I suspect that’s what’s driving the Facebook posts.
From the Economist: [INDENT] Even those who think sport is silly must pause to acknowledge the Super Bowl. The ten most watched television broadcasts in American history have all been Super Bowls, as have the next ten. By a conservative estimate, 112m Americans watched it last year. The number who will see the game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots on February 1st is slightly more than the number who say they attend church once a week. [/INDENT] This sports non-fan was surprised that only 112 million watched the game. That seems low given the hype.
The funny part is that American football is probably near its peak. Over time an increasing number of parents won’t want their kids to risk head injury on the field, whether in high school or college. The accumulation of anecdotes will put a damper on fan support. American football could very well go the way of boxing, once wildly popular. At least that’s the what the article asserts (sub req).
I’ve posted before here that I wish there was a sports newsletter for non-sport folk. Not something I want to read, something I have to read.
If not being interested in competitive masturbation alienates me from competitive masturbators and gives me nothing to talk about with them, that is a cross I have to bear.
The article the OP linked was titled “Cultivated Disinterest in Professional Sports,” though in its first two paragraphs it mentions cultivated indifference, cultivated disdain, and cultivated ignorance.
I want you and The Economist to be right about football’s popularity trajectory. There’s still a chance that it gets ever more ingrained in the nation’s psyche. But The Economist is very right about one thing – things change. Things always change (except for political corruption). One columnist recently quipped something along the lines that football has never been so popular yet so much under attack.
As a fairly recent turncoat, I’m at an interesting point in relationships with football-loving friends. I still like them a lot but it remains to be seen if they are able to return the affection to someone who doesn’t care that the Ravens’ offensive co-ordinator is moving on.
I don’t hate sports or anything but watching sports is usually pretty boring, especially football and baseball, and maybe golf. Those are incredibly boring. If I do watch sports I’ll watch basketball, soccer, tennis.
But I admit I don’t get sports fans and I’m not crazy about the special status they get. I’m weird as hell if I play too many video games, or god forbid go to a con, or even get dressed up. But it’s perfectly fine for sports fans to dress up in their team colors. If I spend too much money on my hobby I’m considered asocial but spending hundreds of dollars for a player’s jersey is OK.
And one more thing. When I drove into Cisco last year whatever team it was had won the Big Game. The entire street was alive. That part was fun, I figured out which team it was (I can’t even remember) and as we drove by, or talked to people, I’d say, “Go ___!” But then later in the night came the drunkenness, and the rioting, and I believe two people got killed over it. I can tell you that D&D players never rioted and broke windows and smashed things.
I do make an effort to at least find out who is playing in the Super Bowl and pick a team. But I don’t watch. Part of it is - have you seen how boring watching any sports is? What with interviews of the player’s wives’ cousins, etc?
Thread is a bit TL;DR so I may be recapitulating what others have said.
I am not anti-sports; I am a devoted baseball fan… but basically, only of the Giants. If they fade, so does my interest in the overall sport. I can fake a vague interest in football but probably couldn’t list half the teams or cities and am increasingly repelled by Big NFL Inc. Basketball… sigh. The only pro team Sacramento ever got was the Kings. Then we move to the heart of UConn territory. And I pretty much loathe basketball, even from a great distance… how can you like a sport that’s all squeaking shoes, thumps, and playoffs?
I don’t go out of my way to diss any sports, but some days the social/community pressure is so high, and there’s so much meaningless blathering about whatever sport happens to be dominating TV that week, that I’ll venture a few distancing snarks. I really delight in being able to deliver an utterly innocent, “What game?” - especially this past weekend.
So I don’t “cultivate a disinterest” - but I do maintain a layer of slightly reactive armor.
I think there’s a place to make it known to the thundering herd(s) that there really are some of us who don’t give two shits for either the Pats or the Hawks, or UConn or Boston or Joisey. Not hate them. Not have other team or sport alliances. Just don’t give a poop, about them, that sport, or pro sports in general. Call it a gentle reminder to the jersey-obsessed that sports have their place… and it’s not the whole of reality.
We know this. I promise you, everyone who is interested sports is aware that there are people who aren’t interested in sports. We don’t care. Really. We don’t care. I also like musical theatre; I am similarly aware that there are people who don’t like musicals, and I similarly don’t care. Your ‘delight in being able to deliver an utterly innocent, “What game?”’ doesn’t blow our minds with shock and alienation. It just makes you look like you care more than you’re claiming to care.
Because, honestly, the things I don’t care about, I don’t mention. For instance, I don’t care about soccer. At all. Just… don’t care. I am aware that many, many, many millions of people do care, very much. But when the World Cup rolls around, I don’t go out of my way to tell people how little I care or pretend not to know it’s happening. Why would I do that? Why would anyone on Earth care that I am not interested in a thing?
One guy on my Facebook feed makes a big show every year of “not knowing” who is in the Super Bowl and “not knowing” what the outcome will be, to the point of asking Facebook what the final score was the next day. Why would you do this? What do you gain? It drives me a little crazy, honestly.
Non-sports person here. I don’t have positive or negative childhood associations with sports because I simply don’t have any. I was homeschooled so I didn’t have a school team or anything, much of the time we didn’t have a tv and my dad wasn’t into any sports so I didn’t hear about them. It just wasn’t part of my world.
Many of my adult interactions with the topic have been negative though. I lived right off of OSU campus and experienced the insanity of the aftermath of games with cars set on fire and all. Getting stuck in traffic and late to work because I didn’t know a game was happening and so forth.
At this point in my life I do have a lot of other interests and don’t really see the point in picking up an interest in sports. I’m probably one of the few people in the US that honestly didn’t know when the super bowl was until the Thursday before. I wasn’t actively avoiding the knowledge, it just didn’t register with me.
Yes, in some cases people who claim to have a “disinterest” make sure they go out of their way to tell you. I agree that it does occur for other mediums too. I will frequently hear people making remarks about how [c]rap is not real music, how they never listen to it, blah blah blah. If it’s not your cup of tea, fine. It’s not really mine either, but I don’t go blabbing on about it.
Which is not to say that there aren’t legitimate criticisms that can be leveled at sports, or at certain genres of music, or at 50 shades of grey or whatever, but if you’re going to do that, you shouldn’t claim that you “don’t care”. You obviously care very much if you feel the need to tell everyone about it.
Very true. It’s even palpable on this board, where RomCom’s and Disney Princesses are universally derided (“Stupid!” “Unattainable Role Models for our Youth!”) but action movies and Superheroes are given a pass as a genre though the same complaints can be applied to them.
And to answer the question in the OP/thread title, of course people purposely cultivate a disinterest/distaste in things… it’s something we learn to do as we grow up and we do this throughout much of our lives as we move from group-to-group. I used to be vocal in my dislike with overbearing parents when I was a singleton, now I can’t stand receiving advice from the childless… though I belonged to both groups in periods of my life!
Of course I believe you when you say you don’t care, but please believe us when we say we know from personal experience that there are plenty of people who do care, sometimes to a highly inappropriate degree. Not having an opinion about matters sport-related has in the past elicited reactions ranging from disbelief, insistence that I’m lying, and disgust all the way to outright anger. I once had a youth pastor who made my non-interest in sports his project. We could not interact without him arguing with me and cajoling me about how necessary it was for me to cultivate an interest, or at least pretend.*
Those who make a big deal about not caring about sports on Facebook are probably often coming straight out of this kind of background. Proclaiming one doesn’t care isn’t the only way to deal with that (it’s not how I do for example), but it’s an understandable impulse.
*I wish to note that I recently friended this guy on Facebook, and it turns out he’s now a pastor for a church that does gay marriage and is otherwise super-liberal along all the axes I can think of. I would never have guessed this about him from my experience with him at my childhood’s very conservative church. But he says he was a closeted liberal the entire time! You just never know!
(Same here I only found out the day before because the game caused my favorite trashy pizza (Jacks) to be on sale for super super cheap. I stocked up!)
As a woman who has been into every category of thing on the list at some time, I think there is a sliver of truth to what you say, but it wasn’t really my experience. I’m into sports, science, arts, cats, and soaps. I don’t get pushback on these things. But I think it’s partially because I’m liking something from lots of different categories. The narrower the set of interests, the harder it is to maintain a conversation. If you’re only interested in talking about James Joyce, and not ALL James Joyce but only Ulysses, and not ALL Ulysses but only the middle third, then yeah, people will struggle to connect. And I swear to god I’ve met people whose interests seem, from the outside, almost that narrow.
jsgoddess, a guy I work with used to ask me what I did over the weekend all the time. “Oh, I worked on a manuscript”. “I spent some time at the yoga studio”. “I sold some of my artwork.” “I went to a potluck thing.” “I went to see the symphony perform.” If I responded with any of those, he’d laugh and say something like, “You need to get out more!” Or he’d (humorously) mock me crocheting a knit sweater for my cat, something I can’t do even if I had wanted to. (Perhaps this is why he doesn’t ask me what I did over the weekend anymore.)
But I know he would have been impressed if I had said I had watched a VCU basketball game. Because this would have marked me as a “cool chick”…someone he could relate to.
Why is my relatability to him more important than him relating to me? I never disparaged his sports-centered weekends. But for some reason, it was perfecty acceptable for him to disparage mine.
But to be fair, he’s the only person who’s given me a hard time like this. I’m guessing that most people don’t care, and those who do have the good sense to keep their feelings to themselves.
I only found out the day before because the game caused my favorite trashy pizza (Jacks) to be on sale for super super cheap. I stocked up!)