Why Sports Are a Sad and Dangerous Waste of Time

and why we bask in others’ achievements.

You sit in a crowded airport. Three muscular men in their thirties sit across from you, staring at an open book. As they read they become animated, they stand and clap, they shout, they give each other high-fives, and at times they become angry, curse, and punch their fists together. What could they be reading to excuse this behavior in an airport? What could hold such sway over these people’s emotions? This happened to me six weeks ago, but of course they weren’t reading, they were watching sports.

I have always felt like a spectator of spectator sports, watching fandom with confusion, wondering why my friends allow it to take up their time, and having to reconcile my thoughts about Sports with those of my own preoccupations.

NC State Fans Cheer (credit: ESPN)

I left school in Boston thinking that my brain must lack a ‘sports-lobe’, but over the last 6 weeks I have realized that I am not alone in thinking that Fans are dangerously deluding themselves, that there are cheaper and more productive ways to fulfill these people, and that there is a collective need to call ‘time out’.

I use the term “Sports” broadly, so by Sports I mean the watching of a game played in person or on video, usually by a team, whose fans wear the team’s colors and often use “we” when referring to the team’s doings (so not competitive swimming or the running of the bulls). The games’ rules are designed so that one team will beat the other in fast paced gameplay and the players are hired professionals. A ball is projected into the air (usually), the fans tense up with anticipation as it flies, and that stress is relieved and the reward centers of their brains are excited when the ball, against the odds, is caught or lands and the team they associate with advances. Putting it like this can make it sound so harmless, but there are millions of people that allow the events in a Sports arena to affect their personal pride, their happiness, their self-confidence, and often their inhibitions in ways that would be unthinkable in other activities with similar personal involvement.

In America, Sports teams represent different cities and people tend to support the teams from where they live. Fans often weave their identities and their in-group loyalty to the place of their birth as if it had been their choice. The rationality behind this regionalism becomes far more confusing when you consider the nature of sports drafting. Sports players are traded and sold to the highest bidder, which creates a mixture on each team of players from all around the country, if not the globe. So although Eagles fans still cheer, “Go Philly”, in any given season it’s likely that most of the team is not from Pennsylvania. This placebo works; by calling the team “The Philadelphia Eagles” and picking where they practice, the regionalism is still activated enough in the fans to make them cheer for Philadelphia. This is highly irrational: what percentage of the Eagles would have to be from Korea or Miami before the fans realized that they have been duped into cheering for something that isn’t Philadelphia?

When I present these ideas to my friend Tony, an Eagles fan, he laughs from his bed in North Hollywood, throwing a football at the ceiling.

Tony, 2013.

“I don’t care where the players are from, it’s not about that, it’s about Philadelphia having the best team possible.”

I disagree, “But if 95 percent of the team is from elsewhere that’s not Philadelphia anymore, dude.”

The criticisms ‘you just don’t get it’ and ‘it just doesn’t do it for you’ follow me everywhere in my discussions about sports. I have to remind people that I enjoy watching soccer, that I learned a lot about teamwork from playing it in high school, and that I shared the same displaced joy when NASA named the touchdown position of the Mars rover “Bradbury Landing”. I understand that sports don’t do it for me, I’m wondering, given their knowledge of the auction block of drafting, how it’s still “doing it” for anyone else.