> I've never watched sports except for tennis, gymnastics, and diving (more
> like art than sport). I couldn't quite see the point of watching something
> I'd rather be doing. But my son watches sports and so did my first
husband.
All bullshit aside, watching sports, especially as played by pros, is like watching great actors plying their craft, great bands jamming, great dancers moving to the steps of great choreographers. While we might like to play-act in a local theater group, whack a softball or dance a tango, there's nothing like watching someone who can really bring it home. The glide, the polish, the power of a master is a delight to observe.
> It's not enough to say sports are stupid. What I've noticed is that
> watching sports is a virtual social experience. It allows you to share
> something (symbolically) with thousands...millions of other people, it
> matters who wins and it doesn't matter (cause it's a game), and it's an
> escape from an otherwise fairly unbearable reality. It makes social
> participation simple (though virtual) and it eliminates the problem of
> building social consensus because we all agree on the rules.
Well, here it gets tricky, for a lot of sports fans get really whipped up by team and town identification -- tribalism -- and the primitive need to conquer an opponent, not beat him in good-natured competition, mind you, but destroy him. These are people for whom social identity is not one of solidarity or consensus, but ultimate triumph and some hazy notion of rule -- over what it's hard to say, but in many cases something other than their sad lives.
DP