I watch auto racing, and still do. However, Niki Lauda summed it up pretty well in his first retirement when he said he was tired of driving in circles.
I’ve never cared about teams or winners or losers, but I do on occasion enjoy watching highly skilled individuals show off those skills.
So yes, I think it’s silly that people spend lots of time and money on sports(both the teams and the fans), but I can still appreciate a well executed jump-shot.
Same here, mostly NASCAR with an occasional Indy car race when they are broadcast in my area. I really don’t care to watch ball sports at all and I have a less than zero interest in sports like hockey, tennis or soccer. I played very few sports as a kid. I did drive race cars at local tracks for much of the 80’s and had a bit of success, that is why it is my sport of choice.
IMHO, aside from all the reasons why sports are cool and stuff (I like watching competition), human society needs something like a sports contest as a (relatively) healthy outlet for interpersonal and intergroup competition. It’s been the alternative to warfare since the Maya Ball Game and beyond.
Again, I have yet to see a rational objective criticism of sports. People get upset when their favorite character dies in a film. They’ll spend godawful amounts of money or wait hours or days to get tickets to see a concert and hear music that they can hear (with better quality) any time they want. Why? Because they enjoy the experience.
Entertainment is important for humans. It bonds us and relives stress. It helps us keep sane. Sports are a form of entertainment like any other. Athletes in many sports train from a very young age, develop their bodies to do something that few people in the world can do, and risk their health for others’ entertainment. They often only can do it for a few years before they decline or get hurt and then it’s over. The millions they get paid for their brief time in the public eye doesn’t often translate into a lifetime of wealth. Meanwhile, sports leagues and teams make billions; the Dallas Cowboys make over a billion dollars a year, every year.
I don’t think what they’re doing is silly. Heck, I’m not into curling at all and it would be easy to point and laugh at people sweeping ice with a broom. But I imagine they’ve trained constantly for years to do that.
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All that being said, I don’t get esports. Anyone can play a video game. I don’t care if you’re exceptionally good at it, it does not take training or dedication. And I can press a button the same as you. That’s the only kind of entertainment I go WTF about.
Here’s one:
Sports can be fun to play and to watch, but it takes the fun out when it becomes about the money, and that there are some ultrawealthy people making themselves more wealthy off the risk and damage that these athletes take on.
(Not to mention when a sports franchise acts in corrupt ways and rewards totalitarian regimes that commit human rights violations, like for example, FIFA)
I’m not into esports either, but I have to disagree with your assessment. There certainly does take training and dedication, as well as innate talent, to be able to press a button(or rather, lots of buttons in a particular way) better than the competition.
I’m not sure how you can argue that e-sports don’t require time and dedication. They do. An experienced player will mop the floor of a newb. The skill ceilings of some games are extremely high. I could go on about this.
That doesn’t make e-sports sports. They’re definitely games. IMHO the fact that almost all video games are totally owned and controlled by corporations who can change them at will is practically a disqualifier to begin with.
I’m not sure if the debate has ever settled over chess being a sport, but since that has a deep history and consensus ruleset, it is the best candidate besides Go that I can think of.
That’s not a bad comparison really. Video games are not sports but they are competitions that require mental skills, and at least some hand-eye coordination. So it’s more like chess, with the addition of twitch skills, I just object to calling them sports.
I think that’s fair. On the other hand, are they any less sports than auto racing? In both activities, you’re sitting on your butt, manipulating the controls of a machine that’s doing all the actual “work.”
Auto racing is one of the most physically demanding of all sports. You are being jostled and beaten up the entire time. It’s like being inside a running clothes dryer being shot out of cannon.
See here for an example.
As it turns out, F1 drivers need to stay in peak physical shape, as driving these incredible cars at such breakneck speeds pushes their body to limits that go beyond some professional sports. This is why a race doesn’t extend beyond 2 hours. It is for the safety of the drivers that this time restriction is strictly enforced.
True, but the number of sports-related riots and tramplings slightly outnumbers the number of film-related ones, I suspect.
But would you consider that a sport?
An awesome one.
But can you honestly compare the depth and meaning between running and kicking a ball to make it go through a rectancular fixture, and the (re-)enactment of life and death, politics, romance, philosophy, the funniest and the scariest things you’ve seen, historical pivot points and what-ifs, the fantastical future - basically the human condition from all angles?
Not all sports are the same, just as not all movies, TV shows, art, or music are.
You’re asking if you can compare one sport to the breadth of all other entertainment. Of course not. But I might ask if you could compare an episode of The Bachelor to all other forms of entertainment and you’d be at a similar loss.
We are always biased against forms of entertainment that we don’t enjoy, and consider them trivial compared to those we enjoy. That sort of prejudice comes through a subjective lens and it’s very human, but also wrong.
A ridiculous form of “sports existentialism” involves being mildly depressed when a team you dislike wins. 
I do agree it’s kind of ridiculous. I chastised my son once for sitting and watching people playing video games. There is nothing constructive about it, a waste of time. He said the same thing of me when watching sports. Point taken son.
I read once, can’t remember who and I’m paraphrasing here, that sports are an extension of our ancestors lives. On a daily basis, they had to hunt to survive. There’s a bit of adrenalin involved in the hunt as well: kill or you will die. Humans, especially the male of the species, wants and needs that adrenalin. Sports is just an extension of that in another form.
We do place more time, money and energy in things we really shouldn’t. There are better activities we should be “rooting” for. It was Bill James in one of his Baseball Abstracts in the late '80s who said, and again paraphrasing here since I don’t have the book anymore:
“My father died of cancer at a young age and so did my uncles. I fully expect to die of cancer and likely at a young age. It would be much more logical that I think about cancer more than about baseball, to spend my money on cancer research rather than baseball. But I don’t. I think about baseball all the time, about cancer hardly ever. We don’t pay cancer research doctors anywhere near the money we pay a relief pitcher. Why? A doctor is much more valuable to society in general than a setup man.”
We do have our priorities mixed up. Maybe because we don’t see the progress made by the research doctors, we don’t understand it. We can’t name even one of those doctors but we can name nearly the whole roster of our favorite team and even quite a few on rival teams. We live and die on the results of what “our” team does. We may never have played the game ourselves yet we like to think as if we personally hit that homerun or the second baseman that made that great play. I think that’s the value to society, to make us feel better about ourselves in our otherwise mundane lives. The research doctors don’t excite us, we don’t see the progress being made as in sports. There’s no “we’re down by one in the bottom of the ninth” anxiety to try to pull the victory out of the jaws of defeat. Well, not in the same way. We don’t even understand the science but we understand that we need a hit to score to give our team a chance to win.
I used to be pretty passionate about a lot of college and pro teams in multiple sports, but over time I let most of it go and now all my remaining sports passion is relegated to one team: the Chicago Bears. Yeah, I know.
For several years I (figuratively) gnashed my teeth about them taking Mitch Trubisky over DeShaun Watson or Patrick Mahomes in the 2017 draft. Then I had a revelation: I had no hand in that decision. I pay nothing to support this team – no game tickets, no merch, no pay-per-view. It literally had no tangible impact on my life at all. Yet I was regretting that decision as if it was a mistake I’d personally made and needed to somehow remedy.
So, no more of that shit. But I still get remote-throwing mad watching them play on Sundays.
Frankly, that’s a large part of why my interest in the NFL has waned, particularly in recent years. I was a rabid football fan, and fan of the Packers, in particular, since childhood. I’m a Packers season ticket holder, and a Packers stockholder; I used to joke that having that one share of Packers stock gave me the right to yell at the TV when my employees underperformed. 
The league is now relentless at monetizing every possible moment of the year, sometimes at the expense of good game play (e.g., Thursday Night Football); that brazen commercialism, and the whole concussion/CTE situation, have soured me on the sport. I still pay some attention, but nothing like what I did just a few years ago. I haven’t watched more than a handful of plays of Packers games this season, and last year was much the same.
The primary reason why I’m still paying as much attention as I am is because football is something that my 89-year-old father likes to talk about, and it gives us a topic to chat about on the phone.
A while back I came to a revelation. I can watch sports and really enjoy when my team wins, and when they lose, I remind myself that it’s just a game and I had no part in the loss. And I’ll even congratulate my team for how hard they tried and still support them in the loss.
It has made sports watching so much more enjoyable. I get all the highs and none of the lows.