So not my thing.
Spectator sports just baffle me. As a European - worse, a German - I'm subjected to tons of football (not using the s-word) and tons more of football-related stories. And all I can think of is "Why!?".
Why are people so obsessed with it? My best friend is a complete fanatic, and we've had discussions about it, at length, and I still don't understand it. It's just 22 duded playing football.
The thing I don't get is... You can do that on your own. He does/did. People all over the country do. All the time. The neighbor kids are doing it right now outside my window! Where does the huge enjoyment come from when watching overpaid dumbasses do it?
And I do get annoyed at the gigantic amounts of money involved. Why! It's just some duded playing football. Yes, it's a business, and organisation and televising and all that costs money and they make money off tickets, but some foreign dumbass gets paid millions upon millions to kick around a ball in some other town for a year. Why!
And that's just football, but it is the biggest one over here.
This may be odd, but I watch what might be the second-biggest. Formula 1. Now that's a spectator sport I can get behind. Because I can't do it myself. You can't do it. Hardly anyone can do it. In fact, there is only 24 people IN THE WORLD who can do it (well, plus test drivers). Yes, everyone can do motorsports, but not F1. I watch F1, not GP2, not DTM, not the American Roundabouts, no Rally, no bikes - just F1. Cuz it's King.
And drivers are transfered all the time there, too - but it's practically never their salary that makes headlines.
And I get why you would watch it. Shit happens. Every race is different, and not just because of the different tracks. You could have 10 races on the same track and each would be wildly different. And yeah, sometimes it's boring, no overtakes and just pit strategy. But it's much more interesting strategy than whatever my friend tries to unsuccessfully convince me football supposedly has.
And while there are billions of Euros involved in F1 as well, at least I can see why. Shit's expensive. They're doing science all the time and have a shitton of equipment and personell to ship all over the world. Why is more money thrown at a sport that only has to put 20-odd people on a train from Dortmund to Berlin?
Arguably, driving a car around, even if it's hella difficult, is not really a "sport" in the sense of actually exercising your body during it - they have to exercise with other sports to survive a race, which is amusingly bizarre. But still. It's a sport I can watch. Much more cool moments, or baffling moments, and much better result. Someone always wins in F1. No draws, and no overtime. Unless it rains in Canada
The only other "sport" I watch is eSports. And only TF2. And only recently.
...
That's watching sports. Why is this about watching sports? We should be doing sports.
And that is where I fail. I never liked sports (PE?) as a kid, I was never good at anything, so I never did anything on my own. Which was fine for the first 25 years of my life.
Then my awesome metabolism slowed down and I gained weight. Not dramatic, but noticable, and I don't like it. But I'm still lazy, so I still haven't done anything.
Until last week. Finally went swimming. It's not much, but that's the point. I don't like doing sports, but swimming sorta counts as exercise without feeling like it. It's fun, it doesn't wear me out, it's refreshing instead of tiring (cuz, you know, water
), and you don't even need anything for it. I can't go to the gym, on half those torture devices I don't even know where front or up is. Also, I'm a tall weakling with no sense of my own body (cuz, you know, never learned to do anything with it), a disabled left hand (that rules out like 75% of sportly activites!), scoliosis (swimming is good for your back they say) and a weak heart (no, not like an 80-year-old's or a defect, it just never had any exercise at all, like the rest of me). What else am I gonna do?
And what are you doing? Playing football, handegg, baseball, basketball (I actually kinda mildly like basketball, but not enough to play or watch it - also, wrong country for that), curling, chess? And if so, why would you waste time watching any of those?
