So why is Sports a way of life for so many people?

Great Debates
101

Hey folks, thanks for the discussion. Really. When I raise this point to friends, they just roll their eyes.

jsc1953: I disagree. True, people will cleave to teams for lots of reasons, as has been mentioned here, but the overwhelming majority are rooting for the home team, either where they live, where they grew up, where their family’s from or, for those without a home team, the one that’s nearest geographically. And when the home team wins, the feeling is that WE won, not just the team. Conversely when they lose, WE lost. I lived in Boston for several years. Trust me, they took the Curse of the Bambino very personally. I suppose some take a more detached view, but I submit that’s not the norm. Ellis Dee’s anecdote about the Giants v. the Jets is a good example of what I’m talking about.

Ellis Dee: Actually, I think you do understand, since we agree about the Lichtenstein ringer. The disagreement, I think, is whether the typical American sports team is comparable. I think it is. For decades, the Yankees have been a dominant baseball team because their fan base is large, enabling them to pay more in salaries. To me, those are bought champtionships, using mercenaries. Now, it doesn’t work every year. Sometimes the other guy’s mercenaries play better and win. But they’re still mercenaries. As for the premise of professional sports, I think it’s straightforward, to put the best team on the field and hope they win the championship. Parity is a pretty new principle, and nowhere near bedrock.

Jimmy Chitwood: Your last paragraph makes sense to me. Indeed, it’s similar to a thesis I’ve held for years, viz, that this is a sort of psychological wager, where you get to be happy/elated if your team wins, at the risk of being sad/dejected if they lose. As someone said upthread, a sort of reality show with athleticism (and, hence, independent entertainment value). As for the writing competition, let’s start by substituting a debate between two talking heads, both because that would be of more interest to me and is a natural form of competition. (This used to be a regular form of entertainment, by the way; Clarence Darrow largely supported himself in later years by doing them.) Problem is that the analogy doesn’t help us here. I’d pick my debater based on content, not where they are from or are living now. Whereas it’s the “WE won” thing that strikes me as, well, disingenuous.

To sum up, let me mention another example. Suppose I were a horse racing fan. I go to the track and bet on a horse. If that horse wins, I’m elated. So is the horse’s owner, trainer, jockey and, for all I know, the horse. What I’m saying is that both forms of elation make perfect sense, but for me to claim the same sort of elation as the owner, trainer, jockey and horse is just wrong. And that’s what I see with most sports fans.

102

PBear42, think of the “we won” in the context of sports as similar to “we won” in the context of an election. Republicans no doubt experienced that “we won” feeling during the last presidential election, no? Even the ones that didn’t vote surely felt that way. Simply because the political party they choose to affiliate with beat “the other guy.” And I would also say that to some extent, there is a local aspect to party affiliation. As in, some areas skew toward one party or another.

I van’t stand baseball for two main reasons. First, there isn’t enough action for my taste. And second, because it’s a mercenary sport by nature.

Baseball is an odd duck when it comes to team sports. In football, hockey and even basketball, team chemistry is a fairly big deal. You can’t just plug in anybody. Not so in baseball, where each player stands alone at the plate, independent of his teammates. So your point is much stronger for baseball than, say, football.

Also, I think parity is in fact a bedrock principle in sports. Haven’t all leagues pretty much always held drafts, where the worse teams the year before get the higher picks? That’s a fundamental aspect of parity.

In your horse example, you’re saying that both you and the trainer are elated, but it’s a different kind of elated? I can certainly buy that. As I tried to say upthread, the fan suspends his disbelief to allow himself to feel the trainer-style elation. Just like feeling happy / sad / scared / angry while watching a movie.

103

Ha; if it doesn’t help us, why’d you bring it up?

OK, obviously my analogy isn’t an exact one; if there was a direct parallel to following a sports team that was totally non-sports related we probably wouldn’t be here. What I’m trying to do is separate why one might become a fan from how one feels when one is a fan, because without the former, the latter doesn’t make any sense. So, OK, you’d pick either Darrow or William Jennings Bryan based on how you felt about the issues, that makes perfect sense. But sports is different, which is why I ask you to buy into my analogy. Without accepting that becoming a fan of the local teams is a cultural and familial thing and not something based on reason and rationality, the whole thing falls apart, because obviously it doesn’t make sense that I love this collection of giant, athletic, mostly black guys from Florida, Ohio, and Georgia and hate this collection of giant, athletic, mostly black guys from Florida State, Miami, and Ohio State. But I always have, and I almost certainly always will, and most of that is due to the fact that everybody around me during my formative years felt that way and everybody in the community feels the same way. It’s a big, weird, sometimes horrifying family. And that’s why it matters to me. You might pick your debater based on content, but to understand sports fans you have to understand that many of these allegiances are forged when we’re five, six, seven years old. If you can buy into that, I think that should go some of the way towards explaining why we react the way we do.

As far as the “we won” or “we lost” phenomenon, I don’t say “we” about the professional teams, so I guess I’m not really the one to speak to it, but I imagine it’s probably closer in meaning to “we, the (insert team) community” than it is to “the players and I”. I know that when I was an athlete and parents/fans came up to me after a game and said something like “we got’em” or something, I certainly didn’t feel like they were trying to rob me of my glory or anything. They knew they didn’t personally win anything, but they were happy as hell that I had, which is something in and of itself.

I might occasionally say it about Florida State, though. Is that similarly distasteful? What about when I was actually a student at the school? If it’s OK in one situation and not the other, on what is that based (in your opinion, I mean)?

104

How can you disagree with a statement of my emotions? “No, you don’t really feel that way.” :slight_smile:

Seriously: I chose to become a Giants fan because of proximity. But once I became emotionally attached to the team, my elation when they win has nothing to do with civic pride. It’s my team, and they won. Nothing to do with the city of San Francisco. (I lived 100 miles from SF when I first became a fan, and had never been to the city.)

105

High school sports are a religion in places where people historically haven’t had much opportunity, or much respect, for a college education.

Basketball is a religion in Indiana because Ohio already had football.

All team sports, baseball perhaps excepted, are popular primarily because they both shape and reinforce what are probably are our most powerful cultural values: commerce, warfare, and manliness.

Baseball appeals most strongly to urbanites and intellectuals because it is the most historical and the most statistical of team sports.

Baseball is also the only excuse, besides perhaps war, for a manly man to have an interest in history beyond his own lifetime or family.

106

Well, of course. Bear in mind that big time sports is a consumer product. In most cases, the most accessible product is the local team. If you like basketball and you live in Salt Lake City, the easiest product for you to get is Utah Jazz basketball; the games are all televised locally, the local media covers them obsessively, and their stuff can be found everywhere. You will find it difficult to live in Salt Lake City and get much in the way of coverage on the Celtics. You get a lot more in return for your investment if you cheer for the Jazz, because you get lots of Jazz coverage.

One of the smartest recent innovations for sports teams is the super station; the Cubs and Braves, to name two teams, derived tremendous benefits from broadcasting their games over national cable networks. At the time it seemed silly; why market to fans in other markets who likely follow other teams and won’t buy tickets to see your team? But the very availability of Cubs and Braves games encouraged people to follow the team and jacked up ratings beyond what was initially expected.

And most baseball fans think the financial system is broken as a consequence. There is a tremendous hue and cry over the Yankees’ buy-a-team approach, and in the other pro sports, it would not be permitted; they all have salary caps. Furthermore, fans in cities where the team has been perceived to give up its attempts to win (such as Florida/Miami) have profound, chronic attendance problems. The Marlins have actually won the World Series twice in recent years but their mass player selloff in 1998 has poisoned the market against them.

(But that said, the Yankees usually don’t win it all; they won the World Series four times in five years from 1996 to 2000, but not since, and prior to that had not even been in the World Series in fifteen years, and had not won it since 1977 and 1978. Prior to that it had last been 1962 when they won the Series. The nature of a large, structured professional league is to make it remarkably difficult even for great teams to win every year.)

Obviously it is true that the player are professionals, but as Ellis Dee has explained, that is understood as being a part of the process. It’s not at all comparable to non-professional events where the athletes are selected on some other basis. In the case of pro sport, the process of acquiring players is, in fact, part of the fun, because the teams are trying to outsmart each other. The Oakland Athletics have garnered a lot of admiration in recent years for constructing a series of successful teams without spending a lot of money simply by being smarter than their opponents.

Hell, last night Oakland played Detroit in the ALCS. BOTH teams are much lauded for thier organizational success; Oakland has sustained success for years, and Detroit has rebuilt what was recently an awful team, by savvy player development and acquisition. The big-spending Yankees got their heads handed to them and the big-spending Red Sox didn’t make the playoffs (they didn’t even finish second.)

This sort of thing is fun to see; it’s neat to see a team of young players like Detroit, who three years ago were getting beaten like rented mules on a nightly basis, come together and start kicking ass. It’s cool to see Oakland pick up an injured old veteran on the cheap (Frank Thomas) and watch him come back in a big way and lead his team deep into the playoffs. That Thomas is from Georgia doesn’t change the drama in his story; it’s like complaining that you don’t enjoy “Star Trek” because William Shatner isn’t really an astronaut from Iowa. (He’s a space cadet from Montreal.)

Indeed, if it were to be decided that all pro sports teams had to get their players from among people who lived in their area, that would instantly destroy North American pro leagues and would make them insanely unfair. The Stanley Cup would be won by a Canadian team, usually Toronto or Montreal, every year; every Super Bowl would be won by a Texas or California-based team; Tampa Bay and the two LA teams would dominate baseball. Pro leagues operate on the assumption that the league begins with a number of equal partners who compete to assemble championship teams. The competition off the field is as important as the competition on the field.

I don’t understand how you can make this claim; if another person says they are elated, how can you claim they’re not?

107

The difference is, Trekkies and the like are subcultures, seen as outsiders (or worse) by the average person. With sports it’s the reverse: the nonfan is the outsider.

I don’t hate sports, but I don’t care to follow them closely. I’m not a jerk about it! If someone brings up sports, I’ll still do my best to be friendly and participate in the conversation, just like I would for any other unfamiliar topic. But that’s often not enough. I’ve had conversations quite similar to Vinyl Turnip’s example. There are many otherwise normal people for whom disinterest in sports is simply not okay.

Yes, I’m sure there are groups in which inadequate knowledge and enthusiasm for Star Trek will get someone frozen out of a conversation. Like a Star Trek convention. For sports, though, that group is called America.

108

So it’s weirder because more people enjoy it?

109

Skimming back through this thread, I have to confess I’ve often not been particularly clear. My apologies. Unfortunately, I’m unable to think of a clever way to bring it all together in a coherent way. What I’m going to do, then, is reply to the comments made (since folks went to the trouble of writing them). Feel free to further comment, or not, as you see fit. Just be aware that I probably won’t be replying to those further comments. IOW, you’ll be getting the last word (if you want it). Which IMHO is the only fair way to terminate a debate.

Ellis Dee: Phrased that way, the suspension of disbelief point has more merit than originally struck me. Rita Rudner once quipped, “My husband is so confident that when he watches sports on television, he thinks that if he concentrates it can help his team. If the team is in trouble, he coaches the players from our living room, and if they’re really in trouble, I have to get off the phone in case they call him.” As for baseball v. football, I can’t resist another joke. A good friend who’s a baseball fan refers to football as “that game where players in astronaut suits fall down between beer commercials.” To each his or her own, eh?

Jimmy Chitwood: Oh please! I’ve spent a lot of time living in or near Philly (as well as Miami, New York, Chicago and Boston). Eagles fans are some of the worst for the WE won/lost thing. My most recent spell there covered the '03 season. Most of the people I knew couldn’t eat the day after they got knocked out of the playoffs. Indeed, it’s observing such despondency time-and-again (in all cities; Philly just struck me as the deepest) that provoked the observation with which I led off this strand of the debate. As for college, that’s always been easier for me to see, since everybody in college is self-selected into a community. It’s pro sport where I see a community/mercenary disconnect. As for the rest, to me you’re saying something pretty similar to Ellis Dee. If so, I’m sort of getting there, but not completely.

jsc1953: Sorry, I misunderstood your point. I thought you were disputing that team pride is mostly a local thing. As I acknowledged above, there certainly are many exceptions.

RickJay: I didn’t propose to reject the fact of the race horse fan’s claiming the horse’s elation. I have trouble with its being valid. In any event, looking back, I don’t think the analogy conveys what I thought it did, so I’d prefer to withdraw it.

Again, thanks everyone for an interesting discussion.

110

Very good observation there. I think it may be because there are a lot more people who are interested in sports than are interested in Star Trek. But sometimes these things change.

For example, ten or fifteen years ago, your average teenager probably didn’t know what “lol” meant. Anyone who knew what it meant was probably a nerd who spent a lot of time chatting online. Now, I’d wager your average teenager not only knows what that means, but also a bunch of other acronyms, some of which even I may not know. What happened? Well, the internet went mainstream, and now most households have a computer that connects them to the rest of the world. It’s a commonplace thing now, unlike it was fifteen years ago.

Nerds and their lives are gradually becoming acceptable. It’s possible that in the future, there may be more people who consider non-leet-speakers outsiders than non-sports-fans. Of course, hopefully I’ll be gone by the time that happens, because if I’m not, I’ll probably go crazy and jump off a bridge or something. (Leet-speak drives me nuts.) :smack:

111

Not true. Auto racing (particularly on the scale of NASCAR) takes an enormous amount of endurance. Modern drivers are all gym rats; for that matter, so are the pit crews. It’s sorta like baseball…you don’t get in shape by playing baseball, you get in shape to play baseball on a professional level. That’s different.

Not a NASCAR fan, btw…but have a modicum of interest in the technical aspects of auto racing.

112

I’m with the OP. I can’t for the life of me see what watching sports does for people.

113

Despite the fact that DOZENS of posts explaining it have been posted in this thread as well as many others? What is it about not being a sports fan that makes it hard to read?

I mean, I don’t quite grasp the appeal of opera, but if someone were to explain to me why they liked opera I’d at least have the capability to store that information in my memory and link it with the concept of opera. So while I may not personally be fond of opera, I’d then know why some people do like it. I might even have the brain power to link the c0oncept of opera with other performance arts I do enjoy, such as cinema, or professional sports, and grasp that some of the same factors may be involved.