I couldn’t care less about sports. Don’t know the rules, don’t wanna know. I could never understand why people get so attached to a bunch of people they’ve never met, and likely will never meet, just because these people chase a ball or some other such thing around. Or why watching them chase the ball / whatever around in the first place is deemed as exciting, or even the least bit interesting.
Sports…bah! Who needs 'em!
Seriousart:
Oh yes…we both know what we are talking about! You are a kindrid spirit with this sports thing, indeed.
My astonishment over the obsession in my unnamed Midwestern city is boundless. I have never seen the like. I cannot watch local news during football season without seeing a huge chunk of the broadcast dedicated to boring and trivial details about football. And then there will be that “human interest” story about someone’s football block party, or how Floyd over on 23rd street painted a big football in the snow in his front yard with food coloring. (That actually happened - I remember seeing it on the news.) I flat out stopped watching local news when they bumped a very important national story about our soldiers held hostage overseas to drone on about some damned college coach. To me, there is something obscene about finding some coach’s career more important than a vital international news story.
I remember telling my football-crazed friends that this was all NOT NORMAL to me at all. They said (in seriousness!) “Oh, you can’t tell me that L.A. doesn’t get as enthusiastic about sports!” I said, emphatically, “NO NO NO!” Sheesh. I never knew that people had a special “theme” day where they all dressed up in the team’s colors, or decorated their damned cars, or centered their lifes, their houses, everything in devotion to the team. L.A. loves sports, but never to that extent.
My football-crazed friends also said “People in other parts of the country think we’re ‘cool’ because we support the team so much.” Once again, NO NO NO! Sure, I guess some areas of the country that are equally sports obsessed might think it’s “cool” to deface your car and your front lawn, but certainly not everywhere. As I mentioned before, I mentioned to my friends back in L.A. the level of sports obsession, and they didn’t even know that this town had a team! I also have traveled to other places, and chatted with many people on plane flights, etc. No one I have chatted with thinks that it’s “cool” to be so obsessive about sports.
So, seriousart, stand strong. There are other things to life!
I’ll have to jump in as an “ex” sports hater. I used to despise, DESPISE, basketball - for no good reason really. I was indifferent to football, generally because it is somewhat complicated, and I didn’t want to listen to the barbs of my friends when I asked “stupid” questions.
But, as in most things, money changed everything. I do like to gamble, and I entered an NCAA pool without really knowing what was going on. I , of course, had to watch the games in order to monitor my investment. Something in me clicked, and now I just bought a pair of season basketball tickets (Go Wolves!)which set me back a fair amount of ching. Such a turnaround in 3 years. AS for football, I still pretend not to like it, but I can’t stop myself from making sure I catch every Vikings game on TV. Weird stuff.
Oh, and I used to love baseball (the only team sport I played in high school) , but now I absolutely despise it. What the Hell is wrong with me…
On a personal level, I suck at sports. I’m not good at any of them. I have an apparently uncorrectable golf slice. I can’t hit a hardball at all; in softball, I’m a 100% pull hitter. Football? Please. Basketball? Can’t do a layup.
**BUT . . . ** (that’s my big “but,” a la Pee-Wee)
I enjoy watching sports. Well, some sports. Baseball is at the top of the list. Golf and tennis are right behind. Boxing. Football and basketball are way at the bottom, oddly.
Why? Because it’s a form of entertainment I happen to enjoy. I enjoy watching people who excel at what they do in the process of doing it.
Mauve Dog, you may as well say, “I don’t understand why people get so attached to movies. Watching a bunch of vapid people who I’ve never met and never will perform a story that isn’t even true, and pretending to be interested?” Or insert some other form of entertainment.
It’s just another entertainment option, like music, or television, or reading, or what have you.
Oh, and NCAA sports, especially basketball and Div I football, are an obscene bastardization of the educational process.
seriousart, I know EXACTLY how you feel. I’ve never been into sports. It doesn’t help that I’m 6’3" - everyone used to assume I must be a basketball fan: “Oh, Didn’t you play in school?” I’m from Springfield, MA, too, where the damn game was invented; I lived a ten minute walk from the Basketball Hall of Fame for most of my life; I’ve never been.
Then I discovered weight lifting. It takes absolutely NO COORDINATION WHATSOEVER. Yes! For a skinny, clumsy geek like me, it’s perfect. But now everyone assumes I must love football: “Didn’t you play in school?”. ARRRRRR! Get a goddamn life already! In school I played bowling, okay?
There. I said it. Blue-collar, pot-belly, sweat-stain, preused-shoe bowling. That’s my game, so shut up about Nomar, okay? He can’t even make 200.
The only spectator game I ever really liked was baseball, and then only at the park. I used to work directly accross the street from Fenway, actually, and now they’re tearing it down. That’s okay, I swore off “that team” after a few bad experiences with their ticket office (long story). Fortunately, beyond the $230 million dollars from my city taxes, and the $120 million dollars from my state taxes for the new Fenway, I’m free not to care.
Oh boy… Sports.
I can follow a football game, I can understand baseball, have always hated basketball, and hockey isn’t a southern sport. 
NASCAR is boring. (Yeah, I’m from Mississippi, so?) I always prefered Indy Car or F1, until they became a soap operas. I watch the Indy 500, sometimes now.
I don’t like football anymore. Same stuff, year in and year out. I like fantasy football, but I’ll be durned if I watch an actual game. Baseball I gave up on. Why bother with it? you can hit a little white ball 400 feet and run around bases and get paid $100 billion for it. Whoop.
Little White Ball – Golf. that’s a good walk spoiled. I don’t care if Tiger Woods has been nominated by Sport Illustrated to be God and Nike is starting a religion in his honor, I still won’t watch the fracking game.
Hockey: that’s when a game breaks out in between fights on ice.
MNF? Gave up on it. Too much Disney. Next thing they’ll have Mickey, Goofy and Donald Duck in the booth.
You better damn well add that little caveat about DivI football; I play NCAA sports (div III–we suck), and we’re only in it for fun, and the glamour of having my ass personally kicked by * three * future officers of the US Army. Damn those guys are big…
Yeah, Myrr21, Div III is mostly exempt, since they don’t offer athletic scholarships. Unfortunately, what often happens at those schools (especially super-competitive schools like Mt. Union College) is that academic scholarships and need-based scholarships are then given to student athletes who then fail to graduate. A very good friend of mine works in admissions at A Prominent Midwestern Liberal Arts College that rhymes with “Snowberlin,” and he has run into this dilemma several times with soccer players. By and large, though, DivIII sports are, as you say, populated by guys who just want to play.
I too cannot understand why anyone would follow sports. Sure, play all you want, take the kids to soccer or little league or whatever. I used to play hockey when I was a kid, and it was kind of fun except every team I was on tended to be in last place.
But why oh why do people watch sports, when your kid isn’t even playing? I can follow a hockey game, lots of people can’t even get the simple concept of “offsides” (OK…the puck has to cross the blue line before any offensive player. Simple, easy to understand. And the corrolary is that if the puck is cleared past the blue line, then all the offensive players have to leave before the puck crosses again. This is NOT A HARD CONCEPT!!!) I’ve met tons of hockey players who had a weak grasp of this simple rule.
Thank god I don’t watch sports…it leaves me with that much more time for my precious internet…
I, on the other hand, am one of those individuals that knows quite a bit about sports (very tough to beat in the All Sports Edition), and manages to get those “What drink is made of X parts vermouth…?” questions a HIGHLY disproportionate amount of time. (I rarely drink, and when I do, it’s mostly beer or wine.)
:mad:
I am another guy who doesnt like team sports. Personally i dont see why watching two teams try to get a ball to the other side of the field is exciting, or, hitting a ball and running around a diamond. As a kid I was never into them much at all. I really dont see what the big deal is to get all worked up over your team winning a game, or, losing it.
The only one I can take an interest in is soccer, but that’s only because I played it from the age of 5 to the age of 10 or so. I stopped playing that when people put the winning over the team work. I used to feel embarassed about not being a sports fan, especially in school, since I could never follow sports conversations. People would always be surprised, especially since i’m 6’2" (i’ve always been a tall guy), they all thought I played basketball (I still get asked that by my grandpa’s friends at the Elk’s lodge). Hell, in High School the football coach would always ask me why I didnt try out for the team every single time I would see him(almost daily, since I had to pass by his office to get to my class. I’m also a pretty big guy). Fortunately, my friends at school all seem to not really be into sports at all (i dont remeber us watching sports, except Matt).
Something that also didn’t help me in school was that I am athletically challenged. Basically I suck at sports. Badly. I hated sports in school because I was never good at anything (except soccer, but I had played that for several years as a kid).
I really can’t stand to watch sports on TV either. It bores me to death. I also dont understand why in football they analyze the game during it, AND THEN they also have to have a frigging post game show where they analyze it even more… It’s also annoying when basketball or football pre-empts the news. BUT i dont mind watching school sports. It’s a support thing. Also it’s a social thing since i would hang out with friends.
But, I am fine with me. No one bothers me about it, no one thinks i’m weird. If they do, i’d just ask them why they were so concerned with me. People let me do my thing and I let them do theirs. Sports fans can have their sports. I’ll just hang out with the other non-sports fans and talk for a while.