"What's My Sport?" you ask? Football. American-Style!
And not just to see in person; no - although nothing beats that! But we can't always make it out to fill the stands, and for the ordinary fan watching at home from the comfort of their proverbial own armchair, no major league professional sport is framed or paced better. Football seems almost to have been designed to be the ideal sport for your broadcast television enjoyment. The drama seethes and contracts. Efforts are made, thwarted, and after a pause to re-gather strength of scheme and sinew - redoubled! Mad scrambles of action alternate with tense moments of frantic planning and strategy, all punctuated by the simple snap of a ball. So much! Riding on a flick of the wrist that sets two whirling cataracts of thousands of panting pounds of man-flesh flailing against each other in an orgiastic ballet of brutally-poised, expertly-executed violence and athleticism!
Don't mistake me, baseball can be quite thrilling and poetic! But it can be kind of boring, also. As can poetry, if we're being honest.
Soccer is fun to see live, but not suited for prime time coverage - too much field to fit onscreen, and you're always missing most of what's going on. And the pacing - a problem it shares with such sports as basketball and hockey - the pace is a problem, from a dramatic standpoint. There's always something going on, but generally, it's nothing important.
In basketball, almost all of the scoring feels unimportant. It's just a constant back and forth of nearly-meaningless points accumulating in tiny increments. It isn't until the final two minutes or so that any of the points really seems to mean anything, and then only if the game has stayed close.
In hockey and soccer, there is a similar pacing problem, but it stems from almost the opposite cause: instead of too much scoring - a constant back and forth of meaningless teensy little points accumulating - there is too little: a constant back and forth of near-scores and attempts to score. There is a certain amount of suspense, in that at any moment something could happen! Suspense, but little drama. Because you can't get past the creeping realization that really, at any given moment, very little *is* happening. Very little ever does happen, and then when something finally does, you're expected to go balls nuts screaming crazy out of sheer gratitude that something finally happened! I expect sometimes people do that by mistake, and then realize mid-jubilation-freakout, shit - that was the other team.
In football, you still have the tease of suspense that at any moment a huge play could break out of nowhere and take it all the way to the end zone - for either team! But underlying that is a real dramatic build. A touchdown drive has to be assembled, play by play, the yards carved out a chunk at a time by flawless execution in the face of stiff resistance, with luck breaking unpredictably either way on any play. I concede that there's a real learning curve - if you don't know what's happening, it's not going to make sense, and for football the fundamentals can seem needlessly complex to the uninitiated. But as complex as it seems when you come to it cold, it really doesn't take long to get the hang of it. Two consecutive Sundays on the couch next to me will have you at speed. And the investment is more than worth it! It's just the perfect spectator sport for lovers of drama, rising action, the purity of the moment, the beauty of a crystalline strategy perfectly executed in defiance of the other team's well-drawn opposing plan. It's a beautiful game.
That said, and all invidious comparisons aside, I love all of the other sports too! I've seen some thrilling hockey and basketball games live! I've had some white-knuckle moments at amateur soccer matches. There's a lot in all these sports to love, and probably much of what I dig in each comes across differently to fans of different temperaments. But for me personally, on the whole, I think football is just the sport of our age. I'm talking right down to the mechanics of the game itself.
One thing I don't understand is why people pay attention to the celebrity aspect of any of these sports. Seriously: who cares?
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