Do You Prefer Watching Sports or Playing Sports?

Play or Watch?

  • Play

    Votes: 6 28.6%
  • Watch

    Votes: 6 28.6%
  • Other (I like both/I don't like anything)

    Votes: 9 42.9%

  • Total voters
    21

The Civs 6

King
Joined
May 27, 2020
Messages
782
First, some context. I have been a fan of one of North America's big 4 sports my whole life. It is not a sport that is played much where I live, so basically anyone who is a fan has likely never played it before. So their whole experience of this sport is through the national league, through television. I have always thought this was odd.
  1. Most people who have never played the sport have no way to effectively assess what is going on. Yet they are often armchair strategists, saying that this player is good or that this coach is bad. What really astounds me is going on a sports forum and seeing how much people have to say about something, when they are essentially clueless.
  2. Most people who have never played the sport also have opinions on issues that don't really affect them. I'm thinking of the concussion issue. I myself played a risky contact sport in my youth. Not only would I have taken the risk if I knew it back then, I plan on doing it very soon when I take it back up! Again, I am troubled at how much an essentially abstract idea (IE a professor who never played football placing themselves in the shoes of a football player) has had an impact.
  3. The national/television depiction of a sport has a life of its own. For example, to some people the use of steroids "ruined" baseball. But the thing is, it didn't really ruin baseball - you can just go out and play a game if you really wanted! I guarantee you don't have to get juiced up to play a friendly game of baseball.
  4. Finally, let me bring up another issue in all this. Take the example of Gary Kasparov and Chess. Let's say that his playing so much Chess exacerbated his mental illness (I have no idea if this is true, but having played some of it I can see how it could happen). Certainly, having watched a lot of E-sports, I have seen how complete immersion in E-sports has a negative effect on a person. Do you think the human body/mind are suited to constant and directed activity of such a narrow type? Personally, I don't.
These are issues I encounter literally every day, and think about every day, as a "fan" of a sport. That has got me to questioning whether I should continue to be in this observation role, or if I should start to engage directly in more stuff. So I put the question to you. You can answer it either as a) I do prefer to play/engage in the activity, or I prefer to watch/observe the activity; or b) I think people SHOULD play/engage in an ideal world, or I think people SHOULD watch/observe in an ideal world.
 
I do neither. We did not encourage our kids to engage in serious sports. Sports (of almost all types) encourages overdoing and overdoing most things is not particularly good for ones health. But if one likes such activities and the competition, they can have both financial and other rewards.
 
I do neither. We did not encourage our kids to engage in serious sports. Sports (of almost all types) encourages overdoing and overdoing most things is not particularly good for ones health. But if one likes such activities and the competition, they can have both financial and other rewards.

Couldn't you use that as an argument against any serious pursuit? Isn't a PhD just overdoing academic research? Isn't being a career politician overdoing that too?
 
Couldn't you use that as an argument against any serious pursuit? Isn't a PhD just overdoing academic research? Isn't being a career politician overdoing that too?
One could, but academic pursuits tend to be less demanding on one's body and they can advance knowledge useful to many. Career politicians can produce lots of social benefit but often don't. I support term limits. If people want to chase the top tiers of athletic ability, fine. They just need to recognize that it is likely to subject them to lots of physical ailments later in life. Money and fame from sports is a popular goal. the "I love my team" sports culture fulfills a basic human need to belong and feel part of a group. I'm cool with that.
 
I do neither. We did not encourage our kids to engage in serious sports. Sports (of almost all types) encourages overdoing and overdoing most things is not particularly good for ones health. But if one likes such activities and the competition, they can have both financial and other rewards.

What about exercise though? A lot of kids these days are butterballs.
 
One could, but academic pursuits tend to be less demanding on one's body and they can advance knowledge useful to many. Career politicians can produce lots of social benefit but often don't. I support term limits. If people want to chase the top tiers of athletic ability, fine. They just need to recognize that it is likely to subject them to lots of physical ailments later in life. Money and fame from sports is a popular goal. the "I love my team" sports culture fulfills a basic human need to belong and feel part of a group. I'm cool with that.

Not to be that OP that responds to every reply in their thread, but I'm not convinced that a desk job is not any less demanding on the body, and indeed, it is more demanding on the mind. And I'm not sure how the "social benefit" enters the picture. Do financial analysts who specialize in short-selling developing world sovereign bonds really contribute more social value than beloved sports players?
 
What about exercise though? A lot of kids these days are butterballs.
yes they are and kids and young adults should be getting exercise, doing physical work or just moving around a lot.
 
Not to be that OP that responds to every reply in their thread, but I'm not convinced that a desk job is not any less demanding on the body, and indeed, it is more demanding on the mind. And I'm not sure how the "social benefit" enters the picture. Do financial analysts who specialize in short-selling developing world sovereign bonds really contribute more social value than beloved sports players?
I am not a sports fan. I do not play sports nor do I watch it on TV. Highly competitive sports clubs and team push pushing one's body now to compete better at the cost of later often tragic ailments. Personal choice. Athletes and non athletes contribute differently to society and what they do affects their bodies and health differently. Cases are pretty individual. Demands on a body and effects on a body are not the same. Sitting all day affects one's body; training to run marathons, puts demands on one's body. Some folks are driven to excel; others not so much. There is room for all types. What we have seen in recent decades is that for those driven to excel who live in poor countries, college and professional sports in the US and Europe have been a path out of poverty and into wealth and fame.
 
yes they are and kids and young adults should be getting exercise, doing physical work or just moving around a lot.

It's basically what they do here at the schools. Full contact sport at primary nope but yeah go out on the sport field or pool.
 
Watching sports is absolutely better, for the simple reason that you can do it from the comfort of your couch.

The last organised sport I played was a lunchtime soccer competition at work, which I found more enjoyable than I initially thought I would. But it was also so much bother.

The balance between watching/playing also can differ from sport to sport. My favourite sport is cricket, which I gave up playing at around the age of 14, because wielding a plank of wood to protect yourself against a rock hard projectile hurtling towards you is not a very fun way of spending your Saturday morniing. It's also a truncated version of the games which you would actually watch, which are 5 day long affairs.

By contrast, an individual sport like golf or tennis is better to play than watch.
 
Watching is okay but I prefer playing when possible. Sadly my body is fairly worn out, my right hip probably needs surgery and I had 3-4 concussions. Strangely enough my knees are doing well considering how many hours I spent on concrete basketball courts. I played several sports in HS and baseball in college and semi-pro, but a whiplash injury from a car accident followed by a torn rotator cuff ended that fun. When I did heal up enough I settled for 'friendly' games of softball. ;)

So I spent the last few decades resigned to golfing, dont need a team and the venue changes make golf a unique sport - the best. I like watching golf though, its a free lesson from actual pros and 'the stadium' is not only scenic but my only chance to see some of the best courses in the world. I like watching football the most, its a nice combination of athleticism, power and pace. Baseball and golf are too slow, otoh they provide plenty of opportunities for multi-tasking.

As for steroids, they ruined some player's stats. I dont even consider Bonds, Rodriguez and McGwire when thinking about HRs. Hank Aaron, Roger Maris and the Babe are still the record holders in my book. I'm not sure if Sammy Sosa was using so he might be the single season HR record holder. But I have to admit watching the Sosa-McGwire HR race that one year was truly amazing, Sosa was in right field the day McGwire reached 70 HRs.

I realize before steroids many players were using amphetamines but I dont think Aaron and Ruth used enhancements beyond coffee. I've played sports on speed and it was cheating. It doesn't build muscle like steroids but man, it cuts down on reaction time. When I lived back in SoCal 4 decades ago my buddies and I would get amped up and play foosball, and these guys were tournament players. I wasn't good on offense but I excelled on defense against some of the fastest shooters in the world. Definitely prefer playing foosball to watching it.
 
First, some context. I have been a fan of one of North America's big 4 sports my whole life. It is not a sport that is played much where I live, so basically anyone who is a fan has likely never played it before. So their whole experience of this sport is through the national league, through television. I have always thought this was odd.
  1. Most people who have never played the sport have no way to effectively assess what is going on. Yet they are often armchair strategists, saying that this player is good or that this coach is bad. What really astounds me is going on a sports forum and seeing how much people have to say about something, when they are essentially clueless.
  2. Most people who have never played the sport also have opinions on issues that don't really affect them. I'm thinking of the concussion issue. I myself played a risky contact sport in my youth. Not only would I have taken the risk if I knew it back then, I plan on doing it very soon when I take it back up! Again, I am troubled at how much an essentially abstract idea (IE a professor who never played football placing themselves in the shoes of a football player) has had an impact.
  3. The national/television depiction of a sport has a life of its own. For example, to some people the use of steroids "ruined" baseball. But the thing is, it didn't really ruin baseball - you can just go out and play a game if you really wanted! I guarantee you don't have to get juiced up to play a friendly game of baseball.
  4. Finally, let me bring up another issue in all this. Take the example of Gary Kasparov and Chess. Let's say that his playing so much Chess exacerbated his mental illness (I have no idea if this is true, but having played some of it I can see how it could happen). Certainly, having watched a lot of E-sports, I have seen how complete immersion in E-sports has a negative effect on a person. Do you think the human body/mind are suited to constant and directed activity of such a narrow type? Personally, I don't.
These are issues I encounter literally every day, and think about every day, as a "fan" of a sport. That has got me to questioning whether I should continue to be in this observation role, or if I should start to engage directly in more stuff. So I put the question to you. You can answer it either as a) I do prefer to play/engage in the activity, or I prefer to watch/observe the activity; or b) I think people SHOULD play/engage in an ideal world, or I think people SHOULD watch/observe in an ideal world.
Just so we're all on the same page, what are these four big sports? I assume you're referring to football, baseball, basketball, and hockey.

The only one I have any enjoyable memories of is hockey (it's part of the social glue that holds Canada together; most of us have at least an opinion about it even if we don't play it or spend our Saturday nights watching Hockey Night in Canada - or several nights when the playoffs are going on). I've never played ice hockey, because I'm an anomaly: A Canadian of my generation who never learned to skate. But I played floor hockey in school, and wasn't too bad at it. The kids I knew during the years when my dad and I lived with his girlfriend and her kids were into street hockey and minor hockey. So it's something I grew up with, as my parents watched games on TV and some of my mother's family were involved with the local hockey team (as referees, and one of my mother's cousins played on that team).

Fast-forward a couple of decades to the years when Wayne Gretzky was playing for the Edmonton Oilers... my dad never missed a game. Both of us would watch the playoffs, especially if it was Edmonton vs. Calgary (Calgary had their own superstar player at the time, Lanny MacDonald). The rivalry between those two cities was intense when it came to hockey, and being geographically in the middle of them also meant being in the middle when it came to who supported which team. In some groups of people, hockey was something that had to be on the list of "don't talk about it" or an argument would break out.

I stopped watching NHL hockey when Gretzky was traded to Los Angeles. Since then I've watched Olympic hockey (more enjoyable due to stricter rules about fighting), both men's and women's teams. Fun fact: When the Canadians are responsible for readying the ice for an Olympic game, they bury a loonie at centre ice, for good luck. It usually works.


But as for sports other than the "big four"? I never watched the Olympics until Calgary hosted in 1988. I got interested because I knew one of the people performing in the opening ceremonies (a dancer I'd worked with in the theatre), and two of the people in our SCA group had scored tickets to the opening ceremonies. It was basically a local event, as international events go, and both my grandmother and I wanted to watch. I really wasn't familiar with any of the actual athletes, though I'd heard and read so much about it in the months leading up to it.

The Opening Ceremonies blew me away. And so did everything else. That was the year of the Jamaican bobsled team, and Eddie "the Eagle" Edwards (I shocked my dad one night by saying, "He's going to end up on Leno one of these nights" - and was, that same night, prompting my dad to stare at me and ask, "How did YOU know?!"... I really didn't, it was just a lucky guess), and of course the event I was most invested in: singles figure skating and the Battle of the Brians. American Brian Boitano vs. Canadian Brian Orser; equally talented, equally capable of winning gold. Boitano won gold by one tenth of an ordinal in the long program, because Orser had a minor mistake coming out of one of his jumps. It was that close.

These Games were special for other reasons, of course. For one thing, all the events were in the same time zone as I was; I didn't have to get up at some insane hour of the middle of the night to watch something live. For another thing, I was introduced to sports I'd never heard of, like bobsled, luge, and biathlon (biathlon gets an unfair rap from people who have no idea how athletic and controlled the competitors really have to be to participate at such elite levels).

This was also what got me interested in Beatles music. It sounds odd, but I wasn't into it before watching a Russian ice dance team perform their free dance to a medley of Beatles songs. That's the sort of thing that prompts me to think, "that sounded interesting, I should check out more of that."

There were some odd things about these Games as well; the American network broadcasting the games to the U.S. and some of the non-local organizers were so determined to have the games during those exact weeks in February and dismissed local organizers' warnings about chinook winds (that can turn winter into spring in a matter of hours). Sure enough, they woke up one morning and then wondered WTF happened to the snow - they had to bring in snow machines to make sure some of the skiing events could go ahead as planned.

The oddities weren't confined to the Americans, though. I was watching the CTV news one night (based in Ontario), when the chief anchor, Lloyd Robertson, was talking about how Calgary was famous worldwide for the Stampede, and to give international visitors a taste of rodeo, they'd put on an indoor version of some of the events. Robertson solemnly informed the viewers that these events included staples such as pony chuckwagon races and ladies' barrel wrestling.

People east of the Ontario/Manitoba border didn't bat an eye. They had no idea that Robertson had made a mistake, never mind what it was. As for me... I literally fell off the couch, laughing hysterically. There was an editorial in the paper the next day with basically the same reaction.


Other sports... in school I wasn't bad at volleyball and badminton (badminton was what I was best at), and in elementary school there was a weird hybrid we played called pingminton. It's a combination of a volleyball net at volleyball height, badminton birdies, and ping-pong paddles. My team made the playoffs for that (if memory serves, I think we won... this was back in 1974).

I also watched the Summer Olympics, though not as much. Track and field events don't interest me. I like the events where we can actually see some of the host country, like cycling and triathlon. That said, I'd watch gymnastics, synchronized swimming, and diving. It seems I like the artistic stuff.


I don't play sports anymore, and haven't watched the Olympics in 15 years. Politics, corruption, and a general unfamiliarity with the current top competitors has made it uninteresting. Calgary was seriously in the race to host the 2026 Winter Olympics, but I'm glad the bid was withdrawn. The amount of money wanted merely to put in the final bid, never mind the games themselves, would have taken a huge chunk of money the province couldn't have afforded. Nostalgia for 1988 was high, but reality had set in among most people in the province by that time. There's no way it could have been afforded again, even considering that Calgary was one of the anomalies of the Olympics: they were able to turn a profit, and many of the venues were still in decent shape, over 30 years later.

Couldn't you use that as an argument against any serious pursuit? Isn't a PhD just overdoing academic research? Isn't being a career politician overdoing that too?
Some pursuits that aren't athletic can have physical consequences when you pursue it seriously to the point where it's like a job in terms of number of hours put into it every day. That's how it was for me when I was doing my Western Board of Music exams in organ and theory. I spent a couple of hours a day doing homework and studying for theory, and at least 4 hours/day practicing the pieces I had to play for the practicals. Another couple of hours were spent on the basics like scales, arpeggios, etc. We had an oral test as well, on musical terms, history, and so on. It drove my family nuts during those times, because it was so intense and I could not allow distractions like TV or radio to get in the way of learning all this. Trying to cram everything into your mind and muscle-memory-train your fingers, hands, and feet to do everything exactly correct takes an immense amount of concentration, to the point where breathing is affected.
 
They're entirely different things really.

I watch a lot of sport. I watch Australian football as a pretty hardcore fanatic and fan of the Sydney Swans, and in the last couple of years also as a paid analyst/writer.

I watch Rugby league (especially the Canberra Raiders) and cricket in short and long forms frequently. Basketball, baseball and soccer, I mostly follow my teams (Clippers and Padres in the US, Canberra Capitals, Cavalry and United here). I've attended all six of those sports live in the last two years.

I'll watch most other big events. Rugby union at least occasionally, tennis mostly during the Australian Open. The Olympics (the real ones, not so much the snow ones).

Do I play? I'm in a social mixed gender non contact Australian Football team and it's s lot of fun. I'm rubbish at it because I'm not very skilled or athletic, but it's still great to run around with my sister and best mate.

But I honestly don't think my playing has much at all to do with my interest as an analyst or spectator.
 
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I watch Australian football as a pretty hardcore fanatic and fan of the Sydney Swans, and in the last couple of years also as a paid analyst/writer.

I watch Rugby league (especially the Canberra Raiders) and cricket in short and long forms frequently.

When we played tackle football as kids without pads we'd avoid leading with our heads, so I imagine thats true for rugby. Is there a concussion problem with rugby players?
 
Rugby Union (AQ's link), Australian Football, and Rugby League are all having their own grapples with concussion and CTE, yeah. All are significantly altering their rules around allowable contact and tackle technique as a result, in order to better protect the head.

Really though, even cricket and soccer are also dealing with it. Soccer has had to change the substitution rules so concussed players can be subbed outside of the usual limited allotment, and there's real questions about whether they need to rethink headers because of the cumulative. sub-concussive damage.

Of the seven modern elite codes of football, I think only Gaelic Football is relatively unaffected by head injury challenges from tackling and ball contact, but even they've had some issues and players repeatedly concussed and concerns they're not screening and assessing head injuries properly. In GAA (football and hurling) it's inadvertent collisions and head clashes in what are quite high speed sports.

Cricket had an international player, Phillip Hughes, die from a blow to the side of the head in 2014, with the coronial investigation concluding that the helmet left too much exposed, enabling the ball to split his vertebral vein, blood flooding into his brain cavity and nearly immediately killing him. The redesigned helmets and new head injury protocols are a lot stronger, including that any time the ball strikes the helmet the helmet must be replaced, and concussed players cannot continue playing and can be replaced (this is the first time players have been able to replace other players mid-way through a test match, a fairly major change).
 
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