I was watching a hockey game on TV last night, and it kept getting my attention that the camera operator was having a hard time keeping track of where the puck was. And I figured I’d have the same difficulty if I’d been sitting at the game in person. Between the speed of the traveling puck and the fact that the puck is often concealed by players piled up against the boards, it can sometimes be a challenge to figure out where the little black object of everyone’s desire is hiding.
So I started wondering if hockey is the most difficult sport to track this way. But other sports might be difficult for a variety of other reasons. Maybe it’s football, because there’s so much action away from the ball. Maybe it’s even bowling or golf, because the audience can’t generally see the changing conditions that the competitors are dealing with and adjusting to.
So I’m setting up a poll. I would appreciate people explaining the reasoning behind their answers. Use whatever criteria you want to back up your answer EXCEPT for claiming that a sport is too dull to watch, please.
Also, I’m creating a multiple-choice poll designed to be answered in two parts. Please vote once for the sport you think is most difficult to follow on television AND once for the sport you think is most difficult to follow in person. Obviously, your answer may end up being the same for both.
TV: Football, the cameras don’t let you see off the ball stuff like WR/DB matchups (same applies to soccer and hockey, but it seems to me they’ve done a better job of zooming out)
In person: Golf. ‘Action’ is taking place all over the course but you can probably only see one or two holes (I’m not a golf fan, correct me if wrong). All the things I’ve seen in person are much easier to follow, especially hockey - much, much better.
Test match cricket has to be one of the most difficult to watch of mainstream sports. Probably harder to appreciate in person due to the enormous quantity of ale that gets consumed at a typical test match.
Very hard to appreciate if you come at it cold - takes a lot of watching before it makes sense - both at the level of understanding what’s happening and at the level of adjusting to the tempo of a game that takes a few days.
A lot of the US sports work well in being exciting on the surface as well as having a deep strategic dimension. So NFL or NHL, say, has a lot going on if you understand the inner game. But it’s not hard to watch, as the casual fan can still enjoy the game with just a basic grasp of the rules.
Agreed on that (please give us several camera feeds, cable companies, so that we can follow the one we want-in my case the wide angle shot to see what’s happening in the secondary)-but it’s even more of an issue in baseball, where 1 inch in the strike zone can equal (roughly, yes) 50 feet on the field of play, but as a spectator you probably don’t have much of a prayer of following pitch locations, unless you’re in a fortuitous spot (behind the plate and/or in CF with an optical device). The strike zone in a very large sense IS the game-what happens after the ball departs it has already been mostly determined.
That’s why I voted “other”, for auto racing (in person). Some seats at some tracks genuinely stink-I went to Indy about 10 years ago for the Brickyard 400, and all I could see, from my seat on the bottom level on the frontstretch, was a slice of T4 and the first 300 yards of the frontstretch, and that was it. Yes, some of the short tracks you can see everything (Bristol), but I’m primarily a road racing fan not an oval nut.
Hockey on the (ex-) tube has been much improved with the advent of high-def TVs-tho in most cases it’s a matter of paying attention to what the players are doing to know where the puck is, something which comes with experience watching it.
American football in person is fairly hard for me to follow. I always seem to get caught looking at the wrong thing.
I’ve never really found any sport hard to follow on TV other than maybe some obscure Olympic events where they don’t do anything but show the Americans who end up coming in 362nd.
That has more to do with crappy American camera operators who can’t anticipate the play because they don’t really know the game than anything else. Watch a CBC or TSN broadcast and it’s much easier to follow the play
This. Hockey is perhaps the sport best helped by HD and wide-screen. The puck can just seem to vanish in SD. It doesn’t disappear quite so readily in HD. And in a wider aspect ratio, it becomes a lot easier to see the action developing off the puck. Between the two it helps me follow a game by a whole bunch.
I don’t see how it gets more ‘difficult’ than golf, in person.
You only see one group at a time, about 3-5% of the the field.
if you follow a group, you have to walk and fight the crowds for 5-6 miles. And then your sightlines might be compromised by other people, terrain, trees or sun glare.
agreed, add to that the commercial breaks between practically every play (seriously, it’s 4 15 minute quarters, plus stoppages, yet it takes 3-4 hours to broadcast) and I have a lot of trouble sitting through an entire game unless several friends and lots of beer are involved.
I picked In Person – Other for cricket too, but not for that reason. It’s because without TV cameras it’s all but impossible to tell exactly what’s going on in the middle. For someone like me whose eyes aren’t that sharp, it’s very difficult to see whether a catch is taken, how close a ball was to being LBW, when a delivery hits the right line and length. Playing cricket and being on the field, you can see those things…not so much when in the stands.
For those that don’t know about 15 years ago FOX tried to make the puck easier to see by using special pucks that left a glowing trail when shot. Fans all hated that stuff so it did not last.
Maybe not. In my experience, difficulty in watching televised sports is a multiplicative property–it’s the product of the camera operator’s limits (and/or the video editor’s choices among various cameras) times your own limitations.
Golf is effectively an impossible sport to watch, as near as I can tell. In person, it’s a hideous, hideous thing, and it’s awfully hard to follow the progress of the tournament.
On television you at least know the leaderboard, but what you see is wholly the decision of the TV producers and they often make choices that are… well, “curious,” I guess.
If you’re referring to being able to follow the game from watching, then it’s got to be a road race, with cycling probably the worst. All of the major competitors are bunched together, and team members dress alike, so it’s very tough to even tell people apart. You only have a few seconds to observe them, and even if there is a visible leader, that’s almost never going to be the final leader. Even if you’re there at the finish line, whoever crosses first might not even matter if it’s a multi-day race (a la the Tour de France). Like golf, I imagine most spectators go not to see the competition so much as to see the competitors.
I caddied for my dad once at a pretty high-level golf tournement. After his round, we followed a group of the top guys for 18 holes. Following that, dad was ready to go another 18 with the premier golfers. I was convinced that, had I done so, they would have had to carry me from the course from sheer boredom. Thankfully, I hitched a ride home with a friend of ours.
I remember a spring break vacation that I took with my parents once we stayed in a condo for a week and across a pond from us was a par 3 golf hole, which we could see easily from tee box to green. For the life of me I could never see a golf ball in flight, ever. I’ve never been to a golf tournament, but I imagine the experience would be much the same.
If you’re talking about real life, you’re probably right, but cycling is one of the best tv sports, period. Especially now that we are constantly updated about time differences, effect on the general classifications, etc. Sure, some of the sprint stages in the tour can be boring, but once stuff starts happening (classics, mountain stages in the grand tours) it is really a great thing to watch.