Like for example, obviously I’m a sports fan, but through all of sports the one thing I love watching more than anything is great baseball pitchers. Watching how much movement they can put on a ball is just fun to watch.
Gymnasts. They’re fucking awesome in regards to what they can do with their bodies
Male gymnastics. I’m pretty strong, but those dudes are beasts.
I’ll watch like a clip of people doing “crazy” things like mailing a difficult shot, or some other high skill play.
But I could not care less about team culture, league culture, specific players/coaches, championships, W/L records, etc.
Even the Olympics all I care about is the sportsmanship of the world coming together to compete fairly as a show that outside politics we can all get along for this event. But I don’t care about watching any of it, I just like the humanity of it.
Sports can bring out great does of skill, but I just wish it wasn’t such a default small talk thing. People will get mad at each other at work for liking the wrong team and they’ll rag on each other about issues that none of them have a hand in.
Like… Just like it privately. It shouldn’t be such a huge part of your personality. I shouldn’t know who you like while actively trying to stay out of any and all discussion about it.
Not a skateboarder & never been one, but watching someone rip it apart on a board is mesmerizing.
Most sports have some aspect that is impressive, I just can’t stand watching them. Watching someone else play just bores the hell out of me 95% of the time if it’s already a sport I’ve seen a lot of. If it’s something new or something I know very little about, it will hold my interest for a little longer.
I also get bored watching other people play video games.
For me it’s the opposite. I enjoy sports but I’m not very athletic but I can watch.
Video games I can play so why would I waste my already busy day watching someone when I can be doing it myself. I don’t understand twitch. Gaming helps me unwind. Only time I’ve went to twitch is when I’m on the fence about a game
Closest I can stand is highlights or the little reviews Dunkey does.
I used to be a casual sports fan, then I started a business, and needed to carve time out of my schedule, and Sports can eat up a lot time, even if you’re casual. So I don’t follow any sports anymore, except:
The Summer Olympics, and the Winter Olympics, to a lesser degree. I enjoy seeing the best athletes in the world, operating at the bleeding edges of human ability. I will sit a become an armchair expert in almost anY Olympic sport, but I really love the weird sports. I’ll never forget the first time I discovered CURLING! Pole vaulters still amaze me.
And since it’s only every 4 years, I can indulge for a couple weeks, and not feel guilty for wasting my time on it.
Would you happen to be a KC Royals fan? If so, by my count that makes at least 2 of us here on Lemmy!
Yes. In Nebraska
Royce Gracie defeating much larger foes with little to no injury to them.
Sports are kind of interesting playgrounds for statistics. I respect that about them. Moneyball is a movie (and book) about how an economist used statistics to change the way baseball teams recruit players. I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did. Although it could have gone into more detail about the nerdy stuff.
Sports analytics have changed every sport. I distinctly remember that season, the average sports fan didn’t know back then what was going on behind the scenes but that streak was fun as hell to watch even if you weren’t and A’s fan. My buddy was a die hard As fan and he was distraught at the trades before the season started.
I loved baseball as a kid, I wasn’t good, but I loved playing and I loved watching. when I hit my late teens is when I finally found my strength in hitting. But I stopped watching when the strikes in the 90s happened and I didn’t follow again for 20 years.
Dont let others ruin something you love. that’s a hardlife lesson, because I’ve gotten back into it and realized how much I truly did love the game itself and hate that I didn’t keep watching or trying at it. Just the feel of the glove, the grass, the smell of the dirt.
And what’s truly great about baseball even though it’s been played since the late 1800’s by hundreds of thousands of people over 100 games per team a year. It seems like every year there is still something that’s never been done before in its history.
I have a pretty high respect for nearly all professional athletes to be honest. The aspect I respect the most is mainly how much technical competence and practice are needed to perform at professional levels
… although it may be because I do play really difficult video games, some of which can be considered to be e-sports. A less niche example, when I played chess semi-seriously for a year I really learned just how strong the Grandmasters are. Maybe this view bled into my view of conventional sports too
To be honest, no.
I can’t even watch the sports I’ve played myself. Watching sport has never given me that feeling you’re describing
What have you played?
Roller derby and running. Football, cricket and tennis when I was a kid
Mad props on the roller derby. I found that anything that comes between my feet and the ground is a no go for me.
Never was a runner but back in my 20s I got into tennis for awhile.
I learned to skate as a teenager, and would break in to the local high school on weekends to skate in the quadrangle. I’d line up the old wooden seats and jump them, and jump down flights of stairs… I was crazy…
Then I basically stopped skating for many years until I took up roller derby, and the old skating skills came in useful. I couldn’t do half the stuff I used to be able to do, but it still gave me a big grounding for derby
I like to watch football goal highlights. Like some of these people doing back flips and shit, kicking the ball while upside down in the air and scoring a goal lol.
I guess I am fan tho… I watched all ~90 minutes of Japan vs. Korea mostly because the Japanese team had >90% pass accuracy for the entire game.
Motorsports of all kinds are remarkable to me, most prominently the rally tours of the 80’s.
The fans and journalists were crazy, the engineers were crazy, the drivers were crazy too.
Something about watching those old hot-hatches flick around a hairpin while people jump in front of the car just sparks something deep inside my heart… it’s the Ultimate Extreme.
Bonus to alpine ski/snowboard. Those POVS are ridiculous.
I don’t give a fuck about more conventional sports. I find them to be primitive and have no idea how people get so swept up by them.
Came here to mention rally, Group B in particular. As well as things like the Isle of Man TT.
Everything about them is just a big middle finger to the bubblewrap mindset of today, whether that’s a good thing will depend on individual perspectives but it certainly makes it more raw and exciting as a spectator.
Its a difficult balance to have. No one wants to see anyone killed, but everyone wants to see risks being taken and the drivers wrestling with the machine beasts. Its incredible. But at some point it just gets too dangerous. Like with Group B. The Henri Toivonen interview before his crash is pretty chilling, he explains that the stages are so long, the cars so fast that its impossible to keep concentration for the whole time. Then he sadly proved himself to be correct.
As much as I love Group B, banning it was the correct thing to do. I will never say that the safety aspect has gone too far, but it has made things a bit… boring. I still watch F1, Rally, WEC and I think its awesome. But its different than what it was. Like it wasn’t too long ago when F1 cars looked nervous going on a straight. I vividly remember Mika Häkkinen bombing down the Hockenheimring and the car just wouldn’t keep in a straight line. These days the cars look like they are on rails. I’m gonna stop myself before I start ranting about this years cars.
I love watching wingsuit povs.
Motorsports can also be enjoyed by most anyone from their home, with sim games. The g-forces are obviously not there, but the inputs are remarkably accurate to life. It’s fascinating seeing drivers brake and turn at exactly the same points on track where I did in the game.
Personally I’m partial to mods of 60s-70s cars for Assetto Corsa. It’s lots of unabashed fun with the wobbly suspension.
Ding ding! Guess what I gre up on? Racing games!
Yeah, I’ve played lots of classic NFS back in the day, but since its physics was always pretty outlandish, the sports aspect of racing didn’t quite click for me. It’s only relatively recently-ish that I picked up Gran Turismo on PS Vita and proper simulators on the desktop, which is when I learned about the racelines, setups and whatnot — and started understanding what drivers are doing and started following F1.
Curiously, there’s a simple pen-and-paper game called Racetrack, which simulates the physics of racing better than NFS.
Ice hockey is rather impressive to me. I’m a very very minimal fan (as in, I will watch 30 seconds of a game if it’s on a TV I am walking past). I have been to a few NHL games, including the Winter Classic with my dad. It takes a lot of coordination, teamwork, and skill to successfully play.
I really only like hockey to watch. Everything else, I appreciate the skill and shit, but I would rather play them all than watch any of them.
