"Except for one thing: I hate sports and the people who play them, care about them or care about the people who play them."

oh, and i expected my bad abilities at sports playing to become less important over time, as i progressed from elementary school, to middle school, to high school, then college, then real life, and the thing is, sports never go away or stop being important to other people in society. i could win a nobel prize, but still someone would want me to play kickball with them.

Hi.

I admit, there was a time in my life, mostly in my late teens, where I thought that being into sports was antithetical to being into creative and artistic pursuits. Then I realized this was a stupid way of looking at things.

xpost john i'm sorry and i hope it didn't leave a bruise.

See Edward Gibbon's descriptions of the Greens vs. the Blues chariot racing teams in Constaninople in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. [several Roman umpire jokes to follow...]

Haha.

I kind of hated dodgeball. People were so merciless. Plus, I have such small hands that I was never able to palm the ball well enough to throw back hard enough. Luckily, whoever I had for gym class senior year let those of us who didn't want to play to sit on the sidelines.

You David James fan you. Er, wait.

those who hate sports are closet Olympians

so, want to play some kickball?
pingpong? does that count? i'd prefer it. or, um. floor hockey? that was fun. frisbee'd be okay too.

http://www.armchairempire.com/images/Reviews/Playstation2/winning-eleven-6/winning-eleven-6-1.jpg

I'd also like to state that the part about high school I miss most was PE and dodgeball. If you had beef with someone, even someone bigger or more athletic than you, you just beaned them in the back of the skull when on the same team. Ahh, evolution never properly protecting the medula oblongata.

does this make me a bad person?

Which is different from people discussing TV, film, or music how, again?

Aaron, now that does not make you a bad person because football kinda sucks and basketball is the greatest sport yet invented. nb unlike mr. perry i do not acknowledge the existence of sport fucking.

XPOST HAHA RIGHT ON CUE

"Except for one thing: I hate sports and the people who play them, care about them or care about the people who play them."

totally comes out of nowhere.

because they're higher brow, dumbass.

A winning moment entails that someone wins. No one wins, they're just moments. In this case, what makes one moment more spectacular than another?

>A tie game still has the struggle for victory. A dull game is one with no winning moments.<

But with the tie game, there is no payoff. No victory. The dull game has victory, but nothing in the middle or beginning that provided excitement of any kind. So how does this tune back into the "winning is everything" claim above? If you admit that excitement can be had merely with what you term "winning moments", then it is not necessary to win in order to enjoy, is it?

Of course. Which brings us back to why people would enjoy sports in the first place. If no one watched the Super Bowl casually, 150 million people in the US wouldn't be watching it every year. Furthermore, if all that mattered was winning, then every Super Bowl would be considered as exciting as the last, because someone always wins in the Super Bowl (due to its unlimited sudden death overtimes).

Come to think of it, isn't it fully possible to have a dull game with plenty of winning moments? There are blowouts in the 40-50 point range every week in college football, and those games are hardly exciting. Yet they offer lots of "winning moments". What such moments can be judged to produce drama or excitement?

(this is a very effective job of trolling. at least I'm enjoying myself.)

My enjoyment of sports is derived more from abstractions and aesthetics than traditional fandom.

My favorite baseball team is the Red Sox, even though I can only stand two of their players and have zero history with the city of Boston. But I love Fenway and the Green Monster and as long as they exist I'll root for the Red Sox. Likewise, I care more about baseball's history than the present.

Extra long games become dull eventually when extra innings and timeouts cause delay of the final winning moment. What's the matter, then? Not "enjoying it" for it's own sake-- has the "strategy and aesthetic" gone out of the game, then? No, of course not: it's all about the winning moments and especially the ultimate winning moment. Otherwise there's no point. In the case of the long drawn-out game, there's not enough "meat" there to justify the waiting for the goal: winning/end of play. It is the reverse of the college game that is very high scoring and fast, yet dull. In either case, something has happened to disappoint the thrill of victory. It is all about winning moments, but there is only so much one can take of it because it is BOOOORING. There are few options and limited play.

>sports are not only about winning moments, but the thrill of strategy and aesthetics. it's intellectual and artistic pleasure as well as competitive.

This is all addressed above. The "thrill of strategy and aesthetics" are all about the winning moments and ultimate goal: winning. There is no strategy or aesthetics without the goal. People would not thrill to watch men run around and throw balls for no reason. In all other forms of entertainment and expression, there is a purpose and in sports the only purpose is "to win."

If a meaningful existence to you means kids, then I win yet again.

The idea that there's such a thing as "no reason" is art school bullshit talk. Just as Cage showed that there's no such thing as "no music" (even "silence" contains sound), so it would be easy to show that, when men are running around in the context of a public performance, there is no such thing as "no reason". Admire their flanks! Lust after them! Try to reconstruct the semantic language of the choreographer! Disentangle the pre-arranged from the random! Make remarks to your lover, sitting next to you, about possible threesomes involving you, him, and the most shapely of the athletes! Imagine "scoring"!

So what makes one winning moment different from another? If two games have 84 points scored, and one ends 43-41, and the other 72-9, why is the 43-41 likely more exciting?

>If both teams are scoring left and right, no one might as well be scoring at all. <

And yet scoring lots of points is considered to be such a huge part of the attraction to certain games that rules changes are initiated to cause it. See: NBA, Arena Football.

>Extra long games become dull eventually when extra innings and timeouts cause delay of the final winning moment. What's the matter, then? Not "enjoying it" for it's own sake-- has the "strategy and aesthetic" gone out of the game, then?<

Prove that long games "become dull eventually". I'm pretty sure you can't.

>No, of course not: it's all about the winning moments and especially the ultimate winning moment. Otherwise there's no point.<

But given that there is not necessarily any guarantee of a ultimate winning moment, then that would entail that any game or competition that ends without victor is a waste of time. So how then to people enjoy watching draws in the NFL or boxing? It would be antithetical to your argument. Either they do or they don't, and if they do, then you can't be right.

>In the case of the long drawn-out game, there's not enough "meat" there to justify the waiting for the goal: winning/end of play. It is the reverse of the college game that is very high scoring and fast, yet dull.<

But a longer game can also lengthen the build to the eventual victory, making the storyline of the game perhaps even greater, assuming its properly done. This is why Game 5 of the 2004 ALCS, while epic in length, is considered to be one of the better baseball games in modern history.

>In either case, something has happened to disappoint the thrill of victory. It is all about winning moments, but there is only so much one can take of it because it is BOOOORING. There are few options and limited play.<

What makes it boring? Wouldn't what made it boring be, GASP, what occurred during the game? The specifics, rather than the stats? The game itself rather than merely the winning? Your argument is fluid and makes no point. You've gone from stating that victory is the sole purpose and what makes one athletic competition subjectively different/better than another in the subjective mind of the viewer to admitting that what actually happens during the contest has some purpose in its entertainment value. Of course, you've never actually explained how people can enjoy a tie, never explained why events with the exact same ending in the same arena of play can be wildly different, or even bothered to come up with the least bit of proof as to sports fandom being purely the result of some modern day nationalism/tribalism.

>This is all addressed above. The "thrill of strategy and aesthetics" are all about the winning moments and ultimate goal: winning. There is no strategy or aesthetics without the goal.<

So personal charisma plays no part in people's fandom of sports? Why then do people associate an outlaw image with the Oakland Raiders and latch onto that in an emotional manner? The fact that Al Davis signed thugs and criminals doesn't have anything to do with winning. Again, your premise is wrong and so is the argument built on it.

It's silly to demand objectivist proofs for subjectvist claims. Proof that a long game has become dull is that I'm bored, surely? (It happens for me in the fifth minute of a football match, for instance.)

Of course. You may be bored, but this does not mean that this is the prevalent opinion regarding said game. Nor does it make long games boring purely by the fact that they are long, just as long songs are not boring merely because they're long, nor are epic plays not bad because they are epic. Again, the only way this could be true is if you assumed that all that mattered was winning, and that therefore, winning in as short an amount of time with the least resistance would be preferable (as a long game would be bad). I guess then that Jimmy Thunder's 6 second KO of Chauncy Welliver is a better fight than Castillo/Corrales, using this standard that's been posited by Guy.

(and of course sports and the entertainment within is subjective. this is not in doubt.)

Talk about beating it into the ground.

this is clearly not true if you think for just one moment about sport in terms of participation. competitive games are not simply defined by their rules, the rules exist to provide opportunities for individual and co-operative participation, the benefits of which can be wide-ranging.

i play 5-a-side football and have done for years (i was never good at sport at school but in adult life i've generally managed to find a regular game at my level, wherever i've lived).

these games aren't all about winning. they're just not. they're all about having fun - they're games. they're fundamentally about play. as the book says, it's about continuing to play - in this case, once a week - and regularly enjoying yourself with your friends... maybe you should try it?

Also this Alan:

Then you don't know anything about the Raiders or Al Davis

is borderline offensive, considering I lived in Oakland for many years and LA before that. The fact that they played in LA and Mr. Davis' long running feud with the City of Oakland, and my sense that Raider fandom is much more about class (e.g. there are plenty of Oakland residents who love the 49ers, and guess where most of them live) were what led me to question your "personification of a place" comment.

Well, that's exactly my point. Oakland is seen across most of the US as a very, very tough city. The Raiders are seen as a football team comprised of the problem children of the league; the toughest, nastiest people there are. Sure, there are people in Oakland who find themselves seeing more in common with the ethic of the compartively clean 49ers (as well as the Packers and Cowboys in large numbers, like the rest of the US), but the Raider ethos has come, for better or worse, to partially define the city.

John Cage showed this? Or he read it in a book by Alan Watts who read it in a book by Daisetz Suzuki who read it in the Diamond Sutra or some other thousand year old Buddhist text? Credit to the ancients, please.

I recently read an article that said, 'In our post-Cagean world...'. As if this man actually changed the physical laws of the universe, as opposed to hanging out with Chogyam Trungpa for a few months.

I am strangely argumentative today.

But sports are terrible at that! If there was a tv drama with an excitement-to-dullness ratio of the average football game, or motor race, or cricket match, it would be cancelled after one episode. They require that the viewer has an interest, tribal or otherwise, in what's going on. American Football and Basketball are ingeneral exceptions to this, baseball from everything I can see isn't.

And I'd guess that a significant percentage of the population doesn't actually give that much of a shit about sports but keeps up so they can make conversation at the office or whatever.

OTM, and also a part of why people hate sports: mandatory culture sucks.

A sentiment I can fully get behind, without hating sports per se. (For myself, watching the interactions between rabid Red Sox fan Tom and rabid Angels fan Craig at work as the season winds down, even though I'm not following baseball at all aside from what they mention is going on, is always entertaining.)

What's your second guess?

it's a bit like nickleback.

This is actually completely horseshit but whatever. I mean, I can't think of a single person in my universe who thinks this. Keep in mind that the majority of my universe is comprised of sports fanatics.

-- The Ghost Of Dex! (...) (webmail), September 23rd, 2005. (link)

Can I just point out that this is rather obviously not me? For starters, the name is spelled incorrectly and also I know who Pooty Tang is (hint: not a vagina).

Even that I wouldn't mind if it was mostly restricted to footage of the games. It's all the time spent lingeringly on Australian Football League players training, swimming in the ocean, appearing suited up at a Tribunal Hearing for accidentally striking another player during a game, speaking earnestly at a press conference before and after... And of course there are then special Sports News shows which replay all of this again in expanded detail... Why is this considered "news" precisely?

Marathons are idiotic because in the original legend, the runner died.

Which legend are you talking about then? I'm referring to Pheidippides who ran from the Battle Of Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory over the Persians. As the story goes, he dropped dead after delivering the message.

Which is correct, but the run from Marathon to Athens (a.k.a. the death run) was where the modern 42km marathon run derives from.

If memory serves though, I think that distance has varied over the years.

I believe the marathon distance became fixed at the London Olympics, when they set it up so that some royals could wave them off at the start at Windsor, I think, then some more see them finish at... White City stadium? The 26 miles and however many yards was thereafter fixed.