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I think you're underestimating the crashing indifference some of us feel toward all sports. It's not cultivated, and it's not that we haven't tried or been expo

I think you're underestimating the crashing indifference some of us feel toward all sports. It's not cultivated, and it's not that we haven't tried or been exposed to other's enthusiasms. It's not that we haven't played a bit ourselves, even, at least at beer-league level. My whole family is pretty nuts about American football, so I grew up surrounded by it and can still appreciate the beauty and complexity of the game, the strategy and execution. But I watch the Superbowl and that's it. I just can't be bothered with anything else. I used to play soccer with a bunch of Europeans who could happily discuss Champions League play for hours. Never was able to muster up the interest to do more than fake a short conversation. I followed baseball for long enough to survive a World Series while living in the US, during which time it was impossible to have a conversation with anyone about anything that didn't involve the game. My interest lapsed the moment the last bat was swung. It was just too much work to maintain. Why do sports leave some of us so utterly flat? I have no idea (although from reading some of the comments here apparently the world is full of people who can tell on the basis of a few short sentences the entirety of a person's motivations, which is a pretty good trick.) But it's the reality. So yeah, you can choose how much effort you want to put into being a sports fan, but for some of us the amount of effort required to engage beyond the most brain-dead superficial level is huge compared to the effort the average fan puts in following their favourite team. For whatever reason, some of us face a wall of indifference that makes the effort of surmounting it simply not worth it. [I half expect replies to tell me that "no I really just don't understand how beautiful $GAME is", which is the flip side of that uncanny ability to know everything about a person's motivations.]

CocaKoala 12y ago
>But I watch the Superbowl and that's it. I just can't be bothered with anything else. That's totally fine! If the extent of your emotional commitment to football is "I watch the superbowl and that's it", that's still a passing interest in the sport and the sort of thing the article is encouraging. The attitude that the article is lamenting is the people who go out of their way to avoid being interested in football, the people who take pride in their lack of interest. The sorts of people who, next Monday, are going to be saying, "Oh, the superbowl was yesterday? I figured I'd just catch the commercials on youtube; that's the only interesting part anyways. I don't even know who was playing." That sort of disinterest is cultivated.

CocaKoala 12y ago

>But I watch the Superbowl and that's it. I just can't be bothered with anything else. That's totally fine! If the extent of your emotional commitment to football is "I watch the superbowl and that's it", that's still a passing interest in the sport and the sort of thing the article is encouraging. The attitude that the article is lamenting is the people who go out of their way to avoid being interested in football, the people who take pride in their lack of interest. The sorts of people who, next Monday, are going to be saying, "Oh, the superbowl was yesterday? I figured I'd just catch the commercials on youtube; that's the only interesting part anyways. I don't even know who was playing." That sort of disinterest is cultivated.