I can understand not liking sports (my office mates give me hell about not giving a shit about the NBA, baseball, hockey, or the NFL. I love college football, though.) I just don’t understand why some people just get so damn ANGRY about it. “I used to like sports. Then I grew up.” WTF?
Look at it this way. What other male-dominated pursuits involve an obsession with memorizing details and being glued to entertainment programming, frequently featuring larger-than-life heroes?
That’s right. Sports fans are no better than the rest of us geeks.
Actually, that’s a very good way of looking at it. Memorizing sports minutiae is nothing but a rather more testosterone-riddled form of geekery.
It depends on the sport, I guess. I like the Summer Olympics, and the Winter Olympics bores me. I watch American football if my nephews are playing, or if my daughter watches (she is now a Vikings fan). We watch the Super Bowl, but I generally have a book to read during the boring parts. Weight training and judo are both fun to do, and judo is fun (for me) to watch, but it is never televised. I think boxing and MMA are fun to watch, as is real wrestling (professional wrestling isn’t a sport).
The other major televised sports - baseball, basketball, soccer, hockey, bowling, golf - meh. Not my cup of tea.
Regards,
Shodan
I don’t watch sports either. I don’t hate them, and if I’m out with some friends at a sports bar or over at their house with some booze, I’ll watch them no problem. I don’t keep up with them, don’t care tbh. I don’t watch them at home alone, because they are boring IMO (because I don’t keep up with the drama or whatever).
I do like boxing and MMA, but I don’t watch much of those either, aside from sports bars.
When at home, if the TV is on and isn’t playing a movie, it is probably on a news channel.
Thanks for saving me some typing. You encapsulated my thoughts perfectly. 
My boyfriend hates sports. His primary complaint is about how much money they make, but he has the same complaint about actors but he’ll still go see movies (only matinees). But even if they didn’t make so much money he still wouldn’t watch because he really has no interest in it.
This is often because rabid sports fans are a more frequent occurrence than you would think. Sports are also often THE opening conversation. When you don’t follow it, and people ask you questions, it often comes up that you don’t follow sports. Which usually will prompt the question of “why” and a sort of them trying to convince you of it type of debate will often start. It is rare when somebody goes “oh, you don’t watch sports, ok” and drops the conversation.
When this happens regularly enough, the more defensive of us can easily just say something acerbic and end the conversation there. It doesn’t win any brownie points, sure, but it isn’t like debating it with them for 20 mins is going to make them think you are anything more than “less of a man” for not watching sports. Debate or insult, either ends with the guy thinking less of you.
See how defensive you get when people get angry. That is how defensive people get when they have to put up with rabid sports fans trying to convert them.
I wonder how much of this is just pure defensiveness, though. I live in Birmingham, AL, and live about 45 minutes away from the Talladega raceway. I don’t give two shits about NASCAR, and I’ve certainly had local fans try to talk to me about it, but I don’t think anyone has ever tried to convert me.
What’s MMA?
One of the benefits of being past 50 is that no one expects me to participate in team sports anymore. I’m good with stuff like bicycling and hiking, but have no interest in playing competitive sports anymore.
And my interest in watching sports has decreased over the years. A big factor has been that the teams I used to root for, or might have come to root for, have been run by people who have no clue. Watching the Redskins during the late 1960s through early 1990s was fun, not just because they were usually good, but because they were run by smart people: if they weren’t good this year, they were still usually laying the groundwork for being good in another year or two. Similarly with the Orioles, who I rooted for from the late 1970s through the late 1990s: ever since Angelos fired Dave Johnson, it’s been an organization adrift. And the Nats’ steady decline into oblivion has sealed the deal. It’s just hard to root for stupidity.
Another big factor in recent years is that I’m less willing than I’ve ever been to sit down in front of a TV for three hours at a stretch. (And I should mention that baseball has really lost me by the way its postseason games stretch out to more like *four *hours on average. It’s hard to get interested in seeing the best teams play each other, when it takes an interminably long time for them to do so.)
And the clincher on the deal, earlier this year: my wife and I adopted a little boy, which has vacuumed up the vast majority of my spare time. That’s the way I wanted it, of course, but there’s no way in hell that I’m wasting what little free time I do have on watching some hopeless team play.
Mixed martial arts. Basically, UFC-style fighting.
Not interested in sport. Never watch sport. Couldn’t care less about sport. Consider me utterly incapable of being able to develop any interest. I respect the fact that sport is of interest and gives pleasure to millions. I just can’t seem to find my way in to the part where it gets interesting or has a point of some kind.
I live in the UK where football/soccer is just about inescapable. It’s there all the time, like a thread woven through everyday life. This utterly baffles me. It always looks like men pretending to be little boys. The fact that so-called news bulletins will actually make time (usually near the end) to mention which team won a game today is something else that leaves me clueless and baffled.
Why is this news? Okay, suppose the other team had won. So what? What difference does this make to me or to my life? Why do I want or need to know? Red team won or blue team won… yeah, so, and what am I supposed to do with this information now that you have given it to me? It’s men in shorts running around kicking a ball. Fine if that’s what they want to do, but I don’t get why the rest of us are supposed to care what happens.
Surely the answer to the OP is ‘men with something better to do and other things to be interested in than big people playing the games that little children play’.
Same here, romantically and as a friend. I like being in a group where the common discussion points are current events, popular culture or even, god help me, the weather. I don’t need to be exactly like my SO, but I like them atheist and that includes the football gods or whoever fervent sports fans pray to.
This is definitely one of those areas where I feel for guys who are ostracized because they don’t like something as much as women who are second-guessed because they do.
So, **Jolly Roger **- I hear three things:
-
I don’t like sports - how do I deal with the need to address athletics in my line of work (i.e., setting a good example for your troops) - not one I have to deal with, but I assume you can pick your poisons. I enjoy talking with my direct reports at work, but don’t like social dinner events, so I make sure that I am social during the day so I can minimize the dinners I need to lead.
-
I don’t like sports - how do I deal with folks going for the easy ice-breaker without coming across like a girlie man or defensive? When I am confronted with a Man Up question like that - usually related to golf, which I don’t play - I try to come back with an honest, confident, non-defensive reply, like “I don’t play golf - I save my time for X (name another interest, in my case, guitar)” or "it’s not my thing, but tell me about Y (in other words, ask them to explain what they meant by their question - I may not like golf, but if they want to tell me about that Major or what Tiger is up to lately, it can still lead to a nice conversation)…it’s just ice-breaking, you know?
-
I don’t like sports - and it feels like they are “racial profiling” me - per Onomatopoeia’s McNabb example. First of all, that stinks, but second of all, you can just file that person away under “clueless attempt” and try the second example above “I haven’t been following the latest McNabb controversy - what can you tell me about it?” and just move the conversation along…
Social interactions are a tricky dance at best - you want to feel like you held up your end and that the other person treated you decently. Humans being what we are, that is less likely than we’d like…when that happens, even if ugly racial crap is hinted at, I suspect it is best to keep that smile screwed on and move past the situation and live to ice break another day…
I had an astronomy professor who gave me a look that shoulda been reserved for me asking if his mother was a prostitute that gave out coupons. I also got a short lecture on how wrong I was.
My crime ?
Asking in a very honest and polite tone if he was into baseball trivia. Which he was. I doubt the guy ever even played the sport as a kid.
Apparently trivia was THE WRONG WORD to use.
This obsession with sports is not only in the beer swilling redneck crowd let me tell you.
Here in the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas, people just assume that everyone, man, woman, child, black, white, brown, yellow, red, and purple with pink polka dots follows the Dallas Cowboys on the field and off. They also assume that most people are interested in other football teams and other sports as well. A common conversational starter is “Howza bout them Boys?”, no matter what the occasion. Getting a haircut is likely to start off with the stylist asking about your opinion of last night’s game, or the upcoming game. Even if both you and the stylist are female. I don’t need to prove my masculinity, fortunately, but I do need to defend my Texnicity, if that’s the proper word for it.
I’m still waiting for my watermelon, by the way.
I grew up with a father, two out of three uncles, and 1 male cousin who all had zero interest in sports and never played or watched them. So you don’t seem so weird to me.
“Marathon Mudwrestling Adventures”
I have no idea as to which teams make up the American League nor the National. I have no idea whatsoever concerning the NBA or the NHA (NHL?) nor do I care. It would not bother me one iota if there were never again any professional team sports played again. I will admit to a passing admiration for pro golfers; I couldn’t do what they do in a million years and yet they make it look so easy. But I wouldn’t sit down and watch a pro golf match for longer than thirty minutes if I were to receive a free puppy for my patience. I just don’t care about sports and I don’t have a hair on my chest, either. I guess I’m just not a real man.