My co-worker went to the Ryder Cup a few weeks back and said it was rubbish… on the TV the cut from shot to shot just as the ball’s about to be played, which makes it feel a much faster game than it actually is. In reality there’s an awful lot of standing around, practice swinging, murmered conversations with caddies etc.
I can’t watch hockey (ice or proper) on TV - for ice hockey the speed of the puck plus its small size means I never know what’s happening. I’m sure that if I watched more I’d get better though.
Football (soccer) is OK on TV but you do miss some of the wider strategic aspects, especially the off-the-ball movement of key players. You’ll have the camera in a tight shot of a wide player, which is great for seeing his fancy footwork, but means you can’t see the lung-busting run from a midfielder to get into a position to receive a cross.
I agree that road cycling is much better on TV - we once saw the Tour de France while on holiday and while it was fun to see the bikes come past, it was all over in 10 mins.
Watching live darts should be boring but is actually one of the best sporting events around.
Hockey’s easy for me to follow because I know the game and I know where to look for the action. I’ll sometimes miss the reason for a penalty call and wonder what the hell is going on but then the replay fills me in and all is well.
I chose football as hardest to watch, because I just don’t understand the game. I get frustrated watching it on TV because I’m confused. Sometimes the clock stops, sometimes it keeps going even though nothing’s happening… forget it, give me hockey.
I have to agree about hockey on TV. I didn’t even realize that I had just seen my hometown Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup until a few seconds after it had happened. (Of course it seemed like the announcers and the cameraman all missed it too.) I usually don’t have any trouble following the puck when I go to a game.
I chose American football for in-person. I was at a college game last weekend and on many running plays I had no idea who was carrying the ball. I guess it depends on where you’re sitting, but football is probably the only sport I actually prefer to watch on TV.
I’m not a hockey fan, but I watched a little just because of the glowing puck.
Auto racing is a strange one. If you don’t have a radio or scanner and you’re at an older track without a large scoring tower, it’s very hard to keep up with anything that’s going on. Ovals get tricky when cars start getting lapped, but on a road course you don’t even know what’s going on if it doesn’t happen in front of you. Thankfully, most tracks have added nice scoring towers and put big screens all over the place in the last 10 years.
A lot of people think racing is boring on tv, so they go to the track and it’s exciting, but then it’s hard to keep up with.
It’s easy for me too, but I think that comes more from experience watching it. The puck is small and fast, and sometimes the only way to know where the puck is, is to not look for it but rather to watch where the players are and what they’re doing. I can see where somebody who has rarely watched hockey has problems following the game, if they’re trying to do as they would in other games; that is, looking for the puck as they would a football or baseball or basketball.
I think for me, auto racing is the most difficult. Understanding who is leading when the cars are stretched out over the length of the track is something I cannot do on my own–I need the TV announcer and different camera angles to explain what is happening. Onscreen graphics explaining the same thing, and time margins are helpful too. At least on TV, these aids are present–the one car race I ever attended in person was pretty much a mystery to me. As with hockey, though, I imagine a better understanding would come with experience.
Not in the poll, but I was watching the Science Channel’s coverage of Punkin’ Chunkin’, a competition to use various machines to throw pumpkins. It’s dressed up in the trappings of a sport now, with whistles and horns and cheering fans and scoring and a TV show.
Even with telescopic TV cameras, every time they hurled a pumpkin 4,000 feet, it instantly vanished into the blue. Even when they circled the pumpkin in flight, it appeared to be an empty circle. And you could see so little where they were landing that the camera usually just cut away to show someone write a number on a whiteboard instead of following the flight of the projectile.
When you can’t see anything even with TV replay and graphics pointing out where to look, you’re no longer watching the “sport” – you’re watching people talk about it, maybe.
I always hear people complaining about how its hard to follow the puck when watching hockey on TV. I’ve never had any problems - though I’ve played hockey for 20 years. With familiarity of the flow of the game I’m guessing most peoples’ troubles would disappear.
In baseball there are long periods where it seems like nothing’s happening. An individual player in the outfield might sit there for a long while doing little. In football you’ve got guys running around and slamming into one another whereas in baseball the only thing you seem to have to look forward to is a player running around in a circle. I don’t know why I don’t find golf more boring but it might have something to do with the mood; baseball seems like it should have something happening but when I see golf on I already know that there’s not going to be much excitement.
I think soccer loses a lot on TV because it just follows the ball and you don’t see the whole field, the formations, the strategies, counter-strategies and the payoffs. It’s like watching a chess game and only being able to see the piece that’s being moved.
American football has some similar issues (you don’t see the secondary play until the ball gets there), but I think soccer loses more.
Golf, by far, gains the most on TV. It’s all but impossible to follow in person. You either set up camp at one hole, or try to follow one player around (with all the variability of views that come with it). Either way, you miss the wider narratives and miss a lot of key shots.
Really, no game is difficult to follow on TV if you know the sport. As mentioned, there’s no need to watch the puck while watching a hockey game, if you are familiar with the sport. I can’t imagine seasoned basketball fans only try to follow the bouncing ball around the court.
And, yes. Golf, in person, is not terribly exciting. I was at the President’s Cup a few years ago, and if it wasn’t for the beer it would have been a total loss.
(Anyone remember Homer attending a baseball game when he couldn’t drink beer? Ha!)
Following sports on TV is pretty easy so I went with Soccer for lack of interest in doing so for any amount of time. I know it is a cop-out but really sports on TV is usually easy if you can put up with the announcers.
In person, soccer is better to watch actually and easy to follow in general. But hockey was very tough for me to follow at the arena. I never really enjoyed it and every time I think about going to a Devil’s game I decide not too based on my experience at the Garden (MSG) many years before. On TV, Hockey is fine but I stopped watching it over a decade ago.
I agree with you; it’s one of the more difficult. I remember driving through Virginia once, tuning through the AM band, and hearing a race. There was almost no commentary; it was just the sound of the engines. A year ago, I heard a similar broadcast on Sirius; lots of engine sounds, and maybe an announcement every few minutes about who was in the lead.
American football is fun to watch, but the strategy just escapes me. It’s even worse when there’s a commentator like John Madden in the mix, who assumes we’re all rabid fans who are familiar with the hundreds of plays possible in the game.
Hockey is much easier to watch live than on television, because you can see a larger portion of the rink, and it’s easier to see the puck.
Were you just flipping through the stations and only caught a second of it? I listen to MRN and Sirius quite a bit and there’s almost never a break in the commentary. Radio can even make a boring race sound like there’s all kinds of excitement going on.
