Not really, President Bush has been known to show up at games, but he’s there to watch the game, not to preach politics.
Because nobody in Memphis has bought another one.
Okay, that’s a glib answer, but it’s the heart of the truth. Memphis has a basketball team, right? What other sport do you think should be there?
Baseball? Memphis would be a small city for a major league team - it would in fact be the smallest major league city. Cities like Milwaukee, Kansas City and Pittsburgh have all claimed to have some trouble competing due to the size of their market and their metro populations are all much larger than Memphis.
Football? Not with a team in Nashville.
Hockey? Nashville. And Nashville has one of the league’s best teams and they still have trouble selling tickets.
Memphis is a lovely town but it’s a marginal pro sports market at best. Memphis is less than half the size of St. Louis. It’s smaller than Vancouver. It’s smaller than Portland, which also has only one team. It’s only half the size of the borough of Brooklyn.
There are a lot of freebie tickets for that kind of stuff - I don’t know if it is more or less than any other stadium, but there are certainly those tickets in the possession of the lobbyists, for example.
And despite the Nats, DC is overwhelmingly a pro football town. The baseball is a pretty popular diversion, but most people I know would give the Nats back to Montreal in exchange for a Superbowl win.
Pro (Panthers/Redskins) and high school football. College (North Carolina tar heads, Duke blow devils, Wake Forest demon deadpans, Maryland turtles, Clemson buck-toothed tigers, South Carolina limp cocks, Boston College who knows, Florida State simoleans, Florida geezers, Virginia camel ears, and did I leave anyone out?.. Oh, of course! The North Carolina State Perfect In Every Way Blessed By The Archangels Conceived By The Breath Of God Wolfpack) basketball.
Chapel Hill, NC. College basketball all the way. The area’s got a pretty good hockey team I hear. And Durham folks love their minor league baseball team. But basketball rules this town.
Before Chapel Hill, I lived in Augusta, GA. where the school system shut down during the Masters. A GOLF town. Isn’t that weird?
That’s why I suggested the Titans move from Nashville to Memphis.
Austin is a city of about 500,000 people, with about 1.5 million people in the metro area.
Thing is, almost everybody (except my wife) is from someplace else! So, there are loads of transplanted Chicagoans who still love the Bears and Cubs, loads of transplanted Detroiters who still love the Lions and Tigers, and a fair number of generic Texans who still have some kind of loyalty to the Dallas Cowboys… but there’s really no one sport or team around which the whole city can rally.
The University of Texas football team comes close. VERY close. They can fill up a 90,000 seat stadium on Saturdays. But no other college sport here draws huge crowds (the Longhorn baseball and basketball teams are usually very good, but draw sparse crowds). Beyond that, we have a AA baseball team just north of here… but while they get good crowds, nobody is passionate about the team or the league. A minor league baseball team is just another kid-friendly entertainment option. Fans come late, bring the kids, let the kids run around a while (there’s plenty to do at the ballpark besides watch the game!), and then go home early.
Big crowds, but not much actual passion for baseball.
Hmm. I’m an outsider looking in on this one, really. I’m from Canada (naturally, a hockey town), and living in Seattle. I’m tempted to say football, but that could be because of my recent obsession with it (probably stemming from the fact that I actually have a home team to cheer for, for a change), but then when baseball season rolls around, I think it could be a baseball kind of place.
On further inspection, however, giving those latte-carrying pottery-store owners who write books of poetry in their spare time the old eyeball, I’m tempted to say this town is largely apathetic toward sports. It might just be Ballard, though. Also, I might not be looking hard enough or hanging out with the right crowds. We do have two stadiums, after all, and we do cheer awfully* LOUD*.
HmmmmMMMMmmmmmmmMMMMM… football. I’ll say football. Go Hawks. Next year, damnit! And let’s not forget the Huskies.
Anyone actually from here think it’s football? Am I close? Or just obsessed?
Football most definitely.
I live in Manchester and we have…
Manchester City
The other bunch of rags
In the Greater Manchester area we have umpteen other teams.
There is also a following for Rugby, Sale Sharks and Kersal RFC
Pittsburgh is definitely a football town. All of the major news outlets start off the broadcast with a report on the consistency of the Steelers coach’s bowel movement that morning. Steelers this, Steelers that. In addition, high school football is huge around here.
The 2nd most popular team in town is actually the Pittsburgh Penguins (if they stay, that is). Mellon Arena (the oldest, and worst IMHO, arena in the NHL) has been sold out 15 out of 24 times, and Pittsburgh has the top ratings share of any US NHL city for TV broadcasts. It probably helps to have had 2 generational players in the last 20 years, but if Lemieux and Crosby hadn’t come here, then there wouldn’t be 20 rinks in the Greater Pittsburgh Area, and high school hockey starting to feed into the NCAA and even the NHL
While people head out to the (beautiful, again IMHO) PNC Park for fireworks and bobbleheads, in general, there’s a huge frustration with the Pirates and 14 years of losing, along with an ownership that doesn’t seem to have any desire to rectify that.
Basketball doesn’t even register around here; at the high school level, wrestling seems to outdraw basketball (at least it did at my high school).
I divide my time between Edmonton and Calgary lately. Both are in the province of Alberta, in Canada, and both are primarily NHL hockey cities.
The degree to which these cities are hockey-mad borders on obsession. If the local NHL team manages to do well in the playoffs, certain streets are shut down to traffic and additional police officers are brought in to maintain order. Even for regular season games, sports bars seem to show nothing but hockey. Want to see the NFL playoff game? Sorry, the Oilers or Flames are playing.
Even if you do convince the bar to put, say, a football game on one television, TV stations have been known to switch away halfway through BCS games to show NHL games. I’m not kidding–once at a football game’s halftime, a voiceover came on saying something like, “Football fans, you can continue watching the Rose Bowl on the ABC affiliate from Spokane; hockey fans, stay tuned as we show you the Oilers taking on the Montreal Canadiens…”
Edmonton and Calgary each have a Canadian Football League team, and so football is popular as well. But since the CFL season begins in July and runs until November, it doesn’t interfere much with hockey. NFL has a number of fans too, but even these fans’ primary loyalty seems to be to hockey. Neither NBA nor MLB makes much of an impression on local sports fans, and college sports don’t even seem to register. These are NHL hockey cities.
40 years and counting…sigh…
Wait, are you talking about rabid fantacism, or sports legacy? If the former, maybe; Red Sox fans are crazy. If the latter, no US city comes close to the legacy of New York sports. Even if New York didn’t have the Jets, Mets, and Islanders, the big four alone (Yankees, Giants, Knicks and Rangers) have a richer collective history than any other city’s teams. Boston and Chicago would probably tie for second place, with whatever city was next being a distant fourth.
As for the OP, New York is a baseball town.
Can’t believe I’m participating in this…
I’m a Michigan Wolverine. UM in general is obsessed with sports, but football dominates.
Which itself (St. Louis) is only the 50th largest city in the US (not including metro areas) and is kind of a stretch for a three-sport city IMO.
Heh. Man City fan, huh? I have no use for either “bunch of rags”, personally, but I feel your pain.
To answer the other half of the OP for my location bar-- Tucson is all basketball, all the time, period.
I lived in Seattle for a while, but never saw baseball season, so I don’t know how nuts people go for the Mariners. My time was pre- the Hawks Superbowl year too (next year, yes!) and I got to say I didn’t really notice a whole lot of football love. I really thought folks were more into the Huskies/Cougars rivalry than any major sports. And no one cared about the Sonics. Yeah, poetry coming in first, then NFL/college football coming in second, if my short evaluatory time was accurate.
I’m in south Jersey, which is unfortunately Eagles territory. After living here a few months, I think I’m seeing the issue – it seems as though a lot of this area code suffers from a major identity crisis, and a lot of people feel the need to identify themselves as Philadelphians. Hell, there’s even a dry cleaner nearby that advertises themselves as “The Best Dry Cleaners in Philly”, even though they’re nowhere near that city.
So while the Flyers, Sixers and Phillies get tolken mentions, this area is firmly entrenched in the Eagles muck.
wow, does anyone come to this thread anymore?
I’m in Detroit. It’s still probably the best sports city in the country. University of Michigan sports, Michigan State, the Pistons, the Wings, the Tigers, and the Lions (let’s not talk about them).
The badness that the Lions (let’s not talk about them) spew is more than made up by the others.
You’ve NO clue how good it was to finally have baseball back. I remember a few years ago, talking to my Yankee-slurping ex-roomie about 15 games into the season, telling him my season was pretty much over.
Detroit is a baseball city, although I’d like to see what would happen if football won (let’s not talk about them).
I live up the road from Indianapolis, which is crazy for many kinds of sports. You might have heard of our NFL champion team. 
The Pacers basketball team is a big deal, I guess. At the motor speedway, they’re host to the US Grand Prix, The (NASCAR) Allstate 400 at the Brickyard, and the Indianapolis 500. O’Reilly Raceway Park has the NHRA Nationals on Labor Day weekend, and scads of Sprint Car and Midget races through the summer.
Victory Field, the home of the AAA Indianapolis Indians, leads the minor leagues in attendance. The Major Taylor Velodrome hosts big bicycle racing events. In pro tennis, there’s the RCA Open tournament. Indy has big amateur track & field events, and parts of the NCAA Basketball tournaments happen in Indy every year.
That’s what kind of sports town Indianapolis is.