As I was driving Brian to soccer training tonight, we started talking about what position in sports is the hardest. Obviously, my first question back to him was “what do you mean by hard, exactly?”
(For those of you who get this, ring your 🛎 now!)
That can certainly be debated, but that’s not the point of this particular story. The subject got me thinking of the subjectivity of all thinking behind sports and how much they are loved or loathed, and why.
I gave Brian the example of how he and his sister don’t like going to baseball games. They think it’s boring and a waste of time. “Nothing happens”, I’ve heard them say. “They take too long between plays.” Honestly, they may be right on that last part. But whether they objectively do is beside the point. My kids don’t like it. Why?
I would would put forth the theory that they don’t watch baseball the same way I do. First of all, they don’t really understand the game. (Not blaming them, just saying.) And when you don’t understand the game, it’s easy to only see the surface of baseball. A bunch of guys on a field with gloves on their hands, waiting for another guy to throw the ball towards yet another guy who may or may not hit it with a bat. “How do they score a goal?”, they may ask. (And they have.)
They don’t see the strategy behind the game. The moves made and the future moves those moves set up for this batter or the guy 3 batters down the lineup. They don’t understand the importance of a 3-2 count with runners on base and 2 outs, and that a hit (NOT necessarily a home run) is all that’s needed to score some runs because the base runners can take off on the pitch instead of having to wait for the ball to be put in play. They will never understand why a batter is intentionally walked because the next guy is hitting .166 with runners in scoring position, versus the guy at the late who’s hitting .366.
Those concepts are lost on them because they only see the surface. I would argue the same is true for MANY people watching a soccer match. They literally see a bunch of guys on a field running around trying to get the ball while the other team plays keep-away with the ball. And maybe they score 1 goal between the two teams in the whole match. “Boring!!” “Where’s the scoring? Where’s the action?!”
And yet soccer fans can watch the same game and come away with “Brilliant!!”
The “Boring!!” people don’t see the strategy of through balls and having runners on the wing and waiting for the perfect passing situation to get it to them. The strategy of preferring players who can read positioning over pure speed when you’re talking about the prowess of a defender.
Again, they see the surface game.
And then we got to (American) football. What can I say? I like football (maybe not as much as I used to, but still).
Like it or not, football is universally agreed to be the most popular sport in America. Why is that?
My argument:
It’s a blend of the two sides I described above. The surface spectator can enjoy the short bursts of athleticism and excitement. And the deeper fan can understand and enjoy the same strategic moves. Neither party is lacking when watching the game, and neither side can look at the other side and say “you just don’t understand”.
Before you leave here thinking I’m promoting football as the best sport, I’m not. Not even close.
I actually believe it’s so popular because it fits in so perfectly with our absolute pathetic excuse for an attention span as a people here in 2021. Like I said, short bursts of excitement. Bursts of athleticism. That, oh by the way, may be the most dangerous major sport we have in the U.S.
Kind of like another extremely popular and yet toxic cultural phenomenon: Twitter.
