Like for example, obviously I’m a sports fan, but through all of sports the one thing I love watching more than anything is great baseball pitchers. Watching how much movement they can put on a ball is just fun to watch.
Motorsports of all kinds are remarkable to me, most prominently the rally tours of the 80’s.
The fans and journalists were crazy, the engineers were crazy, the drivers were crazy too.
Something about watching those old hot-hatches flick around a hairpin while people jump in front of the car just sparks something deep inside my heart… it’s the Ultimate Extreme.
Bonus to alpine ski/snowboard. Those POVS are ridiculous.
I don’t give a fuck about more conventional sports. I find them to be primitive and have no idea how people get so swept up by them.
I used to really enjoy watching Tom Brady play for the Patriots. All other football was a boring grind to me after that, and I have lost all interest in sports since. But when Brady ran a play, it was art, and it seemingly almost always worked. I know he’s generally speaking a pretty terrible person, but man that guy was the GOAT quarterback IMHO. I imagine I will catch a lot of derision for my opinion. I don’t think he’s a well-liked individual.
Closest I get to “admiring” something about sports is with films or documentaries about them. I like knowing the people who do this stuff way more than the actual thing itself (I often tune out when these things get back to the actual sport and tune back in when it gets back to how this is affecting their personal lives).
To be honest, no.
I can’t even watch the sports I’ve played myself. Watching sport has never given me that feeling you’re describing
What have you played?
Roller derby and running. Football, cricket and tennis when I was a kid
Mad props on the roller derby. I found that anything that comes between my feet and the ground is a no go for me.
Never was a runner but back in my 20s I got into tennis for awhile.
Sports are kind of interesting playgrounds for statistics. I respect that about them. Moneyball is a movie (and book) about how an economist used statistics to change the way baseball teams recruit players. I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did. Although it could have gone into more detail about the nerdy stuff.
Sports analytics have changed every sport. I distinctly remember that season, the average sports fan didn’t know back then what was going on behind the scenes but that streak was fun as hell to watch even if you weren’t and A’s fan. My buddy was a die hard As fan and he was distraught at the trades before the season started.
I loved baseball as a kid, I wasn’t good, but I loved playing and I loved watching. when I hit my late teens is when I finally found my strength in hitting. But I stopped watching when the strikes in the 90s happened and I didn’t follow again for 20 years.
Dont let others ruin something you love. that’s a hardlife lesson, because I’ve gotten back into it and realized how much I truly did love the game itself and hate that I didn’t keep watching or trying at it. Just the feel of the glove, the grass, the smell of the dirt.
And what’s truly great about baseball even though it’s been played since the late 1800’s by hundreds of thousands of people over 100 games per team a year. It seems like every year there is still something that’s never been done before in its history.
I kind of find the slow mo videos of how much a seemingly solid ball deforms when the bat or racket hits it to be interesting, but that’s about the only interest I’ve ever had in them.
Jousting is also kind of neat, but that’s not what most people think of for sports.
