Sports You don't care about

[Kooky01]

Always wondered if there are any sports here that people here don't really watch or care for.  For me it's soccer and lacrosse. Soccer is just confusing as heck, the clock goes up, the visitors are listed second and just people pretending to get hurt like 60 percent of the time. Lacrosse I've always thought was somewhat of a hockey rip-off, but outside and balls rather than on ice and it's just not very big where I'm from. 

 

Anyone else care to chime in?

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

It's the individual sports that don't appeal to me.  And I am sure that this is mainly on account of the lack of continuity.  (Though with golf the issue is that the "sport" itself is inherently ridiculous.)

When I was growing up, I sort of cared about tennis and boxing, being interested in the giants of that era who were there when I first encountered those sports: McEnroe, Connors, Borg, Evert, Navratilova; Ali, Frazier, Norton, Foreman.  But when those people left the scene and the sports became dominated by a new group of athletes, the difference to team sports became apparent; and any interest that I had had sharply fell off, as there were no teams to follow (or to learn about their history).  I wound up rooting only for the last old guys from my childhood who were still competing into my adult years (Connors, Foreman).  I will admit that the phenomenon of Tyson temporarily revived my interest in boxing to some extent; but after him, I stopped caring completely about that sport.

Billie Jean King had the great idea to start World Team Tennis.  If that were the sport's dominant format, with teams with long histories spanning the generations, then that probably would have sustained my interest in tennis.  (Also, I love the sensible scoring in WTT.)

[BBTV]

12 minutes ago, Kooky01 said:

Lacrosse I've always thought was somewhat of a hockey rip-off, but outside and balls rather than on ice and it's just not very big where I'm from. 

 

Fairly certain that lacrosse is way older than hockey, so calling it a rip-off isn't fair.  I don't really think there's too many comparisons between the two, other than they both have goaltenders and allow checking.

[neo_prankster]

12 minutes ago, Kooky01 said:

Always wondered if there are any sports here that people here don't really watch or care for.  For me it's soccer and lacrosse. Soccer is just confusing as heck, the clock goes up, the visitors are listed second and just people pretending to get hurt like 60 percent of the time. Lacrosse I've always thought was somewhat of a hockey rip-off, but outside and balls rather than on ice and it's just not very big where I'm from. 

 

Anyone else care to chime in?

I try to give equal attention to the Big Four (MLB, NBA, NHL, NFL), but I haven't exactly caught on to MLS, but that might change if San Diego gets a team.

 

Other than that, I'm not really crazy about golf or tennis. NASCAR on the other hand I get confused if that counts as a team sport or an individual sport.

[neo_prankster]

If pro wrestling really counted as a sport, my interest fell off around the time Vinnie Mac absorbed WCW because I actually liked WCW during the Monday Night Wars.

[gosioux76]

21 minutes ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

When I was a growing up, I sort of cared about tennis and boxing, being interested in the giants of that era who were there when I first encountered those sports: McEnroe, Connors, Borg, Evert, Navratilova; Ali, Frazier, Norton, Foreman.  But when those people left the scene and the sports became dominated by a new group of athletes, the difference to team sports became apparent; and any interest that I had had sharply fell off, as there were no teams to follow (or to learn about their history).  I wound up rooting only for the last old guys from my childhood who were still competing into my adult years (Connors, Foreman).  I will admit that the phenomenon of Tyson temporarily revived my interest in boxing to some extent; but after him, I stopped caring completely about that sport.

 

This is interesting to me. Like you, I've never cared for individual sports, but I recall following tennis as a kid. This was mostly due to the fact that the major tournaments televised matches during the daytime in the summer, when I'd be stuck at home with nowhere to go and nothing to do and cable TV only existed for families with satellite dishes the size of the international space station. So I paid attention, but only because of a lack of any other options.

 

I find that as I get older (I'm 44), I'm much more willing to let my interest in something wane periodically in ways I never did before. For example, a decade ago I absorbed everything I could about the English Premier League, but eventually began to lose interest to the point where I only checked in on it periodically with limited interest. Now, I'm back in again -- just because the mood struck. I'm all for engaging with sports on my own terms. 

 

And conversely, I'm much more willing to try something I never thought I'd like. For example, I've never understood the appeal of motorsports and never cared to learn. Now, like billions of others this year, I've suddenly gotten into F1 racing and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. 

 

 

[Sport]

I can't make myself care about UFC or boxing. The NBA is the league I care about least, although, I'll watch pretty much any documentary on basketball history. It's just I find the actual games so tedious and repetitive - I think I watched one full NBA game this season and it was Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals. 

 

Also I get less excited about the Olympics with every passing Olympiad. 

 

 

  

5 minutes ago, gosioux76 said:

 

And conversely, I'm much more willing to try something I never thought I'd like. For example, I've never understood the appeal of motorsports and never cared to learn. Now, like billions of others this year, I've suddenly gotten into F1 racing and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. 

 

 

 

Same. I watched all the streaming shows on Premier League and now I'm one of those annoying Sunday morning guys who watch soccer. I watched the first season of Drive to Survive on Netflix 4 years ago and I've been hooked on F1 since. Also I've gone full speed into MLS ever since we got a team and I watch basically every FC Cincinnati game. 16 year old me was so diametrically opposed to the very concept of soccer he'd kick my ass if he time-traveled to the present. 

[Dilbert]

Individual sports (golf, tennis, wrestling, racing, etc) I can really only get in to basketball during March Madness. Used to not care about soccer until FCC came to town. Now Im slowly starting to lose interest in baseball.

[Red Comet]

Not really into individual sports and I honestly could not give a flying flip about soccer outside the World Cup or basketball outside of March Madness.

[4_tattoos]

golf and horse racing

[FiddySicks]

I have a weird connection to skiing/snowboarding due to where I grew up, and have had plenty of winters where I’ve been on the hill 100+ days a season (usually working, but in the industry so I was on skis/a board). But somewhat surprisingly, never had any interest in hockey. When I was a kid I basically did at least one season of every sport I could possibly think of from football/baseball/basketball/soccer to boxing to rugby mixed in with snow sports. But even with that, I actively avoided hockey. I never learned to skate very well, and there’s just something about the sport that I never found very appealing. It’s a combination of a lot of things I just don’t generally like by themselves all combined into one. The whole thing just felt like wrestling/boxing on skates and always seemed sort of brutally comical to play. I got into watching it for awhile when I was younger, but I only ever got so interested in it. Now my main interest is just marveling at how dysfunctional the NHL is.

[tBBP]

If the question is about sports I don't care about overall, I'd have to say tennis and lacrosse are the major two. Of course I still greatly respect the athleticism it takes to play both (because Lord knows I couldn't do it), but nothing about the sports themselves really do it for me. For the longest time I'd have said the same thing about stock car auto racing (except we all know none of the care are exactly "stock" and haven't been for decades), but since I can actually understand what's going on on the track, if it's a driver I recognize, I may watch a little just to see if I can follow what's going on.

 

Now if the question entails sports I don't care to watch on TV, then the above two and baseball are it. For me, I have to be inside the park to enjoy the game; I absolutely cannot do it on TV. These days, much the same goes (and since about 2015, has gone) for the NBA. I actually don't remember the last full NBA game I watched--or even half, for that matter. I've seen parts of several games, but never a full one, start to finish.

 

(As an aside: now college basketball is a different story. I actually have watched a few of those. I find that watching games, especially conference tournament games, featuring programs no one knows or has heard of yields some nice surprises. Case in point: Radford University. I forget who they played in 2019--it was another Virginia school not far from Radford--but that was one of the best basketball games I've ever seen at any level, probably ever.)

[Kooky01]

8 hours ago, BBTV said:

 

Fairly certain that lacrosse is way older than hockey, so calling it a rip-off isn't fair.  I don't really think there's too many comparisons between the two, other than they both have goaltenders and allow checking.

Didn't know that. Thanks for the info. 

[tigers]

9 hours ago, 4_tattoos said:

golf and horse racing

 

This times ten zillion.

Also any golf related thing that should not count as SPORT.

 

[Jer15]

6 hours ago, tigers said:

Also any golf related thing that should not count as SPORT.

Devil's advocate:

 

What should it be considered then? 

 

I'm not a particularly big golf fan. I really only like playing with my dad and uncle and my interest in the pro game is mild to none but I still think it's a sport so I'm curious as to where you land on this one. 

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

13 minutes ago, Jer15 said:

7 hours ago, tigers said:

Also any golf related thing that should not count as SPORT.

Devil's advocate:

 

What should it be considered then? 

 

I'm not a particularly big golf fan. I really only like playing with my dad and uncle and my interest in the pro game is mild to none but I still think it's a sport so I'm curious as to where you land on this one. 

 

In a world in which poker, darts, and video games get coverage as though they were sports, it's difficult to single out golf. 

 

So let's not single out golf!  The truth is that none of the aforementioned games are sports.

[Pharos04]

I always went with a personal observation of "if anyone can do it casually (or while drinking a beer), it's not a sport, it's a hobby"

 

It's not hard to casually pick up some darts and throw it at a static wall, or pick up a ball and roll it towards static pins, or pick up a club and swing at a static ball.  (Doing it well is a different matter).

 

When there's some sort of athletic skill to even do the core basics of a game, then you reach sport territory.

 

Personally, things like Golf, Boxing, Bowling, UFC....none of those are interesting to me at all.  I honestly cannot see why people get so excited to watch millionaires walk around a park and swing a stick at a ball and then get paid insane amounts of money for the privilege to do so.

[JerseyJimmy]

golf is not only thoroughly uninteresting as a sporting event, it has an extremely negative impact on the environment and a long history of bigotry, and as such would be outlawed in a just world.

 

not too into the other individual sports, either. well, aside from auto racing, which I do consider an individual sport in most cases.

[dont care]

10 hours ago, tigers said:

 

This times ten zillion.

Also any golf related thing that should not count as SPORT.

 

I don’t know how anyone can say it’s not a sport who hasn’t played and thus appreciate how difficult it is to play, much less play well. Then you have pros that just make it look easy to hit a ball 300 yards straight, or even make a 10 foot putt. 

[infrared41]

There are five six sports - football, baseball, hockey, basketball, auto racing, and curling. The rest are just glorified leisure activities.