Posts Tagged why do we follow sports?
Why Do We Follow Sports? Part Four.
We follow sports because we want someone to win. This follows from our involvement in sports at the level of tribal loyalty and from our fascination with sports as a vehicle for stories: identifying with the team of our nation, city, town, neighborhood, or simply of our own free choice, we want a particular [...]
Why Do We Follow Sports? Part Three.
We love stories. We more than love them, actually: we have a natural need to hear them and to tell them; we use them to help us understand the world in ways we still can’t fully explain. Stories are driven by conflict, and sports, which is built on conflict in the abstract, is thus a [...]
Why Do We Follow Sports? Part Two.
We have a natural fascination with movement, rhythm, and the interaction of objects—especially the human body—with gravity. When a cat sees a dangling string, it tracks its motions obsessively; in the same way, when we see a ball flying through the air or bouncing along the ground, it naturally draws our eye. Add this to [...]
Why Do We Follow Sports? Part One.
Belligerence has something to do with it. FIFA can insist all they like that football is about friendship, cheerful graphics, and tolerant people with stylish glasses who ride their bikes to work, but if we weren’t hard-wired for tribalism and violence we wouldn’t much care about sports. Most of the time we repress those instincts [...]
