Given that we all have different interests, hobbies, religions, and political beliefs, yet we all need to cooperate so that business and society actually can work, we have invented sports so that we have something common to talk about.
Literally. Without commercial sports, people who need to connect to other people for a variety of reasons, couldn't.
I find it annoying and wasteful, but I understand the societal need, especially among those who aren't engineers. (Sales, BD, etc.)
Engineers can typically connect over their specialty, but that doesn't work when talking to other specialties.
Really? There are so many things to talk about. Weather, news, common experiences, the things you see around you. Even though I do enjoy sports (soccer, F1 racing), I seldomly connect to other people because of it.
And if sports are wasteful, all forms of entertainment are. Why do you think like that? The thoughts in my mind are not so precious to the world that it shouldn't be distracted by 'useless' entertainment, and I guess neither is yours.
Yes, of course there are a few other things to talk about, but even "news and weather" is dangerous, because some think Louisiana is currently showing us the future of global warming, and others think it shows that people who choose not to insure their property should not be rewarded with a bail out, lest there be moral hazard.
How is sports more safe than weather or current events? Not everyone keeps up with sports as a whole and much less keep up with the specific sport you would mention.
No, but sales can often be based upon personal relationships, at least to an extent. So you see why a salesperson may be accustomed to treading lightly around contentious topics. If you stake out a strong position on a controversial topic, you risk alienating your conversation partners.
Of course friends can discuss whatever they want. But in less familiar company, one may want to avoid topics that can lead to disagreements. Politics and religion being the classic examples.
Or, as the Professor told Eliza: "Stick to the weather, and everybody's health".
Safe, if you avoid mentioning doping, the effects of concussion on the brain, whether it is ethical to ride horses (more so to jump fences and to use a whip), the ethics of nations training 4 year olds for gymnastics, the fairness of juries in boxing/gymnastics/dressage, whether a sport should be in the Olympics (for example, where are the motor sports?), whether we should have separate events for lesser abled competitors (Paralympics, but also weight classes in judo, boxing, rowing, etc) etc.
For example, if I state gymnastics isn't a sport, just as ballet isn't, and that watching it means condoning child torture, is that a safe bet?
(Edit: and that's ingoring the really contentious subjects such as whether England really scored that third goal in 1966)
Or electronic gaming? Where are the League events? The Olympics are in Rio, but everyone's watching Seattle for the DOTA 2016 International tournament.
I would rather have half my limbs shoved into an industrial shredder than have our world's modes of social interaction determined exclusively by how sales people interact.
Sport exists because it's a simple human desire to push oneself and compete in entertaining physical games and activities. I think the natural instincts at work here transcend anything invented or as simplistic as your description.
Commercial sports often go way too far in their excesses and lack of criticism, but many, MANY people enjoy watching the highest level of sport like any other art. It may not be your cup of tea, but saying it's wasteful to me is the same as tossing out any great artistic or creative endeavour.
I suppose it's because they project themselves upon the competitors. They use the sports to feel they win something that otherwise they couldn't get. That's what I think as a previous sport fan.
They watch because they have a desire to see humans push themselves to the limit. Have you ever watched someone live stream a video game or a coding session?
Plus, when you're 60 and out of shape you can't go out and play a game of football, watching football is as close as you can get to doing it.
> Plus, when you're 60 and out of shape you can't go out and play a game of football
Sure you can. There is nothing stopping an out of shape (but otherwise healthy) 60 year old person from going out and playing touch football. I mean, they might get dirty, sweaty and have aches or cramps the following days, but hey, that's life.
Touch football is not the football that those 60 year olds would be watching :) you're arguing a different point. I enjoy running, and I enjoy watching the 100m, even though I don't run 100m regularly. It's nice to see someone who is world class in that field.
I used to wonder about why some people get so into sports just by watching but then I read about "mirror neurons" in the brain. When one human watches another succeed, fail, jump for joy, cower in terror, etc, the mirror neurons in the brain give the person watching part of that sensation too. I suspect that some people have much stronger mirror neurons which would have the effect that when their favorite team scores a touchdown, they actually feel as though they had participated in the victory. One hypothesis is that mirror neurons developed as a way to help create social bonds through empathy.
There are plenty of other forms of entertainment that provide as much or more mental and emotional enrichment than sports, but as a society, we don't put any emphasis on them, or we stigmatize them in some way.
Pretty much any music or drama student has had to endure years of being some derogatory term, only to find out that when they graduate, society expects them to starve, while athletes can get by quite easily just on former glory.
Maybe it's just the incredibly amount of money to be made as an athlete, or from athletes? Many different people have a very real investment, and the rest have come to have a psychological investment and act as human shields.
Star actors and musicians can get super rich, like star sports players. Neither of them are very acheiable by most people, because there is a limit of how many people can be stars.
Just talk about food, or drink, or the weather; maybe you'll actually learn something about them instead of a common, pointless language that costs the taxpayers billions a year.
Quite the subsidy so that some people can break the damned ice, don't you think?
My standard riposte when faced with a technical discussion that's clearly wound down or gone off the rails - "So how bout them Cowboys?". We would also accept a friend's variant - "Roll tide."
> Given that we all have different interests, hobbies, religions, and political beliefs, yet we all need to cooperate so that business and society actually can work, we have invented sports so that we have something common to talk about.
Odd that it's impossible for us to talk about our different hobbies with one another. I wonder if that's ever happened in human history. Probably not, I guess. But hey, how 'bout them Bearhawks?! Did you see that ludicrous display last night?
No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.
That's your notion.
The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
This is why most of the european countries would love to host the olympics, but in a model where it's split over multiple countries. Because hosting it by yourself is purely a prestige project that politicians try to put on their CV.
“When I was in high school I asked myself at one point: "Why do I care if my high school's team wins the football game? I don't know anybody on the team, they have nothing to do with me... why am I here and applaud? It does not make any sense." But the point is, it does make sense: It's a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority and group cohesion behind leadership elements. In fact it's training in irrational jingoism. That's also a feature of competitive sports.” -Noam Chomsky
That's a very nice quote. I feel the same way when other people that have my nationality win a sport event or do something that's not common, and I'm supposed to be proud because of it, and he put the name of the country in altitude. I'm like wut? I don't know him, and never will. I seriously don't understand nationalism.
If you want others to give a shit about you, you need to show you give a shit about them. If you want the service of institutions that large groups of people have built and run and pay for, you need to show you are part of them. They did not build these institutions for others, they built these institutions for themselves.
Things like national sporting events are put on in part to showcase the accomplishments of the group and to encourage affiliation to it. They are ritual. They are like church services. They are like parades.
If you go out of your way to denigrate them, you are showing disrespect not just for the event itself, but for the group that put them on. And if you persist in these acts of disaffiliation, don't be surprised if that group increasingly excludes you in ways large and small. You want to see what it's like to be an outsider in your own country, someone who really truly is considered one of THEM rather than one of US? Try asking an African-American, particularly an old one. It isn't pretty.
You are not so strong and wise you can build a good life for yourself, alone. All through your life, you need to lean on what your family, your town, your people, and your state have built and are willing to share with you. So try to be civil and show a bit of respect when they are celebrating.
Ok. That escalated quickly. But I think you're mixing pears and apples here. We don't live in a tribe anymore. We live in cities with millions of people, with the average humans having what? 10 friends? Most people don't give a shit about others already. Just go to into a train, they don't even look at each other. Also, I don't understand how I must cheer others of my country in order to live in society? It seems you're implying that you have to care about others in order to use public services? I pay my taxes! That's all there is to it. And on a side note I do care about other people, but people with special circumstances and without flags.
Growing up in a very small rural school in Texas, I've seen, and been a victim of, the attitudes surrounding sports. In my school, if you didn't play football or basketball, you weren't a man (track didn't really count - it was just pre-pre-season for football). I played basketball (badly) and did UIL competitions (well), but no one really gave a damn about the scholastic stuff - you couldn't letter in it. Game night would come around and there was literally nothing else to do in town (also, you didn't call anyone during Monday Night Football unless you wanted an earful of colorful invective). The coach was the highest paid, yet least qualified, teacher out of any of our instructors (he usually taught the Health class - we actually got more sex ed in the Ag class (don't laugh)).
Of the colleges I've attended, they spend more money on the sports programs than any two or three other programs collectively, even though very few players would be able to move on to a higher level than college football or basketball.
It's maddening and frustrating to be surrounded by that culture and unable to convince anyone that a little bit more emphasis on academics would pay far greater dividends. I'm not against sports for the health benefits, but beyond that, it's mostly luck and I just don't buy that it's worth it.
Grew up in Texas and went to a 5A high school that got easy electoral approval for (at the time) a ridiculous stadium, but did give letters for UIL academics and band. In fact, there was a banquet each year for the top 3% GPAs. Everyone at least feigned interest in football, but at least among the college-bound bunch, being good at a sport was a feather in your cap, but not a social necessity.
Our football coach was still grossly overpaid, though.
Life was less pleasant for non-sports guys out in the 2A and 3A districts - I was able to switch to my big high school from one of those semi-rural "white flight" ones, and I'm so glad I did.
I lived in Allen (S. of McKinney ) for quite a while. At least at the time, the Allen Valedictorian was already slated to go to Harvard Med. after he finished undergrad. Dunno how that worked out..
The academics were outstanding there, but about 1/3 dropped out before graduation. Wasn't a lot of effort put into retention, either. We left around the the they were building that massive Allen sports complex and the new high school.
My youngest was still in high school at the time, and moving her out of it was the best thing we could have done, as it turns out. But I think that's mainly that she got to reinvent herself, and she really liked where we moved to.
Plus, the Internet was beginning to make social media (MySpace) available, which really helped her socially.
I'm pretty sure the land for the Allen monstrosity was donated by the founder of one of the companies I worked for. Guy lives extremely frugally, but he was worth untold millions.
The whole Dallas area has dumbed down a lot in the wake of the first dotcom bust. It's all $20 an hour contract Java work now; $30 if you're lucky.
I once visited Lubbock, Texas, home of Texas Tech, a big football school. And there, the stadium just towered above the rest of town. The good burghers of Lubbock didn't build themselves a sports arena. They built a damn cathedral.
This is the reason questioning sports is blasphemy: sport is religion. Stadiums are places of worship. Coaches are bishops.
Fortunately the mechanism of feeding pro sports (TV advertising) is fading somewhat, as people's attention is drawn to other activities. But I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook bought the rights to e.g. basketball.
That's so over, as NBC just discovered the hard way. Millennials aren't watching the Olympics in large numbers.[1] In the 18-to-49-year-old age group, the audience has been 25% smaller than the London Olympics four years ago.
NBC CEO Steve Burke described his "nightmare" before the Olympics: "We wake up someday and the ratings are down 20 percent. If that happens, my prediction would be that millennials had been in a Facebook bubble or a Snapchat bubble and the Olympics have come, and they didn’t know it." That almost happened. Ratings were down 17%. NBC/Comcast has prepaid for the Olympics through 2032. That looks like a bad deal now.
This is happening for other major sports. The average age over the past decade of National Football League and Major League Baseball viewers has increased by four and seven years, respectively, to 47 and 53. Baseball is a dying industry.
Of the top 100 high schools in the US, 67% do NOT have a football team.[2]
In 1998, the top 10 had only one school without a football team. This year’s top 10 has seven.
One of the problems with the Olympics is it is dominated by the sports that nobody cares about the other 47 months of the four years. Track and field, swimming, gymnastics, rowing, etc, etc, are not money sports; they aren't something that people dial into, even for their world championships.
And for the money sports, the Olympics have become a side-show. It is, economically speaking, idiotic for a professional athlete to put their career, and millions and millions of dollars in earnings, at risk for nationalism. So in many cases, the best in the world don't bother to show up.
Also, the NBC coverage is just awful. No wonder nobody wants to watch when it is wall-to-wall puff pieces, talking heads, and a few chopped and spliced highlights of the actual events.
Well, it sure doesn't help that the website is horrific when a huge part of your younger demographic only uses the internet instead of TV. I wanted to see highlights of the judo stuff. The landing page for "olympic judo" better have links to video RIGHT AWAY. Instead, you have to hit the landing, hit the headline, hit the video, wait for some silly player to zoom it's way in, wait through an ad, and ...
Never mind, YouTube or Facebook will have it. And, I'm on a desktop computer with a fast connection. I presume that the experience on mobile without an ad blocker borders on glacial.
Holy spaghetti monster, Batman. Make your website STICKY. Feed me more until I'm ready to explode. You have the most amazing athletes in the world on video, MAKE USE OF IT. Top 10 judo takedowns. Best soccer highlights. Worst wipeouts. And THEN give me the ability to drill into longer and longer videos.
It's not that hard to make me want to click things on your website when I already came there. But, this is what happens when it's about the ad revenue instead of sports coverage.
NBC has only themselves to blame.
As for the sports themselves, the other perennial problem is subjective vs objective judging. One thing that MMA has over boxing, for example, is an objective measure of victory. A lot of the olympic sports that have "busyness and spectacle" also have judging and we see in boxing what happened. Gymnastics has similar issues.
That's, like, your opinion, man. I care about the Olympics and all of the obscure sports, because I want to see humans doing amazing things with their bodies and pushing the limits of what is possible. I also buy into the narrative of it being an excuse for nations to come together. I also like that many of the events focus on individual success. The Olympics have the only sporting events I ever watch apart from tennis championships.
I do agree that the NBC coverage is awful. Their commentary could be much more subdued and intelligent. Fortunately it is possible to mute the inane audio.
Frankly, pushing limits in uninteresting if you don't understand what they are actually pushing and towards what - I think very few people can understand the intricasies of majority of the events.
It's really a poor excuse for nations to come together if no-one cares. Football is popular all the time, nearly everywhere - it's much more organic as a global come-together-watch-together event.
I can't personally understand the interest in sports beyond the personal experience - i.e. if one has familiarity in any skill or discipline it's incredibly enticing to observe true masters performance - but I do value in the philosophical sense the fact that all cultures come at the same playing field and speak the same language and share the same context in the form of the sport.
The problem is that if you don't do TV, there is no good way to track the Olympics. I admit I'm guilty. Since I don't have a TV anymore, I can't just throw it on in the background.
In addition, while it's great watching the best get their medals, the thrill is in the upset. Upsets are getting much rarer nowadays.
That's completely inaccurate. You can stream the olympics from nbcsports.com and from their app. I can count on one hand the number of people I know that both don't have internet, don't have a smartphone, and don't have TV.
No one is going to throw their smartphone on in the background. And NBC sure doesn't make it easy for me throw their website on in the background in high-def and just let it play. So that, when something happens, I can scrub it back a minute or two and watch actively.
NBC is guilty of not understanding that, with the internet, people don't need to tolerate being bored.
It's not inaccurate; you can't stream the Olympics from NBC online without having a cable subscription. Of my friend cohort (late 20s), we are all interested in the Olympics, but none of us have cable, so we can't watch it except at bars or the occasional after-work group. I'd love to follow the events, but I can't open a stream as easily as I can a YouTube stream—what's with that?! NBC has been given access to the public airwaves in the US and that should come with a responsibility to show content openly, but they're not. I looked to buy a USB TV turner, but there don't appear to be any that receive US broadcasts that work on OSX (at least for under $100, which was my arbitrarily-chosen budget for watching the Olympics).
I tried a Sling.tv free trial. Ok, so it starts at $20/mo. But that didn't include NBC Sports. Ok, so upgrade. Ads. A lot of ads. And a little bit of Olympics. Wow, this is...awful, and I completely remember why I stopped paying for cable TV.
Oh? Show me a link where I can go that has legal streaming video from the olympics for all events (live or not) without requiring a cable subscription.
On the other hand, the CBC[1] has no trouble attracting Olympic viewership. From other discussions I have read, it seems America's youth who are interested in these sports are oft being turned away because of poor production done by NBC, with some even claiming to be tuning into CBC's coverage stateside.
Anecdotally, that is essentially it. I don't watch the NBC coverage of the Olympics because it's so terrible. I want to see the sports (preferably live) and I want to spend a minimum amount of time hearing about the life stories of select athletes (I can get a lot of that by going online and looking them up). To sum it up, I'd be more interested in watching the Olympics if they actually showed more of the Olympic events. I guess now they stream a lot more of the events online now. But after many years of bad NBC coverage I tend to just ignore that the Olympics are happening, so I don't remember that the options to watch (may have) improved.
Maybe. I was a little surprised at the amount of people I know who are watching the Olympics via less than legal means simply because NBC's coverage and commentary were terrible .
I don't get the joy that so many smart people get in looking down on sports. Sports are no more inherently better or worse than other forms of entertainment. I don't see how sitting down and reading a book is somehow more noble than watching and cheering for someone like Usain Bolt to prove that he is the fastest person in human history. You could rewrite half that article subbing in other forms of entertainment and it would be laughed off the front page. But since it is criticizing sports, you will get a comment section where everyone posts their favorite anti-sports quote.
That isn't the fault of sports, that is the fault of corrupt politicians that use sports as bread and circuses. And the only reason they use sports is because of its popularity. If getting an author to move to (or not leave) your city resulted in getting votes, you bet there would be governments going bankrupt courting them.
This has nothing to do with looking down on sports themselves, but the institutions that manage them. The article mentions the Olympics practice of costing host cities huge amounts of money and other problems. There are also football stadium that get very unfair subsidies. Taxpayers subsidize high school and college athletics and the benefits may not be worth it. There are now serious concerns about serious brain damage being caused by some sports.
The article also mentions youth athletics which is the worst. Parents are overly harsh on their kids. The events are overly competitive when it's just 9 year olds playing what should be for fun. The games aren't designed very well for small uncoordinated kids, and many kids get excluded.
So there are many things to criticize sports over. The main point the article was making was not that sports suck. Just that they aren't allowed to be criticized in our society. Suggest that you should change youth sports, or that the football team doesn't need a brand new million dollar stadium, and people will give you a funny look and ignore you.
Agreed. There are several issues here that are all conflated.
One, the value of exercise and friendly competition. I don't think anybody is discounting that. Two, the social construct of forming into teams for purposes of increased participation. I'm a little iffy on whether this is at play in the article or not. Three, the institutional nature of sports, specifically professional sports. This seems to be what all the hubbub is about.
Like I said in my other post, a lot of that is directly caused by sports with the exception of the brain injury concerns. I think that is a serious issue that should cause extensive rule changes in youth sports like football and soccer.
The other issues are just normal human problems that happen to occur in sports. Yes, subsidies are an issue, but as I addressed in my other reply you shouldn't blame sports for that, blame the politician that uses sports to placate the masses. Yes, some sports parents are too harsh on their kids, but I have seen just as many parents have a similar attitude towards their kids when it comes to other pursuits like music.
I also don't by that sports "aren't allowed to be criticized in our society." None of these issues should be news to anyone. One of the US's recent Olympic bids was squashed by public outcry over the cost it would take to fund it. The architect of the most recent deal to give public money to build a new stadium was just voted out at the first chance the public got. For the first time in my memory an NFL team just moved to a new city and is building a new stadium without any public money. The reason these things are happening is because we are starting to wake up to these issues exactly because people have been criticizing them for a decade plus.
I don't think it's looking down on athletics or sport specifically, but more the ridiculous edifices that have been built up around them.
When you boil it down, sports are play, it's a "childish" activity. Which is fine for adults to engage in, but then you have all of these absurdities built up around play which can even go so far as to ruin the whole purpose of play (fun, camaraderie, personal excellence, teamwork, etc.) People get overly attached to their favorite teams, living or dying based on their success or failure on the field, and loving or hating those who like the same team or rival teams. There is so much money in the mix that players can not only make a living playing games but can become enormously wealthy in some cases, which distorts sport in odd ways sometimes. One of the worst examples being the ways that athletes injure themselves for their sports, such as those in boxing or football who endure brain trauma which shortens their lives and the quality of life, or those in many sports (baseball, football, running, bicycling) who take performance enhancing drugs in order to get ahead. Then you have cities that spend hard earned tax dollars to subsidize sports, with no good economic data to back such choices.
Sports are definitely taken far too seriously today, often to the detriment of sport itself. And that creates numerous situations that are rife for parody and derision.
Imagine an article detailing how some folks dedicate a huge portion of their life toward following, oh, let's say Magic the Gathering. How they spend every weekend dedicated to it. How they spend so much money on the hobby, and on various accouterments related to it. How they regularly get drunk while watching matches. How they will refuse to be friends with someone if they enjoy playing the wrong color deck. How they have gotten into several fights over the game. We would view someone like that as being outside the bounds of normal society, as being an unusual person, and as someone who engaged in pursuits that justified derision. But when people engage in precisely the same sorts of ludicrous behavior when it comes to sports, we see this sort of behavior as normal and even borderline acceptable. Merely because it's familiar and commonplace. But it is ridiculous, and it is worth pointing out how ridiculous it is.
For what it's worth, if I understand correctly, Gurdjieff held that sports were a null activity of no worth and pernicious influence. (A cursory search turns up no references, sorry.)
It's interesting that this college obsession for sports isn't just at the big state / football schools, but has trickled down to top tier universities and liberal arts schools. Many students continually get admitted in the area I grew up in for things like field hockey / crew / lacrosse / volleyball etc., while students qualified far more academically get rejected.
Glad that whole process is long behind me, and I wonder if sports are continually going to be prized as time goes on.
I'm 25 years old and I've never enjoyed any sport for as long as I've lived. Even firearms sports, where firearms otherwise interest me, bore me entirely.
The cleaner, single-purpose sports like sprinting, rowing, or cycling are dominated by min/maxers with immense genetic luck and an army of sports scientists. Who would care what they accomplish? And have you seen the hungry skeletons who do the tour de france? Who would want to watch or take part in a sport that requires ridiculous body modification or being born in kenya to compete? I don't get why people spin their wheels in these* sports* or why people care to watch them do it.
That said, I would enjoy a multi-discipline/skill level gladitorial system where the loser dies. Or giving toddlers guns, or cars, or something, and setting them loose to see who gets the highest score. Or giving them different weapons and a slight bit of training and betting on the outcome. Maybe a toddler with a flail vs. a pissed-off badger.
I (like, I imagine, many people here) have never been interested in sports but managed to get very interested in eSports - itself a blasphemy to sports-culture - for a little while a few years ago, which has made me more sympathetic to sports fandom. The special charm of eSports was that the entire scene felt like it was ours - like it belonged to the generation of gamers who grew up playing the precursors of the popular games (RPGs & RTSs that were the progenitors of MOBAs, and of course Nintendo-land). This tribal feeling was foreign to me, but I imagine it's the same sense of allegiance that functions in normal-sports culture.
An intelligent friend of mine told me that she figures that I don't enjoy watching baseball because I was just a nerd in school and don't realize the value of sports.
I was captain of my swim team in junior high and lettered every year in high school in swimming. I also pole vaulted in high school (not very well). In college I did one year on the swim team and one year on the gymnastics team (I wasn't very good). I did Judo for around 20 years and competed in the state championships in my 30's (not very well). I qualified and ran in the Boston marathon in my 50's. In most races i was in the top 15% of my age cohort.
I was never a great athlete in any sport, but overall more active than most; however, because I don't want to drink beer and yell for players that I have no connection to other than that they live in the same city she thinks that I'm too nerdy to appreciate the value of sports.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadLiterally. Without commercial sports, people who need to connect to other people for a variety of reasons, couldn't.
I find it annoying and wasteful, but I understand the societal need, especially among those who aren't engineers. (Sales, BD, etc.) Engineers can typically connect over their specialty, but that doesn't work when talking to other specialties.
And if sports are wasteful, all forms of entertainment are. Why do you think like that? The thoughts in my mind are not so precious to the world that it shouldn't be distracted by 'useless' entertainment, and I guess neither is yours.
Yes, of course there are a few other things to talk about, but even "news and weather" is dangerous, because some think Louisiana is currently showing us the future of global warming, and others think it shows that people who choose not to insure their property should not be rewarded with a bail out, lest there be moral hazard.
Sports is the safe bet.
Of course friends can discuss whatever they want. But in less familiar company, one may want to avoid topics that can lead to disagreements. Politics and religion being the classic examples.
Or, as the Professor told Eliza: "Stick to the weather, and everybody's health".
I would assume that once the two people get to know one another the window of safe topics would become broader
For example, if I state gymnastics isn't a sport, just as ballet isn't, and that watching it means condoning child torture, is that a safe bet?
(Edit: and that's ingoring the really contentious subjects such as whether England really scored that third goal in 1966)
Or electronic gaming? Where are the League events? The Olympics are in Rio, but everyone's watching Seattle for the DOTA 2016 International tournament.
Commercial sports often go way too far in their excesses and lack of criticism, but many, MANY people enjoy watching the highest level of sport like any other art. It may not be your cup of tea, but saying it's wasteful to me is the same as tossing out any great artistic or creative endeavour.
That explains why people play sports, but I don't think it explains why so many people watch them. Most sports fans don't play the sport themselves.
Plus, when you're 60 and out of shape you can't go out and play a game of football, watching football is as close as you can get to doing it.
Sure you can. There is nothing stopping an out of shape (but otherwise healthy) 60 year old person from going out and playing touch football. I mean, they might get dirty, sweaty and have aches or cramps the following days, but hey, that's life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron
Especially for sports that can be divided into local, regional and national tiers.
It becomes something of a clan system, where you squabble locally, but support each other regionally and nationally when a outside "threat" shows up.
Pretty much any music or drama student has had to endure years of being some derogatory term, only to find out that when they graduate, society expects them to starve, while athletes can get by quite easily just on former glory.
Quite the subsidy so that some people can break the damned ice, don't you think?
Odd that it's impossible for us to talk about our different hobbies with one another. I wonder if that's ever happened in human history. Probably not, I guess. But hey, how 'bout them Bearhawks?! Did you see that ludicrous display last night?
Is that why war endures?
No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.
That's your notion.
The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
The promises don't materialize.
Nowadays it looks like Olympics and its ilk (Pam am games) are just fraud by global construction contractors on the masses.
Things like national sporting events are put on in part to showcase the accomplishments of the group and to encourage affiliation to it. They are ritual. They are like church services. They are like parades.
If you go out of your way to denigrate them, you are showing disrespect not just for the event itself, but for the group that put them on. And if you persist in these acts of disaffiliation, don't be surprised if that group increasingly excludes you in ways large and small. You want to see what it's like to be an outsider in your own country, someone who really truly is considered one of THEM rather than one of US? Try asking an African-American, particularly an old one. It isn't pretty.
You are not so strong and wise you can build a good life for yourself, alone. All through your life, you need to lean on what your family, your town, your people, and your state have built and are willing to share with you. So try to be civil and show a bit of respect when they are celebrating.
I can't even number how many people touched the parts of this laptop.
Of the colleges I've attended, they spend more money on the sports programs than any two or three other programs collectively, even though very few players would be able to move on to a higher level than college football or basketball.
It's maddening and frustrating to be surrounded by that culture and unable to convince anyone that a little bit more emphasis on academics would pay far greater dividends. I'm not against sports for the health benefits, but beyond that, it's mostly luck and I just don't buy that it's worth it.
Our football coach was still grossly overpaid, though.
Life was less pleasant for non-sports guys out in the 2A and 3A districts - I was able to switch to my big high school from one of those semi-rural "white flight" ones, and I'm so glad I did.
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-news/20160819-mckinney-...
I am ... I don't know how I feel about this. Certainly not happy. Probably a good thing I don't live in McKinney.
The academics were outstanding there, but about 1/3 dropped out before graduation. Wasn't a lot of effort put into retention, either. We left around the the they were building that massive Allen sports complex and the new high school.
My youngest was still in high school at the time, and moving her out of it was the best thing we could have done, as it turns out. But I think that's mainly that she got to reinvent herself, and she really liked where we moved to.
Plus, the Internet was beginning to make social media (MySpace) available, which really helped her socially.
I'm pretty sure the land for the Allen monstrosity was donated by the founder of one of the companies I worked for. Guy lives extremely frugally, but he was worth untold millions.
The whole Dallas area has dumbed down a lot in the wake of the first dotcom bust. It's all $20 an hour contract Java work now; $30 if you're lucky.
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--OsmROR7...
Oh, and in states where it isn't the football coach? second most common? A college Basketball coach is the highest paid in half.
Fortunately the mechanism of feeding pro sports (TV advertising) is fading somewhat, as people's attention is drawn to other activities. But I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook bought the rights to e.g. basketball.
NBC CEO Steve Burke described his "nightmare" before the Olympics: "We wake up someday and the ratings are down 20 percent. If that happens, my prediction would be that millennials had been in a Facebook bubble or a Snapchat bubble and the Olympics have come, and they didn’t know it." That almost happened. Ratings were down 17%. NBC/Comcast has prepaid for the Olympics through 2032. That looks like a bad deal now.
This is happening for other major sports. The average age over the past decade of National Football League and Major League Baseball viewers has increased by four and seven years, respectively, to 47 and 53. Baseball is a dying industry.
Of the top 100 high schools in the US, 67% do NOT have a football team.[2] In 1998, the top 10 had only one school without a football team. This year’s top 10 has seven.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-19/nbc-s-12-b... [2] http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/local/americas-most-ch...
And for the money sports, the Olympics have become a side-show. It is, economically speaking, idiotic for a professional athlete to put their career, and millions and millions of dollars in earnings, at risk for nationalism. So in many cases, the best in the world don't bother to show up.
Also, the NBC coverage is just awful. No wonder nobody wants to watch when it is wall-to-wall puff pieces, talking heads, and a few chopped and spliced highlights of the actual events.
Never mind, YouTube or Facebook will have it. And, I'm on a desktop computer with a fast connection. I presume that the experience on mobile without an ad blocker borders on glacial.
Holy spaghetti monster, Batman. Make your website STICKY. Feed me more until I'm ready to explode. You have the most amazing athletes in the world on video, MAKE USE OF IT. Top 10 judo takedowns. Best soccer highlights. Worst wipeouts. And THEN give me the ability to drill into longer and longer videos.
It's not that hard to make me want to click things on your website when I already came there. But, this is what happens when it's about the ad revenue instead of sports coverage.
NBC has only themselves to blame.
As for the sports themselves, the other perennial problem is subjective vs objective judging. One thing that MMA has over boxing, for example, is an objective measure of victory. A lot of the olympic sports that have "busyness and spectacle" also have judging and we see in boxing what happened. Gymnastics has similar issues.
I do agree that the NBC coverage is awful. Their commentary could be much more subdued and intelligent. Fortunately it is possible to mute the inane audio.
It's really a poor excuse for nations to come together if no-one cares. Football is popular all the time, nearly everywhere - it's much more organic as a global come-together-watch-together event.
I can't personally understand the interest in sports beyond the personal experience - i.e. if one has familiarity in any skill or discipline it's incredibly enticing to observe true masters performance - but I do value in the philosophical sense the fact that all cultures come at the same playing field and speak the same language and share the same context in the form of the sport.
In addition, while it's great watching the best get their medals, the thrill is in the upset. Upsets are getting much rarer nowadays.
No one is going to throw their smartphone on in the background. And NBC sure doesn't make it easy for me throw their website on in the background in high-def and just let it play. So that, when something happens, I can scrub it back a minute or two and watch actively.
NBC is guilty of not understanding that, with the internet, people don't need to tolerate being bored.
If you have cable TV, which I don't.
I tried a Sling.tv free trial. Ok, so it starts at $20/mo. But that didn't include NBC Sports. Ok, so upgrade. Ads. A lot of ads. And a little bit of Olympics. Wow, this is...awful, and I completely remember why I stopped paying for cable TV.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-c...
[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/olympics/gold-medal-wo...
The article also mentions youth athletics which is the worst. Parents are overly harsh on their kids. The events are overly competitive when it's just 9 year olds playing what should be for fun. The games aren't designed very well for small uncoordinated kids, and many kids get excluded.
So there are many things to criticize sports over. The main point the article was making was not that sports suck. Just that they aren't allowed to be criticized in our society. Suggest that you should change youth sports, or that the football team doesn't need a brand new million dollar stadium, and people will give you a funny look and ignore you.
One, the value of exercise and friendly competition. I don't think anybody is discounting that. Two, the social construct of forming into teams for purposes of increased participation. I'm a little iffy on whether this is at play in the article or not. Three, the institutional nature of sports, specifically professional sports. This seems to be what all the hubbub is about.
The other issues are just normal human problems that happen to occur in sports. Yes, subsidies are an issue, but as I addressed in my other reply you shouldn't blame sports for that, blame the politician that uses sports to placate the masses. Yes, some sports parents are too harsh on their kids, but I have seen just as many parents have a similar attitude towards their kids when it comes to other pursuits like music.
I also don't by that sports "aren't allowed to be criticized in our society." None of these issues should be news to anyone. One of the US's recent Olympic bids was squashed by public outcry over the cost it would take to fund it. The architect of the most recent deal to give public money to build a new stadium was just voted out at the first chance the public got. For the first time in my memory an NFL team just moved to a new city and is building a new stadium without any public money. The reason these things are happening is because we are starting to wake up to these issues exactly because people have been criticizing them for a decade plus.
When you boil it down, sports are play, it's a "childish" activity. Which is fine for adults to engage in, but then you have all of these absurdities built up around play which can even go so far as to ruin the whole purpose of play (fun, camaraderie, personal excellence, teamwork, etc.) People get overly attached to their favorite teams, living or dying based on their success or failure on the field, and loving or hating those who like the same team or rival teams. There is so much money in the mix that players can not only make a living playing games but can become enormously wealthy in some cases, which distorts sport in odd ways sometimes. One of the worst examples being the ways that athletes injure themselves for their sports, such as those in boxing or football who endure brain trauma which shortens their lives and the quality of life, or those in many sports (baseball, football, running, bicycling) who take performance enhancing drugs in order to get ahead. Then you have cities that spend hard earned tax dollars to subsidize sports, with no good economic data to back such choices.
Sports are definitely taken far too seriously today, often to the detriment of sport itself. And that creates numerous situations that are rife for parody and derision.
Imagine an article detailing how some folks dedicate a huge portion of their life toward following, oh, let's say Magic the Gathering. How they spend every weekend dedicated to it. How they spend so much money on the hobby, and on various accouterments related to it. How they regularly get drunk while watching matches. How they will refuse to be friends with someone if they enjoy playing the wrong color deck. How they have gotten into several fights over the game. We would view someone like that as being outside the bounds of normal society, as being an unusual person, and as someone who engaged in pursuits that justified derision. But when people engage in precisely the same sorts of ludicrous behavior when it comes to sports, we see this sort of behavior as normal and even borderline acceptable. Merely because it's familiar and commonplace. But it is ridiculous, and it is worth pointing out how ridiculous it is.
Glad that whole process is long behind me, and I wonder if sports are continually going to be prized as time goes on.
entertainment vs real sport for everyone
The cleaner, single-purpose sports like sprinting, rowing, or cycling are dominated by min/maxers with immense genetic luck and an army of sports scientists. Who would care what they accomplish? And have you seen the hungry skeletons who do the tour de france? Who would want to watch or take part in a sport that requires ridiculous body modification or being born in kenya to compete? I don't get why people spin their wheels in these* sports* or why people care to watch them do it.
That said, I would enjoy a multi-discipline/skill level gladitorial system where the loser dies. Or giving toddlers guns, or cars, or something, and setting them loose to see who gets the highest score. Or giving them different weapons and a slight bit of training and betting on the outcome. Maybe a toddler with a flail vs. a pissed-off badger.
edit: sentence correction
An intelligent friend of mine told me that she figures that I don't enjoy watching baseball because I was just a nerd in school and don't realize the value of sports.
I was captain of my swim team in junior high and lettered every year in high school in swimming. I also pole vaulted in high school (not very well). In college I did one year on the swim team and one year on the gymnastics team (I wasn't very good). I did Judo for around 20 years and competed in the state championships in my 30's (not very well). I qualified and ran in the Boston marathon in my 50's. In most races i was in the top 15% of my age cohort.
I was never a great athlete in any sport, but overall more active than most; however, because I don't want to drink beer and yell for players that I have no connection to other than that they live in the same city she thinks that I'm too nerdy to appreciate the value of sports.