All good quotes here but this one is really interesting. I never considered its something the whole family can absolutely watch.
Consider NASCAR, college football in various parts of the country and the fans of some pro sports teams as examples. There are parts of the country where tickets are handed down, where when a season starts game days are the most important thing and where you root for a team not because they win, but because it is what you do. Right Cubs fans.
I watch sports, I like sports I just don’t really talk much about it though. It just seems to bring out the machoness and trashtalking in a lot of guys who are way overly into it.
For the record, as I noted upthread, I’m not a huge sports fan. I mostly just watch football, and even then only about one game a week.
But I find the “put the sports thing in the ball hole” jokes to be pretty weak. They’re just nerd-snobbery, and more or less akin to “I don’t even own a television” type comments.
If you’re interested in games, even if you aren’t interested in sports as a spectator activity, you ought to be interested in them academically as games played professionally, with enormous cultural cachet.
Normally, this would be when I plug my blog, which is nominally about sports and game design, but that hasn’t been updated in over a year.
That’s fantastic.
I remember listening to the radio a half dozen or so years ago, and they were talking about the University of Maryland Basketball team. One of the announcers said – clearly looking at his statistics on a screen somewhere – “The Terrapins are 17 and 0 this season in games where they outscore their opponents.” I very nearly crashed the car.
I don’t get the sports thing, either, ElG. My time visiting Columbus regularly made me realize that during a game was the best time to go shopping – there were never any lines, never any traffic, etc. – and after a home game was a really, really good time to not leave the house.
Reminds me of one sports commentator on a basketball game who sounded very proud of a stat that he came up with: “It’s statistically proven that the team that scores 100 points first is more likely to win the game.”
The sports I watch it’s because of the titanic human struggle it embodies, where people push themselves as far as they can physically go before they collapse, all for some ethereal feeling of ‘glory’. If you can’t see that when you watch golf I feel sorry for you.
The ‘we’ thing does annoy me, it reminds me of when people talk about celebrities as if they personally know them. At least calling them something like “my team” implies you admit you’ve chosen them and they have no knowledge of your existence, whereas “we” sounds suspiciously like you think you’re part of their group.
Lawler’s Law. I think he has more fun with someone “breaking the law”, though you have to remember that Lawler was desperate to coin something, anything, since the guy down the hallway coined virtually everything in basketball (Chick Hearn). But my comment when people come up with faux statistical analysis is that statistically, the team that has more points at game end always seems to win. Always. Who’d a-thunk it?
Well, maybe not Olympic Sailing…
…because it allows us to be lazy?
'Inactivity ‘kills more than obesity’:
Sports, like most things, become more appealing when you understand what’s going on. On their surface, a lot of games seem fairly simple, and a spectator without any background can be lost and bored. Once you start to learn more about what’s happening, the game becomes a lot more interesting.
Football was like this for me, where I always was an Eagles fan, but didn’t really follow most football that much. Then, after getting involved in Fantasy football, I started learning a ton more about much more of the game (because I was watching a lot more games), and then the sport itself became more interesting.
Golf is probably the most extreme example of this. If you don’t play Golf, I can only describe watching Golf on TV as one of the most boring things ever. It’s like watching someone take a walk. But if you actually PLAY Golf, then watching golf starts to actually have some meaning, because you understand why doing what professional golfers do is like a series of fucking miracles on command.
I used to be a huge football fan, but that faded years ago. It really started when I got rid of cable, and couldn’t find any decent streaming alternatives.
Start missing a few games here and there, and before I knew it I just didn’t care anymore.
I know a LOT of people who refuse to get rid of cable/sat solely because of sports.
I would call myself a huge sports fan for most of the reasons that have been already mentioned here.
Growing up in the neighborhood we played baseball, football, basketball, street hockey (on boots with a tennis ball) and ice hockey for most daylight hours we weren’t at school for most of our entire grade school years. I never played high school sports, but baseball in the summer leagues and sports year round in the neighborhood. Watching them by people that perform them at a high level is interesting to me and growing up in the suburbs of Detroit, we always had a big following of the local pro sports teams and the University of Michigan for college.
One of the more unusual ones that I absolutely love watching are pro bowling tournaments, which many may not even consider a sport ;). This is because I understand it on a level that most probably do not. When I was 15 years old, I signed documents waiving my amateur status so that I could bowl in money leagues and tournaments with my dad around the Pontiac area and was a scratch bowler already at that age. In college I sort of fell away from the sport a bit, but it has always been a big passion of mine. I really should have picked a college that had a bowling team, but we did scrape together a mishmash of us bowlers and entered the regional qualifying tournament in Wisconsin one year and actually would have won if one teammate didn’t fail out that term so we were disqualified. I watch the college bowling on television now with all of their coaches and it seems so weird to me as we were all alone when we entered and wondered what the deal was with all the coaches, heh. In hindsight I suppose I wasn’t really eligible to bowl either in an NCAA tournament, but we didn’t care too much as we just wanted a platform to compete. Still, it was quite a rush to compete in the local tournaments in the area, and win a good percentage of them, while meeting new people and traveling to new towns to compete. Just bowling in the stepladder finals in those tournaments where maybe 50-100 people all stop and watch was quite a rush, but I can only imagine what it is like to compete in front of 100,000 people in the Big House or even 20,000 in a hockey or basketball stadium.
Ironically, I’ve sat down to watch sports (rather than it being pure background) recently for the first time in like a decade…well, esports. Hearthstone.
Not a huge amount, but still.
The time is coming when I drop cable, and figuring out how to get sports will be my number one concern.
Speaking as someone who does not have cable, not having sports is a large concern.
We recently went 3-4 weeks without cable, and I was able to get ESPN through the Netflix app, but I think that is because they still thought we were under contract to U-Verse. I need ESPN at least. If ESPN makes themselves available outside of a cable contract I would drop cable like a hot potato.
Baseball is easy to do without cable, as long as you have quality broadband. MLB.tv the class of streaming sports services. The NBA streaming is catching up fast by all reports (I don’t have it).
If you’re a football fan, you might be a little screwed, though I suppose a really good HD antenna that gets local Fox and CBS stations would probably take care of most games. Local teams anyway.
I can’t quit cable quite yet, though, because I really dig MLB Network. During the baseball season, that’s pretty close to 100% of my TV watching. If they added that to mlb.tv, there’d be very little reason for me to continue subscribing.