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You beat me to it !!

Actually I'm one of those rare birds who could care less about professional sports. I enjoy watching a football, baseball or basketball game or tennis match from time to time. But that's about it. My wife, on the other hand, is a football fanatic. When University of Nebraska games are being televised or broadcast on the radio, everything comes to a halt in our house...and any practicing must be done on the digital. Fortunately, we both enjoy watching the amazing athletic prowess exhibited by professional ballet dancers.

Wow - I'm impressed !!!!

Also impressive !!!

I'm baffled by the popularity of most sports.

I like watching the occasional game from time to time, but the amount of time, money, and energy many people spend on sports seems ludicrous to me.

(Especially since they'll spend hundreds on pay-per-view, t-shirts, fantasy football clubs, and spend entire Sundays watching the stuff while complaining about a $45 ticket to an orchestra concert.)

I play (and follow) badminton! Hahaa, talk about your stereotypical asian huh....

I am a very casual baseball/hockey fan primarily because my husband and sons are intensely into both. I occasionally go to a game and find it relaxing but watching sports it pretty low on my list of priorities.

Let me explain it to you.

Sports represents and encompasses many things that we're probably hard-wired for; and they serve as living demonstrations of mathematics and physics, and our constant necessity to cope with them and to try to surmount them. And in the media, sports serve as a near-unique instance of unscripted, spontaneous, unpredictable real-time stuff that we see and hear about as it unfolds. How much other stuff fills those bills?

About the "hard wired" stuff: Sports involve competition, pursuit of excellence, and physical capabilities of all sorts and their stretching to the limits. Do you not think we're hard wired for those things? I sure do. And how about if we're just watching, not playing? We experience it vicariously, plus we just find those things captivating (unless we don't, of course) .....because they're so key to what it is to be human and what it has meant for survival over these thousands of years. For better and worse, we're hard wired to fight, and to win. "Civilization," however, puts reins on those things -- so (I'm saying) we channel those instincts into other things, most of us anyway; some people love going to war and make careers of it, but most don't. We play sports, or we watch sports, or both. And some of us enter piano competitions.
And some of us just argue about stuff; that's almost the same too.

Many sports have obvious analogies to war. I think football (American football) is the main such one, although Stephen Jay Gould wrote (to my utter astonishment, but maybe he had a point) that the sport is a clear representation of gathering of food -- and maybe that's another subliminal basis for our being drawn to sports. I don't think so, but heck, he was smarter than I am.

Some sports involve things that probably derived directly from battle. My theory of how baseball originated -- I don't mean how the full-fledged game developed -- we sort of know that, although the exact venue gets debated; I mean the way-back basis for what eventually became the game: Something like, two tribes were fighting. One guy hurled a stone at the other tribe. A guy in the other tribe had some kind of stick or club that he had brought to the battle. He swatted at the stone, knocking it back at the other tribe, and maybe killing one of those guys. Preferably the guy who threw it.
It became legendary, and members of one or both tribes then began making a sport of it. Or something like that.

And worship of sports heroes.....Another thing we're (probably) hard wired for is, admiration and deference to a star warrior. Could our interest in sports heroes, to the point that we follow them sufficiently for them to be worth millions of dollars a year, be based strongly on our being hard wired to bestow great benefits on the best warriors? I think so. In any event I have little doubt that for the most part, the star athletes -- Ali, Chamberlain, Mantle, Brady, Jordan, even McEnroe .....I have little doubt that in an earlier era, they would have been among the star warriors, and would have helped their tribes to triumph over neighboring tribes and over their environments and to greatly help the survival of their fellow members.

BTW......golf, I can't explain at all.
Even though I've played my share of it and was even on the team in high school.
I kid. Golf is harder to explain in terms of the primal things I'm talking about, but not that hard.

Mark_C -- good post, with some interesting points, and judicious use of singular and plural verbs.

The origin of golf on the field of battle is described in The Hobbit.

For the original question, only baseball holds much interest for me. (I suppose I would enjoy cricket if I knew more about it.) Baseball is the best sport to listen to on the radio.

I enjoy playing the occasional game, but don't have much skill. I have one slightly deformed finger due to an attempt long ago to field a hard-hit ground ball.

Kreisler, I have read your post, here:
I'm baffled by the popularity of most sports.

I like watching the occasional game from time to time, but the amount of time, money, and energy many people spend on sports seems ludicrous to me.

(Especially since they'll spend hundreds on pay-per-view, t-shirts, fantasy football clubs, and spend entire Sundays watching the stuff while complaining about a $45 ticket to an orchestra concert.)

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well, I don't have tv so I don't watch anything - I would rather do something badly than watch anything.

I never had a chance to play basketball because I lived in northern Canada and with one gym in a one school town, volleyball had more teams and players than a basketball court.

I got a chance to learn to play basketball when a couple of guys at work said they played basketball every summer half court. I asked them to teach me so I could play at the community center.

It was so exciting that after a game, I couldn't go to sleep for many hours.

Since I never played sports before, there are teams, of courses, there are rules and it is like a war but everything is done as gentlemen, everyone plays by the rules, sportsmen. Not the real world like business at all. Obviously I wasn't that good because I started playing at 58, and everybody played since they were little kids, but lost weight from 240 to 165 just running around the court playing basketball.. If it wasn't for my health I would be playing it today. It is all about teamwork and most everything I did was skiing, sailing, swimming, motorcycling, etc. Playing in a band is teamwork and fun but not remotely similar like basketball - or other team sports, I guess.

Golf utterly escapes me. Well, I guess it could be more accurately stated that I escape golf.

At work, we hosted an event at this past summer's U.S. Open, which meant we had a lovely tent and tickets for everything and I did everything I could to stay as far away from it as possible. And succeeded. I gave away reserved parking, reserved seating at the last hole for the championship round, and turned away just about everything. I even drove past the event giving it a really wide berth as it was snarling traffic in and around it.

Motorsport. Big time.

The big three for me are:

Football (soccer to our American chums)
Rugby Union
Snooker

Football has a beautiful simplicity to it, and when played well is one of the most beautiful sports there is. Despite its simplicity there is a diverse range of tactics and it can be fascinating to watch these clash. It has moments of incredible drama and skill, and it's not hard to see why it's the most popular sport in the world by far.

Rugby is a much more complicated game, but when you fully appreciate the nuances of it it becomes hugely engrossing, with a perfect blend of skill and brutal physicality. It has more flow and grace than American football, more power and general manliness than regular football.

Snooker is just a hugely skillful game, requiring unbelievable precision to play at the highest level. The pockets are smaller than on a pool table, yet the table itself is 12' x 6'! Watching a high break can be captivating, but watching a battle of tactical safety play can be equally so. The aesthetics of the green baize and the various coloured balls are also very appealing. A wonderfully relaxing sport to watch, with plenty going on.

All three of these I find huge fun to both play and watch. Now and then I also enjoy watching a bit of boxing, Formula 1, tennis and cricket.

Why?

Why?

Why?

I could not possibly care less about your interest in soccer/football/bowling/skittles/goldfish-swallowing/competitive-pumpkin-raising/whatever.

I'm sure members here have a wide range of interests other than piano and classical music, but most have enough respect for the forum and its members not to try to impose their outside interests on the rest of us. But for those who just can't help themselves and must post about their irrelevant outside interests or else their heads will explode, some do have the presence of mind to put an "OT" in the subject line.

Next up, the Kardashians...

You forgot to mention worm-charming, the most musically intense of all sports. It requires the outmost in patience, and finding just the right note and pitch (I believe the microtonal note of 399.99 Hz works best) to charm the worms out of their holes.

I think many posters here are interested in what other posters are like and that includes their non musical interests. There have already been many replies to this thread, and there have certainly been other PW threads asking members about their non musical interests. In fact, there have already been threads about memebers' interest in sports.

No one's imposing their outside interests on anyone. Did any of the posters so far say anyone reading the thread must take up tennis or soccer?

As far as reprimanding the poster for non including OT in the title, I find that rather silly. The worst that can happen is that someone spends around ten seconds opening up the thread and then decides it's of no interest. Of course, that can happen many times with many threads because the thread titles are not always clear in terms of explaining what the thread is about. In fact, I don't even consider this thread to be off topic.

Unlike most red-blooded American males, I have zero interest in sports, with the major exception of tennis and the minor exception of Tigers baseball. (BTW, I'm happy to report that the Tigers beat the Blue Jays last night.)

Tennis is the one sport I'm truly a fan of. No other sport demands the complete athleticism, mental agility, and psychological toughness that tennis does. Unlike with team sports, there is no refuge, no coach, no one to replace you if your legs are cramping, or you get a tummy ache. 15,000 fans have paid a premium to see you and your opponent battle it out to the bitter end, mano a mano. And many 5-set matches can last 3, 4, or 5 hours. The John Isner-Nicolas Mahut match at Wimbledon in 2010 lasted over 11 hours, spread across 3 days, with 183 games played.

Here in America I often hear how tennis is a wussie sport, and I always chuckle. I'd love to take the most physically fit NFL, NBA, MLB or NHL player and put them on a tennis court and see how long they'd last. This assumes, of course, that they can even get off a serve, or sustain a rally long enough to raise their heart rate. To a NBA player who measures court time in minutes, or a NFL or MLB player who's in motion for less than a minute at a time, I suspect the challenge would be daunting. I'd venture to say we'd be hearing a lot of whimpering puppies begging to go home.

So hats off to Plover. Anyone who had anything to do with developing one of the greats of this game deserves to be honored. (But no one's cutting you any slack in THIS forum.)

I've heard this argument before but it's simply not true for all of us. I view sports as ritualized warfare, civilization's way of channeling a primitive need in humans to secure their environment but I don't think that need is universal. I, for one, find sports utterly boring. I've never gotten emotionally involved nor do I identify with any team. I scratch my head at all the enthusiasm and it all seems silly to me. When I occasionally watch a game I do it to be a good wife. I say the right things, ask the right questions and ooh and ahh but I really don't care. So I'm either an exception to your theory or I'm from another planet.

I'm with you, gooddog, (well, except for tennis which I think involves a lot more than just "sport".)

My own acceptance of sports is based on the alternative: If there were no sports, how would society's (OK, let's be honest - men's) pent up aggression be channeled? My fear is that "ritualized warfare" would quickly be replaced with real warfare. And I think we already have plenty enough of that.

Even during the depths of the recession, families would still scrape together enough to take in an occasional baseball or football game. And if it gives them solace, or escape, or provides an outlet for their anger and frustrations, what's the harm? Marx described religion as the "opiate of the people". Obviously he never attended the Super Bowl.

I run, ideally about 35 miles per week.

Tell 'em that it's human nature...