I’ve seen tables flipped, tv sets punched through, furniture thrown. And that’s just in the home.
How does one get to a place mentally where burning and destroying things, over a sportsball game seem a reasonable thing to do?
I’ve seen tables flipped, tv sets punched through, furniture thrown. And that’s just in the home.
How does one get to a place mentally where burning and destroying things, over a sportsball game seem a reasonable thing to do?
I really hate the “non productive” argument as you only see it with sports, not say, the video game or movie/tv industries. Just has this real whiff of “I don’t like this activity and I don’t see why anyone else should!”
Of all the non productive uses of money and time, at least sports has a bunch of ancillary benefits, especially for youth. I don’t imagine youth sports leagues, which keep kids in shape, keeps them doing something positive instead of the usual juvenile delinquent stuff we’d have been doing, teaching them to be a part of a team etc. And then those stadiums tend to get used for a bunch of cultural/musical events.
Exactly. I used to think like this when younger, but I now see how stupid this mentality is. Basically anything we care about as humans is “non-productive”. Music, art, video games, musicals, movies, sports, etc. just because I don’t care about something doesn’t mean that it’s not important to someone else.
I don’t really have a problem with youth sports. But it shouldn’t be a “profession”. We shouldn’t allocate hundreds of acres of land for parking lots that are only used for barely half the year. Games and tv and movies advance tech at least and don’t each up billions and trillions of dollars of my money for shit I and many others will never use. There are dozens of studies on the utter uselessness of these facilities.
https://www.si.com/soccer/2015/05/01/ap-soc-brazil-useless-stadiums
They bring down the local economies and depending on the fans fanaticism can utterly destroy local towns after a bad kick or pass or whatever.
How much money and research has been devoted to proving that getting smacked in the head by a 400 lb wall of meat can cause concussions. Or more accurately to prove the misinformation that it wasn’t happening to be false.
Part of this always makes me uneasy. I grew up knowing a lot of kids from rough backgrounds who loved sports but also went to a private school where a lot of folks looked down at stupid sports fans. To me, there’s always been an unpleasant whiff of classism to these anti sports takes. While sports finds fans at every strata, it’s hard to deny that the poorer one is the more likely you are to be into sports. (Go to any working man’s bar during a game night.) And it just has this taint of “sportsball is a waste of time for stupid poor people do and there are such better uses for the time and money!” And I just think back a couple months ago when I caught a playoff game in a veterans bar, watched as we scored and the whole bar waited patiently as an older Indigenous lady “ran” up and down the aisles draped in her Canucks cape to wild applause from the crowd. It’s moments of joy shared by complete strangers who might have nothing else in common but come together for these magical moments.
Edit: I don’t mean to imply or say that opposing sports is inherently classist or that you are being so.
I get where you’re coming from on the use of space. But, at least in my hometown, our arena is used almost every night; it hosts I think three or four different sports leagues (well, a few sports leagues plus, ugh, e-sports) as well as all concerts, comedians and expos. (To the point where our local team often has to do ridiculous road trips because of the arena scheduling.) Or you could look at Paris for the Olympics which used the opportunity to clean the Seine as well as put a literally world class swimming facility in a run down neighbourhood as part of a revitalization. (Or, back to my city, Vancouver, we used it to add a mass transit train line which has spurred a bunch of lower cost housing around stops, put in a few popular facilities in underserved areas.)
Some fields are much less multipurpose but the parking lots, that’s just a consequence of American transit etc. And while I think it’s ridiculous how much some local governments pay for stadiums and I wouldn’t want my government to do s but, they do it because those teams are incredibly popular. To blame their popularity and the poor decisions of governments on the sports though seems a little like getting angry at journalism because Russia, Hungary and others use it for nefarious ends.
I mean, I don’t think any town has been burned to the ground. We had two of the worst North American sports riots twice in the last 30 years (yay) but the destruction was pretty limited to a small section of downtown and it was more just embarrassing than anything else. And frankly, any city that has a fanbase large and passionate enough to riot is probably a city that really loves that sports team. Even though we’ve rioted twice, every time the playoffs come around, the city is awash in Canucks gear, little flags, towels etc.
I don’t think you get youth sports without professional sports. We have lacrosse leagues (technically our national sport) but almost no one plays, it’s not the same without your heroes whom you’ve watched growing up. Watch even young kids practicing or fooling around, a good number of them will have their favourite player’s jersey on.
On the finances or advancement, okay, let’s consider a simple one, pets. Americans spend more than 180 billion on their pets every year! They provide some psychological benefits but so do sports. That money could feed every hungry person in America maybe 6 or 7 times over. That’s not to mention the environmental damage etc. But, rich people are as likely if not more to have pets and everyone basically finds them cute so, they aren’t referred to as a waste of resources.