I do not feel any big attachment to pro athletes. To me they are highly paid professionals, who earn tremendous salaries, and would move to another team at the drop of a hat (for more $$). Why should i be “loyal” to them?
Yes, but where do you stand on Macs vs PCs?
Usually sports fans are happy when **“we” **win, but not happy when “they” lose.
Tribalism is a huge part of the human condition. For those that don’t enjoy sports, that’s understandable as sports aren’t for everyone, but surely there’s some other sort of tribalism you engage in to some extent.
For instance, take politics, imagine you hear about some race in a neighboring area, you know nothing about the race other than the names and parties of the candidates, but chances are your first initial reaction is that you want the person that matches the party you most closely relate to to win. Obviously, that might change if you find out the other candidate is better and/or the one from your party is a douche. But that’s tribalism at work, and immediate response to favor “us” and disfavor “them”.
Or consider something, though still sports related, like the Olympics. As a general rule, most people couldn’t care less about most of the events. When does the average person care about the 400m dash, tae kwon do, curling, shot put, etc. Yet, invariably, we’re inundated with conversations about medal counts and all that. Nationalism is just a type of tribalism. And this is really true for pretty much any sort of international competition, not just the Olympics.
Hell, even if you see some kind of reality TV. Sure, it’s neat to see the best player win. But what if there’s someone competing and they’re from your hometown, or very nearby, especially if you’re not from a major metropolitan area. All of the sudden, it seems more interesting, and chances are other people you know are going to be more interested and more likely to talk about it.
And it’s not just limited to competitions either. I feel a sense of comraderie when I’m around people that are mutual fans of the same type of music I’m into. I go to a show, and all of the sudden, people I’ve never met before feel like friends and we can have a merry ol’ time just hanging out, yet we have nothing else in common besides our love of the music. And I see the same sorts of things for fans of certain TV shows, books, movies, whatever. Sometimes those sorts of fandoms can develop rivalries, but it’s not necessary to feel that sense of “us”.
And that’s how it relates to sports teams. Most people tend to like their local team because their geographically the closest and so they have that attachment, and so does everyone around that reinforces it. But sometimes sports loyalties can be inherited, because a parent was from other city and they loved that team, so you do. Other times, I have several friends who just had an attachment to a team for some reason they can’t really explain. Or other times a team does well for a long time, like the Yankees or Cowboys or Patriots, and between all that exposure and bandwagoning, they get fans.
This has unfortunate sides too. This is the same sort of mentality that, to the extreme, leads to bigotry. For instance, racism is an “us” vs “them” based on a trait of skin color. But I think that’s actually a benefit of something like sports. We have an innate desire to belong to something, and for the most part, attaching a little bit of tribalism to sports is, while maybe not constructive, at least it’s far less destructive than most other applications. Sure, you get the people who flip out when their team loses or get in fights, but for the most people, sports fandom is still based on a mutual respect. Hell, most of my friends are fans of different teams than me, we’ll talk a bit of smack about a game, but its still in good fun in the end.
Oh boy, here we go again with another thread on why sports fandom is stupid. Is it Friday already? Because let’s be honest, your thread title isn’t really meant as a question, even though it ends with a question mark.,
Look, let me ask you one question; do you watch movies? What are your favourites?
You develop an emotional attachment to a certain when you are a child and root for them for years and years
If someone is not happy or sad after watching their team play then what is the point of watching it?
This is simple. When my team wins, I win. When my team loses, I lose. What do I win or lose? Except for an occasional bet I don’t win or lose anything of material value. It’s like playing a game, we’re not playing the sport, we’re playing the game of which team is better, which team will win. How happy or sad do I get? Not much, but I’d rather be sad about my team losing than other things I could be sad about. I’d also rather be happy about something more important than my team winning, but lacking such an event I’ll take the team win.
When someone is sad their team loses it;s only for two days. Sunday and Monday
So… should I request a s/n change to “no one”?
Relocated to The Game Room.
y u like what i no like?
:rolleyes:
First, it’s only the NFL that plays almost exclusively on Sundays. The NBA, NHL and MLB all play games throughout the week.
Second, why do people love their families? I mean, after all, you probably wouldn’t care about them if you were born in some other family, right? No, I’m not saying your team is your family. But sports teams generally are a part of local culture. A lot of them REFLECT the local area and various traditions. Many athletes participate in the community. And even those that are traded are still considered to be respected and loved in the area.
And why do I like to watch sports? Because it’s fun. I like watching the action. I like seeing the skill, and the anticipation.
I do hate fair-weather fans, your team is your team, win or lose. When we win, I’m thrilled, and when we lose, it sucks. And yes, it’s WE. It’s a part of the community. The team wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for the fans.
If you don’t understand any of this, well, I can’t help you.
I kind of wish sports were strictly region vs region again, with players actually from the area they represent. At most levels that’s been lost, and is rendered kind of meaningless.
Picking an arbitrary team to support when you’re 7, then sticking to them loyally forever more, doesn’t really make sense. You should be free to swap teams when you move to a new town, or when the team you follow is utterly useless. I mean, you can do that, but it’s really discouraged, sometimes excessively so.
Speaking of which, I believe UK soccer has Premiership competitions, where bad teams are kicked out of leagues as they fail. I’m not sure if other countries, or other sports, also do this, but they should.
Well Internationals in cricket and football are the highest level (still true in football, despite the large Euro club protestations) and those are based on (usually) countries. So, that at least is understandable.
I don’t like sports either. But every now and then, when I’m watching a TV show or movie or reading a novel and I’m really into it and I want something to happen to the protagonist or I want the story to go in a certain direction, it will suddenly occur to me that I’m being silly. Because the characters aren’t real, and so they exist only in the imagination, and my imagination is just as good as the writer’s. So if I’m already imagining the story that I want, why should I care if someone else imagines something different? Because in some cases their imaginings get projected on a screen? That doesn’t apply to a book, where the action is all in my head anyway, and it really doesn’t apply to shows either, since I can often imagine just as vividly as I can experience it by watching. But I feel happy when the author imagines what I want them to imagine and frustrated when they imagine something different.
So I get irrational preferences in entertainment.
No, I really don’t get this.
Like, I understand liking sports. Sports are pretty cool, and exciting.
I get the whole “following them from week to week” aspect, and seeing them improve. I’ve even watched esports, lightly.
What I don’t get is the team affiliation. Like, whenever I’ve watched sports or esports, it’s interesting to see things play out, and if you watch it enough you get a feel for the people involved. But the thing is, I want to see all of them succeed. I don’t get the attachment to one over the other at all. I mean, yeah, sometimes there’s one guy who’s an unrepentant asshole or there may be some hypothetical scenario where this one player needs to win this tournament to pay for his cancer treatments or whatever, but I like to see two people (or teams) give it their all and whoever succeeds, good for them!
I would seriously have like 90% more fun with sports if it wasn’t for the team rivalries. Team rivalry almost feels damaging to me. There was a story the other day, my undergrad university’s rival had their yearly grudge match football game. One of the fans of one of the teams decided to yell invective at the other team’s marching band and throw a football at one of the bass drums. Broke it, cost a lot of money to replace.
This shit happens almost every year*. Sometimes things even more damaging happen. In high school, when I was in band, once some people from our school’s rival flipped one of the band’s buses and we were stuck an hour away from home down one bus until they could send a replacement at like 10PM. Not to mention the cultural mainstay of football/soccer hooligan riots.
The whole rivalry thing just seems gross to me. Why not be happy when any team wins and learns and grows and enjoy their successes without attaching yourself to just one? (Again, excepting the case where the person in question is a giant asshole or whatever).
I find this different from a novel or movie or whatever where there’s often a specific reason to want to see someone succeed other than “they’re the protagonist.” And in darker/greyer works, you may not even want the protagonist to succeed, you just find them interesting to watch (like, say, Breaking Bad where you may be rooting for Hank even though Walt is probably more interesting to watch). Of course, this is abstracting a lot of the complexity of Byronic heroes and such where you want them to succeed in spite of their flaws and such, but I don’t think I can exactly give a thorough analysis of historic attitudes towards protagonists in this post.
- Despite the fact that the actual people on the teams and in the different marching bands between rivals tend to be good friends, or at least get along well even if they don’t know each other.
Sports haven’t been “region vs region” since the 1800s.
Then it’s well overdue to return!
Anyway, that can’t be right, half the sports I’m talking about didn’t exist back then.
I’ve been looking at rosters for pro sports teams in the 20s and 30s, and none of them seem to have players that lived in the general area before they joined the team. We all remember Lou Gehrig getting recruited on the field at Columbia, but he’s exception, not the rule.
The world of modern sports began with the convergence of high speed transportation (trains), high speed communication (telegraphs), and high speed printing presses. Before then there wasn’t much inter-regional competition because it took to long to travel and report back the results for anyone to care. When suddenly sports journalists could track a team and report results of road trip to other regions then sports became big money, and immediately teams were comprised of the best players found anywhere instead of locally. So purely regional professional sports were comprised of teams of local residents were limited to neighborhoods within the same region. Of course we still have largely regional competition at the amateur level, mostly in pre-college sports.
Well, someone didn’t watch Babylon 5, or they would have anticipated the obvious result of the students murdering each other.
My lack of interest in sports isn’t just because of the tribalism. I can kinda get that. It’s a form of manufactured drama, and I like manufactured drama in other forms, like movies. I root for fictional protagonists as much as anybody.
The thing is, I require some sort of realism and believability to it. I want the characters to behave in believable ways. Soap operas and the like are ridiculous enough as it is. But in pro sports they don’t make the slightest attempt to hide its artificial nature (aside from pro wrestling, where they have only the barest facade). In any case, I need some kind of mental excuse to pretend that the competition is real, and sports don’t provide one.