the term, has been banned for three matches, which makes the incident very fortuitous for the Australians, as he has five times dismissed their captain first ball.
But the focus on 'sledging' has resulted in many Australians being critical of their team, a most extraordinary development.
The fact remains that long-termchampions are never particularly popular, however good they are.
What Australia needed was to lose this otherwise excellent test match, which, without some dodgy umpiring decisions, they probably would have done.
Then we would have really seen what they were made of and admired them all the more.
The last thing you want when facing the best side in the world is luck and justice deserting you, so one feels for the Indians.
But it was unlucky for everyone, and for cricket, that it didn't work out that way, and what could have been, and will be, a great series will now be famous for a very different reason.