Sports are fun to watch; they can provide you with a connection to a place, give you a chance to learn about strategy, are an easy way to strike up a conversation with somebody else, and are a good way to feel a part of something bigger than just yourself. Why is the article "Why Sports Are a Sad and Dangerous Waste of Time" and not "Why Watching TV or Watching Movies or Reading Dumb News Stories On The Internet Are Sad and Dangerous Wastes of Time", given that by basically every metric the author provides (people get really worked up over them, people get into big arguments over them, people cheer wildly for the participants, billions of dollars get spent on them, and the consumers don't accomplish anything useful by consuming) apply to them? Is it because the author likes watching movies, doesn't like sports, and is bothered by the fact that people like a thing he doesn't like?
People don't get worked up over movies, TV shows, or dumb news stories on the internet the way they do about sports. They don't pledge allegiance to a single movie, go out and buy costumes displaying the movie's emblems, or engage in verbal and physical conflict with fans of rival movies.
Well, some do. But we consider those people to be nutcases.
No, the only other things that people get as worked up about as they do sports are nation, religion, and sometimes politics. Which, now i come to think about it, are subjects that are even more ridiculous than sports.
Your list is incomplete; it should read "nation, religion, and sometimes politics, and also justin bieber, twilight, harry potter, the hunger games, jennifer lawrence, and whichever celebrity does something crazy in the next week".
Actually, I'd say that HN has too much politics. Almost every week or every other week someone brings up Basic Income (for the 500th time) and that spawns a 500-comment thread. Personally, I'd prefer it if Hacker News stayed purely technical (there are other forums where people can bash each other over politics all they want).
Sports are fun to watch, I just watched a great Elite Eight game.
The problem is that people are just committing far too much mindshare to sports these days. ESPN has three channels devoted pretty much to just talking about sports, in great detail, including gossip, drama, recaps, minutia, etc.
People, and let's be honest, mostly men, sit there consuming this stuff all day, reading about it online, talking about it with friends, watching it in the evenings, playing fantasy sports...
Past a certain point it goes beyond entertainment and into the realm of tribalism. There's just far too much emotional and mental investment into this stuff.
Honestly, I feel like the amount of mindshare given over to sports pales in comparison to the amount of mindshare given over to movie stars, musicians, and celebrities. I only found out about the Seahawks and their success because I grew up in Seattle and made an effort to see how they were doing. I don't listen to Miley Cyrus at all, but couldn't help learning how everybody in the world felt about her performance at the VMAs. Why isn't the article about that?
Sports is cool because it's a documentary-style narrative about people trying to overcome their limitations and most of the time coming up short. To be honest, I enjoy the failures than the successes, the show of vanity and insecurity than the squeeky-clean polished professional athlete.
Some cool sports-related books and doc's I've watched over the years,
Seven Seconds or Less; about Phoenix Sun's "Run & Gun" season which reads more like a kladeiscope novel about the star players, role players, injured players and coaching staff. The Sun ultimately falls short of their goal of winning an NBA championship. The morale of the story is that it doesn't really matter if you win in the end, the point is to try something different (score in 7 seconds or less of your posession clock, play unselfishly and make the extra pass). And even a Canadian unatheletic, relatively undersized white guy can become the NBA Back-to-Back MVP, by owning up to who he is.
The Finish Line; about Steve Nash (the former MVP)'s potential last season with the LA Lakers which reads more like 'Old Man & The Sea,' about a man's denial of his aging, struggle to defy against it and his slow acceptance and somehow finding dignity and putting on a last fantastic hooray against the elements.
Skip Bayless, Stephen A's conversation with TO; which watches more like the last act (on St.Helena) of Kubrick's "Napoleon" if it was made). It shows a broken down once high flying and flameboyant professional athlete coming to terms with his vanity and ego, after it's already too late. But that's the beauty too, of a man accepting who he was, how the situations turned against him and appreciating life because the circumstances forced him to grow, even if it meant no longer in the NFL.
Sports are awesome. My fiancee is crazy into hockey; she grew up in Detroit and is a passionate fan of the Red Wings. After we got serious, I started tracking the Wings so I could chat with her about how the season is going, and now I have a lot of fun listening to their games on the radio and tracking their season (although this current season is pretty rough). I grew up in Seattle and this year's football season + the Superbowl was incredible for me; I spent YEARS being salty over the 06 loss to the Steelers and the utter curbstomping of the Broncoes almost made up for it.
I wonder how this guy feels about the Olympics. Does he bitch and moan about "ugh I can't believe people watch this crap" when people are rooting for Michael Phelps, etc?
I always hated sports. I got caught in some negative feedback loop where I never practiced so I was never any good; I was never any good so I never practiced.
Also it didn't help that I had no siblings or neighbor kids around, kicking a ball around by yourself gets boring quite quickly. I've never been fast or coordinated enough to catch things reliably, it's like my brain didn't come with some physics module that's standard feature on most models. And due to when my birthday fell, I was always one of the youngest kids in my grade, which didn't help either.
Sports really suck if you're at the bottom end of the curve. Usually I ended up waiting or something to happen or running around to various places. On the rare occasion I had a chance to make a difference in the outcome, I usually screwed it up. Nobody wanted me on their team, and I didn't enjoy playing.
I'm not really unhappy; if I had a chance to design the "character sheet" I was born with, I don't know that I'd do anything different. In RPG's and such, I tend to prefer tricky builds that are unbalanced and optimized for unconventional strategies.
You're talking about playing sports. The article is about watching sports. Or, since it's not just watching but talking about, identifying with, and generally obsessing over, fanboying sports.
The two are, i think, not at all related. Indeed, if we accept the analysis in the article, they are opposites - fandom is about subsuming your identity into a herd defined by its submission to some set of idols, whereas participation is about asserting your identity as an individual or member of a team defined by your (intended) domination over your rivals.
Wow. I've read anti-sports rants before, but never one so lengthy and pointless. It reminds me a lot of the hate I see for pop stars on the internet. The vitriol over the Biebers and One Directions simply because they're popular in the mainstream. My immediate reaction is "Lots of people like something you don't like. Get over it." But ultimately, it's a completely elitist attitude that in this case ignores the cultural basis for sports fandom. He looks at all the ape-like sports fans and wonders why they can't behave like civilized men. Like him.
In summary:
- He doesn't like watching sports.
- He once heard about a guy who abused his girlfriend and was also a sports fan. He concludes that jerks will be jerks despite the existence of sports and the anecdote was essentially unrelated.
- He's felt the same shared joy and admiration except about things other than sports and gets why that was exciting but doesn't feel the same way about sports.
Great. Particularly ill-conceived is this notion that we are being "tricked" into rooting for our regional teams despite their being full of non-local players. What he doesn't get is the team is the fans, not the players. We are the constant throughout the team's history. As the customer base, we are the reason for the existence of the team. In a sense, we pay to fund the thing. Players may come and go, but without us there would be no team. That's why we might simultaneously cheer for a hockey team full Canadians and a baseball team full of Dominicans. No one is "duping" us. I also fail to see the point of the wrestling analogy but I suppose it all goes back to the idea that we're all rubes.
Of course he has a friend who is an Eagles fan, so it couldn't be that he doesn't understand the cultural basis. And he likes to watch soccer sometimes so it couldn't possibly be that he "just doesn't get it". And he's not judging sports fans because they don't choose what is enjoyable to them-- But why sports?!
I've had so many positive sports-related experiences, memories celebrating with family and friends, countless strangers befriended simply because we were both fans, it's no wonder for me. Why does it have to be sports? Because we like them. Why do you struggle to change society instead of accepting that this aspect of the mainstream isn't for you?
