True Confessions: Why I Don’t Like Watching Sportsball

It may not come as a surprise to most people who know me that I am not an avid sportsball* fan. As I am also not very good at playing sportsball, you might think that I don’t like sports at all… but that is actually not true. Given the right environment—typically coercion/persuasion by friends along with teammates who will not get too frustrated by me messing up, striking out, or shying away from the ball I am supposed to be moving toward—I actually enjoy playing sportsball. And yet, I can describe most of the time I spend watching sportsball (like the baseball game I went to with my family last night) as excruciatingly boring.

As I was at the baseball game last night (Why is there so much time in between the players doing anything?? Don’t they already get a break every time they switch which team is batting?)

As much as I love them, I prefer to snuggle
kittens when it is warm...

I realized that I viewed the ballgame much like some game night at my house—we all got together, and I visited with everybody in between occasional breaks when something would happen—except that at a game night I would actually be doing something interesting in between the visiting/quality time. And yet, my Pap loves sports. He actually paid attention to the game the whole time, and he will sit in Ravens stadium in the middle of December to watch a game that literally goes on for hours, which is more time than I would spend in the cold even if I was snuggling multiple kittens.

So what’s my problem? I think it’s mostly that…I just don’t care. In order to enjoy watching sportball, I have to be emotionally invested in the game, and most of the time I am just not emotionally invested. Here is my reasoning:

1)  I love football movies (shocker, I know). But in football movies, you always get to know the players and get caught up in the epic struggle they face and you want them to WIN. Same with pretty much any sports movie I can think of.

2) I like watching rugby… but my exposure to rugby began with Invictus (epic sportball movie for sure) and then continued by watching the world cup in South Africa pretty much only in bars with avid springbok fans, and it seemed that half the time, our team was playing. I wanted them to WIN.

3) I totally like watching games if my friends are playing. I want my friends to win, so I care what happens. Simple.

4) The closest I can get to caring about professional sportsball is when the Ravens are playing. I am a ravens fan because my family are Ravens fans, and when the Ravens win, many people I love are happy (It doesn’t hurt that there is an epic sportsball movie about Michael Ohr, who still plays on the team).

To me, it seems perfectly reasonable to only care about a sportsball game when I am emotionally invested in the players (even if most fans seems to derive motivation elsewhere). But it does beg the question: what areas of life should I care about that I just don’t because I am not emotionally invested... because it doesn’t affect me or the people close to me?

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* Not familiar with sportsball? If it is a team sport and involves something similar to a ball (football, baseball, soccer, etc), it probably falls under the category of sportsball.