I disagree. There is an ingrained assumption that abso-fraggin-lutely everyone - in the room, in earshot, in the circle - is “interested” in last night’s game or this weekend’s or some such. It’s very, very, very much an “opt out” activity and it is difficult to opt out quietly and gracefully; if you don’t make a fuss, they will. (“Oh, okay, we won’t BOTHER you any more about it.”) (Or, more commonly, “But, y’know, it’s the Pats, and they’re in the SB this year, and you know about deflategate, right, and…” like if they encourage you enough you’ll join the cheerleading.)
Which leads to the widespread ingrained assumption that pretty much led to the OP - that people who don’t like sports REALLY EFFIN’ DON’T LIKE SPORTS AND GET YOUR SHITTY FOOTBALL BLATHER OUTTA MY FACE, PAL.
It’s second only to weather for group/open/“social” conversations that are easier to just grit your teeth and nod at rather than try to opt out of. And no, I really, really don’t care in the slightest about the Pats’ shrunken balls.
Monstro, I get the impression you are unhappy at your job. Because you’ve made quite a few posts describing your co workers as being difficult to be around- Here you mention a guy that would make fun of you for being honest with how you spent your weekend. In another thread, you mention a 40yo co worker who is going out on Maternity leave even though she’s up to her eyeballs in debt, forcing you to cover for her over the time.
Could it perhaps be an unpleasant job environment fostering some of these feelings? Because the way you describe it, nobody seems to ‘get’ you at work, you feel held to an unfair standard, it just sounds miserable. I mean, I’m a woman, single, childless, person of color, and been surrounded by co workers extremely different than me. I don’t know if maybe I’m doing something different that doesn’t cause my co workers to mock me for having an obscure interest or my work culture is just more pleasant.
Growing up, I played baseball, I had baseball fans in the family and took a generalized interest in the game (knowing who the major players were in my local teams, and the history and lore of the game, where my local teams are standing this year etc).
I also know a little about hockey because my husband used to play. I enjoy watching live hockey the most of any sport I’ve tried. It’s fast moving and not too easy to score. Baseball I find quite boring although our local Single-A minor league team is fun and cheap.
Without any football fans in the family or exposure to playing it, I never really knew much about football either way. I was pretty much indifferent. It took living in Ann Arbor, MI to really make me hate the game. No matter whether you care or not, it’s just constantly shoved down your throat as The Most Important Thing You Can Know About U of M. The football schedule dictates where and when you can drive, when and where you can shop, you have to schedule your life around it because it’s just such an overwhelming thing in the town. You are constantly forced to care, and if you are a not HUGE fan, you have to explain yourself.
Thankfully, Ann Arbor has no strong tradition of sports riots, but for people who live in places that do, it’s kind of scary.
Well, I’ll obviously take your word for it on your own experiences. But I do wonder where all of these people are, because I know hundreds of sports fans and not one gives one single lonely crap whether some random guy also likes sports.
I used to watch both football and basketball many years ago. Also boxing. I still watch a little hoops, mainly because we have a local NBA team, and because I used to play. But major league sports now seem to be occupied by steroidal mutants, and the organizations that pay them enormous and ridiculous salaries use bully tactics on local governments to avoid paying taxes and to get them to kick in money for stadiums. I know enough about the games to speak about them generally with people, but I am pretty much completely disinterested in them as a pastime, and consider a football game a complete waste of four hours of my ever-shortening life. I have no idea which teams play where these days, and it’s always a surprise when I see a new team name pop up (the Grizzlies? Who?).
On the other hand, it matters not one bit to me what others do with their time.
Um…no. I work with a bunch of characters, sometimes they work my nerves, and sometimes I want to kill them, but I actually really enjoy my job.
And? I don’t know what this is supposed to signify other than I have a coworker who thinks my interests are boring and another coworker who is pregnant, whose job duties overlap with mine. I didn’t realize this was so outrageous.
My life isn’t miserable, nor am I. I work well with the majority of my coworkers. In fact, most of the “coworker” stories I share on this board are about the two coworkers you’ve already identified.
Consider this: Everyone’s experiences in this life are different. Not better, not worse. But different. People profess a desire for all kinds of things that seem quite unpleasant to me, but I’m not going to assume they are lying about their feelings. Just because it seems like the majority of people are into something, that doesn’t mean there’s something pathological or “off” about those who aren’t.
If you don’t understand something as basic as this, I’m going to have to question whether you are in the best position to play armchair psychoanalyst to anyone–let alone me, a person you don’t even know. You don’t know my experiences or anything about the world I inhabit. Why you feel so confident you do is very strange to me.
Football has been largely paced and organized to be a television show for decades, so this is not a new feature of the game. Nor is it unique to football; hockey has “TV timeouts” too. The period of time between innings in baseball has been expanded to allow for an extra TV commercial.
The lady’s first name is “Katy.”
I’m not a big football fan but even I can see this is all nonsense. People actively declare hatred for football because it’s a contrarian position, and people like contrarian positions. People especially love contrarian positions if it makes them feel superior. It’s exactly why people are vocal about hating TV shows, or TV in general, or popular movies, or popular brands of beer, or are snooty about the fact they dn’t own a car. Darker versions of this include a refusal to believe in vaccination efficacy, global warming, or the fact the WTC was destroyed by airplanes.
People just like to feel like they’re special, and the overwhelming popularity of the Super Bowl makes it a popular subject.
Sure, beyond those who are just genuinely disinterested and into their own things, its not that unusual for people to express pride in not knowing anything or caring about otherwise popular stuff, I’ve known a few. Alternative types, hipsters, whatever. Kinda gives a degree of iconoclast credibility, rejection-of-the-mainstream badge of honor identity, not unlike that conferred by sports fandom (in an opposite sense) to sheeple like me! :smack:
I still disagree, and strongly, and suspect you could be more sensitive to the actual level of interest and participation the next time you’re in a room group-discussing that day/week/seaon’s sporting event. I can’t recall the last time I was in such a group of five or more without finding someone to exchange a knowing eye-roll with.
Put another way, I think you’re mistaking social-polite silence and tepid participation for actual interest. And thus coming to the conclusions that (1) more people are interested in “sports” than is actually true, and (2) you’d never, ever bother someone who wasn’t interested.
I’m not going to defend his bad behavior. I don’t think your relatability is more important than his (though women are always expected to make more of an effort when it comes to the incredibly broad topic of “getting along” (which is a whole 'nother topic and makes me spit nails)), but that both people having broad interests makes things easier. Frankly, your interests sound plenty broad and really interesting to me!
Many years ago, I did actively hate professional sports. I wasn’t interested in watching any of them, but when a big game happened, it seemingly took over all of the mass media available to me and replaced all of the other stuff I used to watch/listen to for entertainment. I resented being bored and ignored, basically.
I have Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and the entire rest of the internet these days. So mazel tov to all the people who are happy over a game! I don’t get pushed out of the way by your hobby now, so we’re all cool. The downstairs neighbors were shouting very loudly over the Superbowl when that was on, so my also-not-interested roommate and I found some movies with loads of explosions in them and turned them up.
I do recognize the social significance of sports to the point where I ask the roommate who is interested who won important games our city/state/region/country is involved in. It’s one of those things I feel like I ought to know in case I bonk my head and the local paramedics ask as part of their assessment.
My main extracurricular hobby is musical theatre. Believe me, I know from people who aren’t interested in sports.
In most social settings, the room is composed partly of people who like sports, and partly of people who don’t. It’s also composed partly of people who watch The Bachelor and partly of people who don’t. It’s also composed partly of people who are teachers and interested in the ins and outs of their profession, and partly of people who are not. We all manage to squeak by. The teachers talk about teaching and the people who aren’t interested in that conversation discuss something else; at another time, the sports people chat about, say, the Cleveland Cavaliers and the people who aren’t interested in that conversation discuss something else. And so it goes. I don’t see the problem, unless your standard is literally that every medium-to-large-sized social group should literally never talk about anything that isn’t of interest to every person in the room… but I’m not sure how that would even work.
Well, FWIW, Mrs. Homie’s disinterest in - nay, outright hostility towards - (gridiron) football comes from the fact that we lived for a few years in a town that was All Chiefs, All The Time. During football season, there was nowhere she could go where she could get away from talk about Chiefs this or Chiefs that. On Mondays during football season, it was all the radio personalities would talk about when they weren’t playing music. The entire experience left a bad taste in her mouth about football.
To this day, she will have no part of it. Hand to Og, if a football game is on she will leave the fucking room, muttering obscenities under her breath.
I’ve begged, cajoled, sweet-talked, even bribed her to just let me try to explain the game to her. I keep insisting that if she understood the game and watched it with me, she’d enjoy it (or at least be ambivalent about it, like she is about baseball, soccer, etc.). She will have none of it.
Fred: Won’t you spend Christmas with us, Uncle?
Scrooge: You celebrate Christmas in your way and let me celebrate it in mine.
Fred: But you don’t celebrate it at all!
Scrooge: Let me leave it alone then!
