Splicetoday

Sports
Mar 31, 2009, 08:52AM

Primal joy

Your daily dose of snobbery.

Here it is:

Let me be clear: It is not the doughty doing of sports that is so ill-conceived, but the woeful watching, the ridiculous rooting, the silly spectating. Nor is it a uniquely American affliction. Spectator sports may be a true "cross-cultural universal," in which the soccer ball has the kind of global salience to which Esperanto once unsuccessfully aspired, although the details of spectatorship owe much to local flavoring: Among Canadians, hockey worship is so pervasive that the running joke when the 2005 season was canceled was that sell-out crowds would still show up, just to watch the ice-resurfacing machines go around the empty rinks. In Afghanistan, the rage — except for brief banishment under the Taliban — has long been buzkashi, a violent and tumultuous game seemingly devoid of rules, in which thousands of onlookers go berserk while hundreds of mounted riders try to carry off the decapitated corpse of a goat.

Discussion
  • What a ridiculous rant. Rooting for a home team, whether vociferously or casually, is a diversion, a break from everyday life. It's no different, really, than someone who relaxes by going to movies, the theater, museums or reading celebrity magazines. Sure, it's kind of annoying when people refer to a sports team as "we," but so what? As for youths so desperate for role models—as if that's a new if exaggerated conceit—I'm not buying. Most people can separate the entertainer, whether it's Derek Jeter or Sean Penn, from the actual person.

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