bauer blog

A brief preface…
This is not a note about playing sports and being fanatical about your team. This is not a note about those people who do play major league sports for a career. This is a note about college students/alumni, working professionals, that only care to discuss sports in a social situation that are fanatical to the point of exhaustion about ’scores’, ’seeds’, and ‘rankings’. If you are involved in a sport at your school, I understand being excited about making it to national championships. If you are involved in a recreational league, I can understand boasting or complaining about how a game went. What I fail to understand however is the amount of gravity that sports seem to pull on people’s emotions and moods. How those of us on the sidelines of the game actually become more ‘depressed’ after our favorite team, which we have no affiliation with, loses a game. The following is a list of reasons why I think that sports are a waste of time when taken at length, as well as the reasons I do judge those who are fanatical about them.

1) Because 99% of us are not involved.
This was addressed in my preface but it is worthy to be mentioned again upfront. If you are discussing something that you took part in, and I don’t mean rooting for the home team, but actually playing the game, then I can understand some enthusiasm. What I cannot understand is why people sit and yell at their TV sets or sit in the stands and yell at the ref’s who are ‘making bad calls’. You are not in the game, you are a bystander that is paying big bucks either through your cable company, directtv, ppv, sporting arena to watch other men/women compete in something that has no impact on your life outside of the mundane 2 hours of watching a ball be thrown/kicked/ran. Get over the fact that your favorite team, which you again have no affiliation with, just lost by an upset. I cannot believe that this actually affects people on an emotional level.

2) Because it is insignificant when compared to learning something new and educational.
If you consider that the average ‘game’ of any given sport takes roughly 2 hours. And you watch 2 games a week, then you have just blown 4 hours of your week watching something that amounts to absolutely nothing. You could have spent 4 hours reading through literature, philosophy, classics, rhetoric, politics, current events, culinary, how to chop down a tree, or better yet, you could have been doing something active and participating in life. But instead you were plopped down on a couch, yelling at the TV, or sitting in a stand paying 50-200 bucks a ticket, eating GMO based food and slurping down copious amounts of alcohol or corn syrup. If you consider that in a given year, if you watch 4 hours of just sports a week, you are wasting over 200 hours of your life. That’s equivalent to sitting on the couch for over a week straight watching mind numbing play after play. What could you have been doing to better yourself? What could you have learned in 200 hours? You could have become a skilled pianist. You could have been lifting weights. You could have been writing the editor of your local paper on some misinformation that he was spreading. Who knows? But your 200 hours are not gone and wasted.

3) Because they are a distraction from life.
Sports serve nothing more than to distract people from their mundane lives. They feel the need to watch sports because it gives them a sense of accomplishment… No wait, scratch that. How can they feel accomplishment when they were not even participating? They watch sports because they literally have nothing better to do? That I find hard to believe as well. It appears that sports really do just serve as a distraction from life and it’s necessities. How often do we see people plop down with friends to watch the game on a Monday night? This forsakes the idea of intelligent conversations between men. There was a time when, if a group of men gathered, they discussed things of importance. Now you hear men get together, grunt, and discuss their disdain with their rookies on the team, or discuss why it is a rebuilding year, they never want to discuss what is going on in each others lives or what is affecting them through politics. I’m sure if someone was given a choice between doing a bit of community service and bettering the lives of others verse watching some sports with a few buds, most would certainly opt for watching the pigskin get tossed. How sad that is…

4) Because they feed a fictitious need of primal man for competition.
No, wrong. What this boils down to is the desire of every man to feel like a ‘hero’. Whether you are playing the sport and you want to be Johnny Quarterback, who gets all the girls and gets lifted up on the other players shoulders when he makes the game winning play, or you are the fanatic sports commentator that calls an upset and every one praises you for making such a good call. These are one and the same, they serve the same purpose. There is no primal need within man to be the winner of competition, but a fairytale-esque slay the dragon, IE win the basketball game mindset. Much like how women idealize men coming and sweeping them off their feet because of pop culture, men feel the need to be the ‘hero’ and then ’sweep the women off their feet’.

5) Because they affect people on an emotional level and that is absurd in and of itself.
The idea that sporting events actually affect people on an emotional level is absolutely absurd to me if you took no part in the game. I can understand those that played a game in a championship and lost and subsequently cried because they were so close to being the ‘hero’s’ and potentially signing big contracts, getting scouted, etc. But for those people who watch a game, and after the game are actually in a worse mood than they were before hand because their team lost just boggles me. To truly be saddened by a recreational activity’s outcome is absurd and as such makes the person who is upset absurd.

6) Because they are inconsequential.
Let’s face it sports are inconsequential. Do you think anyone these days cares about who won against a certain gladiator in the coliseum? Do you think that this does anything other than perpetuate Hollywood actors? No, these events do not matter on any scale. Given light that there is a super bowl every single year, does it really matter who wins the current super bowl as they will be obsolete next time around?

7) Because they are machines for propaganda and consumerism.
What are all the commercials during games geared towards? They are geared either towards propaganda or consumerism. Either they are pushing forth an agenda or they are encouraging you to buy something. People who watch sports fanatically often want the latest pair of sneakers with one of the athlete’s names on them. Or they are sitting there craving whatever fast food restaurant is being peddled by the next commercial. It encourages the mindset of want rather than need. You will never see a commercial during halftime that is encouraging people debt free, but what you will see is a commercial introducing 0% APR for new card members. You will never see a commercial suggesting organic alternatives to Lay’s chips, but you will see a commercial telling you that corn syrup is fine in moderation and anyone that says otherwise is uneducated and/or ignorant. So not only are you watching something that is inconsequential, but you are also being sold on things that you don’t need, further perpetuating the ‘American dream’.

8) Because they use up your memory which could be used for something of substance.
The last point I am going to touch on is this. Your memory is a wonderful thing, and for some people it is better than others. So please don’t muddle it up with useless information about sports and which team won and what kind of play that was and so on so forth. You could be retaining information that is useful to you like what some of our constitution says. You could be remembering sacred scripture. You could even be memorizing who our political leaders are whether you agree with them or not. These are part of the educated mind, not who plays what position for a specific team. These are things that again are inconsequential and only take up precious memory where other important things that are actually consequential could be retained. Imagine how much more cultured we would be if people gave less of a damn about sporting events and cared more about their political influence, or served to better their community, or even educated themselves so they would not repeat history’s errors.

In conclusion…
Sports have their place in the world. They serve as a recreational device used to escape reality and serve our inconsequential need for hero’s and corn syrup, and really they are not much worse than playing a video game every day of your life, in fact they may even be better considering that they are at least semi-social. But people ought not get so caught up in sports as they are just that, a recreational, inconsequential, distraction from what is really going on in one’s life.