I’ve been on both sides. When I was in high school and college, I disdained taking an interest in sports because it wasn’t “intellectual.” It seemed to me at the time that only the less intelligent were interested in it. I also had bad associations due to my father’s interest in it, and the fact that I was bad at it.
When I was in graduate school, I found that many of the people who I respected, like my major professor and some of my friends, appreciated sports a great deal. I realized that whether or not you enjoyed sports had nothing to do with how intelligent you were. I became an enthusiastic baseball fan following the NY Yankees on their run from 1976-1978.
Today I’m still a baseball fan. I follow football when the NY Giants are competitive, and I always watch the Super Bowl. I have almost no interest in basketball and hockey. I also don’t follow soccer, but I did try to watch games during the recent World Cup to try to see why it was so popular. I think I got more appreciation for the complexities of the game than I ever had before.
There are some activities I’m interested, and others I am not. But taking pride in not being interested in something strikes me as rather ridiculous.
I share your love for baseball, but I found this to be an odd comment. I’m not aware of any of the major American sports — including baseball — that are not under the control of the TV networks when it comes to commercial breaks. With baseball, it’s most noticeable during games that are being nationally broadcast. Nothing like having a quick pitcher finish his warm-up tosses and then stand around while the umpire looks up at the press box, waiting for the signal that the game can continue.
To your point, though, I think baseball may be the only one of the Big Four where a timeout can’t be called SOLELY for a commercial break. At least, not yet…
Sports are personally no better or worse than reality TV, soap operas, Youtube cat videos, or clubbing. These activities are popular and beloved as well, but for some reason they don’t dominate water cooler conversations and newscasts the same way that sports do. Nor do the fans of these activities presume that their popularity is universal.
Yesterday everyone kept asking if I had watched the Superbowl. I didn’t pout or say “that’s dumb!” I asked who won, who fumbled the ball, and what makes one team more “rootable” than the other. Just to make conversation. And that’s the usual extent of how much I show how detached I am from the world of sports. Unless, that is, someone dares to accuse me of not liking it on purpose. Then you can expect me to start ranting about how stupid and obnoxious sportsfans are (at least some of them).
This approximates my perspective as well. The Super Bowl, and football in general, is a statement of excess. Excessive commercialism, excessive patriotism, excessive violence, excessive authoritarianism, excessive partisanship.
Underneath it all, it’s 31 rich guys pushing our buttons in an attempt to become even richer and more influential. Rooting for laundry is what’s really weird. So take your “Purple Fridays,” good fellow worker bees and move along out of my space.
I don’t think it makes sense to say that people cultivate a disinterest in something. You start out with a disinterest in everything. You have to cultivate an interest in something. It takes no effort to remain disinterested. And the author clearly backs that up, since he mentions how little effort it takes to become marginally interested in a major sport. Obviously, it doesn’t take any effort to remain basically disengaged and ignorant.
People certainly cultivate a distaste for sports, and I think that madmonk is right on the money that a lot of it is a reaction to what seems like an unreasonable amount of interest in them.
Comments about “sportsball” are the equivalent of “I don’t even own a TV”, and both are a reaction to everyone around you spending so much time and energy discussing something that you just don’t care about. But “Go <Team>!” is just as banal, and I certainly see lots more of that one. I imagine that sports fans don’t realize just how boring their affiliation signaling is to people outside of it.
I enjoy watching many sports. The physical feats are impressive, there’s tension and surprise and excitement. In almost any competition played at a high level, even people who don’t know much about it can see the intense level of skill and mastery that goes into it. Having never before in my life watched a tennis match, I ended up watching hours of the US Open last year because a friend was a fan. And I enjoyed every minute of it. But I haven’t bothered to watch tennis since.
Where I get lost is in the tribalism and the emotional involvement. People are always asking me who I’m rooting for, and I can’t find it in me to care. And people treat me like I’m a weirdo because I don’t have an emotional investment in the outcome of a game or a season.
And I disagree that you need to be interested in a particular topic to converse with people from all walks of life. You need to be polite, a good listener, and interested in the person. This isn’t rocket science.
“Did you see the game last night?”
“No, I missed it, what happened?”
“<describes the game>”
“<question about something they mentioned>”
I don’t mind sports, but I’d really prefer to play than watch them. What I don’t like, and please keep in mind this sounds way more acerbic in text than I mean it, is team affiliation.
I really can’t stand it. It screws with me every time I hear it. I’d enjoy sports a lot more if people weren’t fans of a particular team. I always had this issue with high school pep rallies. They could be fun, but I just hated the underpinning that we’re rooting for Us over Them. Look, we’re all people, and I see no reason to wish for the triumph of one arbitrary set of people over others. Sure, maybe some of “our people” are my friends while “their people” are strangers, but I still wish them luck and happiness! I don’t want them to lose!
I don’t mean that in that I think “everyone should get a trophy.” I mean that I prefer analyzing the ebb and flow of the game from a high level, but whenever people talk about sports it’s always just so disgustingly focused on how their guys did against the other guys. I just can’t grok that sort of support.
I actually really like talking with people about sports they play recreationally. It can be fun, but I just loathe professional sports because of team fandoms.
It’s part of why sometimes I like to watch people play “friendlies” (as they say in club football), or watch things like video game speedruns versus the computer. There’s less of a sense of team affiliation and it’s just people trying to do their best. I like watching Tabletop, a show where celebrity guests play board games. Because there’s no rooting for an established team, there’s different people every week. There’s much less rah rah-ing. I hate rah rah-ing.
Yes yes yes, this is exactly how I feel. I find sports boring, but were that my only problem with them, then it would be no different from any other activity I find boring. Different people like to do different things, no big deal.
But when people say we ought to be emotionally invested in the outcome of a game that none of us are even playing… ugh.
I can understand hating football. Three hours to watch 12 minutes of actual action? You’re doing it wrong.
Humans are violent and hierarchical. The tribalism from sports is a safe outlet. Might as well bring back the gladiatorial games.
On the other hand, there’s definitely a bread and circuses component. A lot of intellectual energy is spent on something that really doesn’t mean much. I have to laugh at people talking about “dumb sports fans.” Some of the biggest nerds around obsess over the stats, the best strategies, making predictions, etc. But it’s a release, fantasy escapism. If you could magically make sports disappear that energy wouldn’t be directed to bringing down the Man or making the world a better place, it’d be directed at some other “pointless” entertainment, like TV shows, movies, video games, whatever.
Adolescent resentment is definitely a big component for a lot of effete guys hating on sports. For some reason mathletes didn’t have girls hanging off them like the big macho alpha males throwing the pigskin around. Doesn’t take Freud to crack that mystery.
Personally the only sport I care about is basketball, specifically the NBA. I would argue for its merits over football and baseball, but really the only reason is probably because I was brainwashed into watching it as a kid. You could make parallels with religion and geography as well.
This phenomenon is not limited to sports. I see it in other places. People of a certain class often try to distance themselves from ‘lower’ classes. This can take the form of cultivating disinterest in activities, musical genres, brands, and so forth.
A decade ago or so, when Memphis finally got a major league sports team (the NBA Grizzlies) at the cost of spending million on a sports stadium (and abandoning the stadium we had previously built and were still paying for), a coworker of mine invited me to go with him to some promotional event the team was holding. When I declined–politely, I thought–he asked why, so I told him I wasn’t interested in basketball. At that he got irate. It was my duty, he said, as both a black man and a Memphian, to support the team.
Fuck that shit. I’m already being forced to support FedEx Forum through my tax dollars; I’m not giving the Grizzlies my leisure time as well.
Oh, bullshit. I have a white collar job now, but I come from a working class background. That doesn’t mean I have any obligation or reason to inflict upon myself things I find terribly boring (except, as noted upthread, as necessary to support kids in my family). I am no less authentically working class and no less authentically black because I don’t have any interest in most sports.
No. I pretended to be calm and understanding, and the next time he asked me for help doing a sales proposal, told him to fuck himself. I thought about doing the proposal for him and doing everything wrong so he’d lose the client, but that was over the line.
You know what I see a lot of? Manly interests being esteemed over feminine interests. If women gabbed about soap operas to the same extent that men talk about sports, we wouldn’t hear the end of it. If I asked a guy, “Hey, did you watch Real Wives of Atlanta last night? That shit was awesome!” I’d be greeted with the loudest laughter. And no one would care if I got butthurt over it.
A guy can walk around wearing an oversized basketball jersey and it’s cool. A woman walking around in an oversized cat t-shirt is pathetic. A guy can hang his favorite team pennent up on his wall and get the thumbs up. A woman who hangs up a poster of her favorite chick flick–let’s point and laugh at her, everybody! Because CHICK FLICK LMAO!!
When I confess to not knowing what teams are playing in the Superbowl, all the guys in the breakroom giggle and accuse me of living under a rock. But for some reason I don’t giggle and laugh at them when they don’t know who, say, Crazy Eyes is. (And if I laughed at the facct they don’t know who Paul Krugman or Malcolm Gladwell is, I’d be accused of being a giant snob.)
I see shit like this all the time. A woman into sports = cool tomboy. A woman who likes math and science and comic books = cool nerd. A woman into arts and crafts and cats = uncool weirdo. A woman into soap operas and talk shows = uncool ditz.
Somewhere there’s an alternative universe where the six o’clock news devotes 20 minutes to baking recipes and funny cat videos, and it’s the sportsfans who are wondering why their interests are always being insulted and ignored.
And I’ve seen it in other ways too- a woman acting too tomboyish being seen as a dyke. Her interest in sports/video games “she’s only into it to impress guys”.
And I know exactly who Crazy Eyes is and she is my favorite character on the show.
Disinterist 1.the state of not being influenced by personal involvement in something; impartiality.
“I do not claim any scholarly disinterest with this book”
synonyms: impartiality, neutrality, objectivity, detachment, disinterestedness, lack of bias, lack of prejudice
Since sports fandom transcends socioeconomic status, calling sports a “lower” class interest reveals your own biases. Seasons ticket holders aren’t exactly struggling to put food on the table. Games wouldn’t be highlighted on the local news if advertisers couldn’t count on middle-class fans to tune in. College sports wouldn’t be viable if it they weren’t supported by the educated and affluent.
There will always be people who turn their noses at what is popular. But I don’t think this phenomenon is in effect for the vast majority of people uninterested in sports. Affinity for sports usually starts at an early age, unlike many other interests. Few kids cultivate a taste or distaste for something based on the opposite of what other people like. If anything, they will gravitate to what is most popular. Kids like to conform.
I suspect that by the time someone is in their late teens/early adulthood, the extent to which they are into sports is pretty much set in stone. After that point, the potential for “cultivating” any distaste that isn’t already there is pretty limited. Their distaste may grow over time, but I can’t see anyone going out of their way to hate sports when there are so few incentives for doing that. You risk missing out on parties, outings, and conversations. In exchange for what? No one pats anyone on the back for not knowing who Brett Favre is.
Here’s the general truth that that article was a subset of - if you’re in a Group, then you get cool points for liking what the Group likes, and disliking what the Group dislikes.
If you’re a University Academic working in the humanities (and this is really what he means by ‘highly educated people’, doesn’t he? He sure doesn’t mean engineers) then the cool things to like are Hungarian-Inuit fusion music, organic fair trade food and reading - and you’ll be quite vocal about liking those things. If instead you like Taylor Swift, hotdogs with mustard and the local football team, you’re probably going to shut right up about it. Or proclaim your undying devotion to walrus pierogi on a regular basis.
If you’re a plumber or a taxi driver, the ‘in’ things will probably be quite different. Can’t speak for them, never having been either - for techies, I reckon the music/food/leisure trio would be indie music, death-level curry and, yeah, football (or cricket if you live in Australia and it’s after September)
Basically, even while trying to be humble about his interests, this dude is still being awfully condescending. Lets learn about football not because it might be interesting in itself but so we can converse with this alien ‘taxi driver’ species which otherwise we have nothing to say to at all. Bah humbug. I’ve never found it a problem finding something to talk to with taxi drivers, and I can’t stand sports. Movies? Local traffic? Politics? Come on. There’s got to be something, for any two people, that you both find actually interesting for its own sake.