My family were never sports fans and I have close to zero interest in soccer, gaelic football, hurling, rugby etc. I get a bit annoyed at how much coverage that sports get in the media, print, online, and on TV. I am curious whether there are societies that don’t value sports and expend so much time, energy, and discussion on them.
Sports didn’t seem like a big deal to anyone when I was in Yemen.
I wish.
Still, I think the more major the country, such as America or Byzantium the Golden, the more imperative that the powers that be manipulate the masses of feebler minds into mock rivalries to hinder their critical thinking.
If I lived in Ireland I wouldn’t be interested in any of those sports either. Yawn.
So there’s Yemen maybe. Anywhere else?
Judging from this article, there’s not much football fever in North Korea.
Do mass games count as sports?
Chasidic Judaism.
Interesting OP.
Actually, I’d go so far as to say Ashkenazic Jewry as a whole, before the Haskalah “Jewish Enlightenment” era in the 19th century. That’s a pretty big and old culture, needless to say.
No idea on Sephardic Jewry.
But my God! how would you ever know whether or not you’re living in a great city if you got your wish??
That’s the justification we’re hearing day and night here in Seattle as the media bombards us with the life-or-death importance of bringing pro basketball back to town.
And they make a good point. What would Paris or Berlin be without whoever their soccer teams are? And who would remember Renaissance Florence if its world-class bocce-ball hurlers had never existed?
Only took two posts. Awesome.
Interesting. Is that because it’s naughty, or just “meh”?
Off hand, my guess of the current Hassidic man/boy in the street response is meh, more specifically that it’s simply uninteresting goyische naches, what goyim, the non-Jews, find fun. Like hunting, eg, for the classic example. (It’s not a rabbinic term or anything, and is just a common description for stuff they find weird and different, not necessarily bad.)
Although I think I’ve seen kids at recess playing basketball. I mean, they’re kids, they’ve gotta move around somehow.
Better you should study Torah if you free time.
Somalia… Probably.
North Korea qualified both men’s and women’s teams in their respective last World Cups, so they must be playing it pretty well there. It may be that the starving people don’t go to the games for fun, but the country is turning out athletes.
FWIW, there were Hasids and other Orthodox playing baseball in The Chosen, although the Hasidic team was something of an aberration, and the coach sat on the bench reading Torah.
The NBA had a lot of Jewish players at one time, but presumably they were not Orthodox.
I guess it depends on your standard. North Korea’s men’s team is currently ranked 115 in the (extremely flawed) FIFA rankings and 57 in the ELO rankings. They barely qualified out of Asia (they relied on goal differential to beat out Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the UAE, all bad teams), it’s the first WC they’ve been to since the 60s, and they finished 0-3 with a -11 goal differential.
Unlikely. Soccer is pretty universally huge throughout Africa. You can play soccer on just about any patch of land, with next to no equipment, so it’s not something likely to stop even in adverse situations. And the drama between national teams (and pride in African players in the international arena) is a big deal throughout the continent. It’s a bit of a universal language, and I don’t think any warlord or dictator has the power to stop it.
Here is a good article from 2010 showing the persistence of Somalian soccer players under the threat of violence:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/10/AR2010071002033.html
Is salmon fishing a sport?
I suppose that it is the nature of men to want to demonstrate that they are better than their fellows at something. This makes them competitive, and over the years the competition has evolved from seeing who could collect the most heads/wives/whatever, into kicking a bladder around a field and then to just watching others doing it.