I wonder how old people with takes like this are.

If you grew up before 2010 and nerd culture you would realize that liking sports was not optional. You were mocked as gay. You couldn't keep up in small talk with your boss and would get passed over for promotion. It was mandatory to watch sports or you would be stigmatized. There was eventually pushback to that hegemony via the "sportsball" meme and mocking sports for being silly. Everyone seems to have forgotten how oppressive and toxic American sports culture was (and continues to be, schools are still getting gutted to make way for more football shit. Stadiums are still built with slave labor. Now it just makes you a "loser" instead of a "f**" to hate sports but the toxic masculinity underlying it is still there as you can see even in this thread)

My resentment towards sports comes from being good at sports as a kid, so I got a ton of pressure from a bunch of boomer dads, sucking any fun that once existed out of sports for me. I nonetheless kept playing sports until middle school (because I was scared of my dads reaction if I didn’t want to play sports anymore) when the pressure started coming from my peers in addition to my parents and coaches. There was so much pressure on us to be good at sports that kids would thrown tantrums and get in fights if they lost a pickup basketball game. If I wanted to goof off a bit or just not try so hard just playing pickup basketball I’d have a couple of my “friends” start yelling at me giving me shit for trying to have a little fun. The atmosphere around sports was so toxic, I remember the fights and the arguments when some of us made the school basketball team and others didn’t. By 7th grade I had enough of an independent streak (and was sick enough of my “friends”) that I quit baseball tryouts halfway through. My dad didn’t speak to me for like 2 months after that.

I wish I had stuck with sports I really do (and I wish I didn’t quit just to do drugs all day in high school) but when everyone around you is a toxic asshole who sucks all the fun out of it it’s hard to. I like competition, but when you have kids breaking down crying and throwing tantrums when they lose a simple pickup game I think it’s gone too far. Sports culture is extremely sick in the United States and “sportsball” is a cringe term, but sports culture deserves most of the hate it gets.

I think most people's resentment for sports, if you asked them, comes from their connection to gender norms, and how kids who aren't interested in sports are treated by society as freaks who need to be policed into liking the appropriate gender coded activities. I suppose that also extends to people who for whatever reason weren't fortunate to be good enough at sports that they were picked last.

Either way the issue isn't that they werent good at it or weren't interested - its the gendered stigmatization that comes with it.

Perhaps that's changed or isn't as extreme now as it was. But, most peoples issue that grew up when i did comes from the reaction from society at large for not liking the enforced gender coded thing and being told whatever we liked instead was stupid or wrong and that we needed/were expected to like sports instead.

I'm not fond of them because I never grew up with it and I don't understand having loyalty to a random North American city over another one. I don't watch much TV to begin with so that's another big barrier.

To your school point, I wish there had been more non-competitive alternatives. I thought I hated physical activity until I realized you can go portaging or on long bike trips, and work with your peers in an extensive environment instead of being pitted against them in a very mechanized ruleset on a very small court.

I love pushing my body to new limits and travelling ambitious distances in the woods. And now I'm not against a good game of ultimate or whatever with some buddies, but sitting down to watch "the game" is one of the most frightfully boring ways to spend an evening that I can think of.

thats fucking ableist

Everyone has treats that they're biased towards and treats that they're biased against. In the end, I don't see how one set of treats (sports) is noticeably more harmful than another set of treats (movies, games, anime, YA novels). You could argue that a particular sports fandom like American football is very obviously more reactionary, fascist, jingoistic, and in general terrible than other sports fandoms or fandoms period, but sports as a whole? It's pop culture, and in a reactionary society, pop culture will always be some shade of reaction. Pop culture is a key component of the superstructure that socially reproduces reaction. You can't escape it.

I personally don't tap into pop culture these days, partly for the reason above, partly because I don't really get personal fulfillment out of pop culture, and partly because I realized that even if you share the same taste in pop culture as someone else, it doesn't actually help you socially and emotionally connect with them, so why bother? But I'm not going to stop rolling my eyes at some weeb or gamer making the same "sportball" joke while they gush over some slice-of-life anime or AAA game that nobody, including them, would remember in a year.

If you werent a jock you were a target. My frjend group gad death threats against us during school and tge jocks were exempt from consequencez because they needed them for the "big game" 🫠

I was good at neither and yet I only dislike sports today. Organized, big league broadcasted on TV sports I should say. I just do not care about it, or talking about it, or it taking time on the news every day. There are few tings that matter less to you and me then who won the ballgame yesterday. It's pointless.

neither nerd nor jock