Superbowl parties or super spreader event

I will admit that I am no regular sports fan. I enjoy irregular viewing such as the Women's World Cup and the upcoming America's Cup races. (Have you seen those boats?!?!?!) In the past I have seen large number of cars parked in front of my neighbors' houses for Stupidbowl parties and I am concerned that they might be repeated again this year.

What is wrong with these people that they can't learn from the lessons learned from this pandemic?

I can't even name the two teams at this moment but I will probably watch the game (alone) mainly to see the ads. I usually end up preferring whoever doesn't get the first touchdown so I can root for the underdog.

I can imagine that most people on this group are too cerebral to spend much time with organized sports but I would love to hear your favorite sport, team, etc. and your sports viewing habits.

>1 mamzel:
I'm mostly a baseball fan but I also like hockey. I grew up in Chicago so it's Cubs and Blackhawks. Sometimes I'll watch pro football but college football and the culture around it makes me want to vomit. I enjoy the college basketball tournament but don't really follow the NBA much anymore.

I don't think I've watched a Super Bowl since the 70's so it's not going to be hard for me. Like Mike I'm a hockey fan. I've been following the Rangers since 1971-72 which is quite a long time I think. I played in local leagues for a long time too and I use to use my open space basement as an inline rink. Plexiglassed the windows even. It was a great way to burn off excess energy and anger and I needed it sometimes working for the Post Office.

I also like World Cup Soccer--mens or womens. Sometimes I'll watch lacrosse or boxing.

I went to a small Catholic college; too small for even a football team. And the basketball team had just a couple of competent players. The very tall center was there for intimidation purposes only, but lacked all physical grace. I was there the night he made a career first and only basket - the crowd went berserk. That’s my fondest school sports memory.

>2 mikevail: I agree about the culture around college football. I while back I read Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town by Jon Krakauer. Luckily (for them) there were no young football players in my vicinity.

(Can't get touchstone to work.)

This horse person says "What do you mean there aren't going to be Clydesdales for Budweiser?"

I can't remember the last time I watched a football game (no need to, the local fireworks enthusiasts always let us know if the Seahawks have scored a touchdown), but I *do* watch the Clydesdales afterwards on You Tube.

>5 mamzel:
Yep, rape culture, deifying football coaches, endless academic cheating and fraud, commodifying "student-athletes", the list goes on. I won't even mention the Penn State shit.

A lot of sports really took a downturn for me with the advent of steroids and the muscle enhancing shit. It really got into baseball and football. It turned it into a cartoon and a fraud for me. These people dehumanizing themselves--trying to turn themselves into superheroes. It's pathetic. The money is another thing but keeping in mind the owners tend to be the one who make out the most from ripping off fans. When I started following the NHL Rangers there were still players back then that had to work summer jobs to make ends meet--that was too far the other way but players making millions and millions a year it kind of puts them out of reach of the average person. American born players that make it to the NHL almost all come from well to do backgrounds anymore. The equipment for one thing is so expensive. A stick back in the 70's could be had for 7 or 8 bucks. In the 80's maybe $20 was as high as you go. Now you're throwing down a couple hundred bucks. And if you're going through 15/20 sticks a year? And skates. Then there are fees for ice--to play on travel teams--you got motels and hotels then too. Your family really needs to have cash. Kids grow and sizes change. Maybe there are a few exceptions to that in the United States that have made it who come from poorer backgrounds like the Rangers K'Andre Miller but not many. For European or Canadian players it's probably not as bad. There are programs that deal with less than wealthy people.

Eight years ago I spent a few months as a Visiting Scholar at a US university well known for its American football prowess. My wife and I decided to immerse ourselves in the local culture by getting some peanuts and snacks, some cans of US beer (aka pisswater in most of the rest of the world) and sitting in front of the TV to watch the Superbowl. Of course we didn't understand any of this arcane and mysterious sport (any more than we did when we watched a live local game later in the year) but it was an interesting experience. When I went into the office on the Monday morning to discuss this cultural experiment with my faculty colleagues, I found that almost none of them had watched the Superbowl themselves and most were quite surprised that we had done so. MInd you, this was the peace studies faculty so maybe they're not typical of the average US citizen?

Thankfully I'm now back in a milieu where I can follow a real sport, cricket. England have just thrashed Sri Lanka and are doing OK against India at the moment.

>9 John5918: Years ago we used to get one of the Canadian channels in with our cable television and I really enjoyed watching curling (along with also watching Red Green).

>9 John5918:
"some cans of US beer (aka pisswater in most of the rest of the world)"
Fighting words for sure. Even eight years ago I'd put America's craft beer scene up against any other country's. If, as I suspect, you happened to be in South Bend IN at the time, you had easy access to stuff from some terrific breweries like Bell's, 3Floyds, Great Lakes, Founders to name a few. If you bought a mass produced lager it's your own damn fault.

As for cricket, I think part of it's appeal is that it's inscrutable. First time I watched cricket was at a bar in Darwin Australia (if you want real pisswater pick up some VB). Naturally, drinking with Aussies I may have been too impaired to properly understand the rules and scoring. I do know they wear white for "test" matches though it's not clear why. I won't defend American football but I will take baseball over cricket any day.

>11 mikevail:

Fair comment about US craft beers. I've had some really good ones, and I unreservedly retract any inference that they are not up to scratch. But I'm afraid my view (and that of many non-Americans) on the standard mass-produced US lager-style beers remains. There's the old joke asking what is the similarity between US beer and having sex in a canoe: they're both fucking near water. Mind you, I know many people from across the Pond think English beer is warm and flat, so it's just a matter of taste and what you're used to, I suppose. We can probably agree on Aussie beer!

While I was staying in Toronto once with an English friend who had been resident in Canada for many years he managed to explain baseball to me using cricket as an analogy, and for a while I began to understand it, but that was some decades ago and I have to confess that I've forgotten it now and baseball seems as inscrutable to me as American football. Cricket is not like most other sports. A test match lasts five days, so while it has moments, periods even, of intense excitement, it also has periods when you can't see anything apparently very exciting happening unless you understand the long-term strategy. In some ways it has more in common with chess than with, say, football. Australia of course has a top class cricket team and is a cricket mad nation, but all you need to know is that the rest of the cricketing world supports whichever team is playing against Australia at any given moment.

Full disclosure: much of the above is tongue in cheek! And I had to break off in the middle of it as our dogs got into a fight with a pack of baboons. The baboons came off worse, but there were a couple of small wounds on the dogs that I had to disinfect.

>12 John5918:
"Full disclosure: much of the above is tongue in cheek"
Same here. And I'm a big fan of Samuel Smith beers. Don't have a lot of access to many other English where I live except Boddingtons and Newcastle. Huge fan of Belgian beers. Not a fan of baboon packs but I rarely run into them in central Indiana.

If you can put hands on Chinese beers, try them.

Ah, Newcastle broon (brown). I was at university in the north east so we drank a lot of it, although as penniless students we often had to drink the amber rather than the brown as amber was slightly cheaper. Boddingtons and Samuel Smith, yes, also Greene King, Theakston's Old Peculier, London Pride... the list is endless. Whenever I get back to UK (which has not been for a while now due to COVID travel restrictions) I look forward to a pint or two in an olde English pub. I have a sister living in rural Devon which is a good place to visit country pubs with my brother in law. A few years ago my wife and I walked a section of the Cornish coastal trail with some old mates and there we experienced the local cider. Nostalgia...

>8 lriley: Speaking of steroids and performance enhancement, I was so disappointed that Lance Armstrong had all his yellow jerseys stripped from him because of his sneaky doping. It really threw a shadow on an event that I have enjoyed watching since they started airing it live in the U.S. Being half-French I love watching the country sides roll by. There is no way I can relate to those tall skeletal men who pedal mile after mile but I love watching when one of them pushes themselves beyond their endurance to win.

#16--it does put a damper on things. Growing up I could admire players like Hank Aaron or Roger Maris who broke long standing records but did it the right way. Then all of a sudden you have these over inflated and muscle bound players like McGwire, Bonds Jr. and Sosa and they're just tearing records apart but they're not doing it in the right way and there's a hype machine pushing it along. Not a good look and not a healthy lifestyle choice either. Whatever the game it connects better to people when they see athletes that really aren't all that different from them as far as size and strength.

Sport events I've watched outside of fiction in the past ten years have mostly been martial arts and ice skating.

In fiction, I've watched characters compete in ice skating and martial arts; play volleyball, soccer, rugby, and hockey; and move balls around just for fun. (Do competitive chess and go count as sports?)

Anyway, I don't much like American football. The game is kind of interesting, like chess with a ball and autonomous pieces, but the culture around it tends toward deplorable. The wasted billions, the toxic drinks and food, the misplaced priorities (as I had members of my wedding party who wanted to carry around a portable TV to not miss a game while at my wedding; nevermind that arts and sciences are devalued every day in favor of football at colleges) are problems that cycle through other areas of society.

When I lived in college town with a major football team, the non-football fans lived in fear of the team winning big home games, because people would die every time. Police officers would be run over by the suped up trunks leading tailgate parties and others just trying to get through the night would be caught up other drunken, celebratory violence. I hated it. This happened again and again.

I'm not surprised there are Superbowl fans willing to be viral superspreaders this year.

>18 aspirit: I forgot to mention that school sports weren't canceled where I currently live due to pandemic until sometime such as last month. People continue to meet without masks at the city's football field. Makes me angry.

I'll spare you y'all from the full rant, though.

Regarding American macrobrews, the gag I always liked was, "why is American beer served ice cold?" "Because otherwise you might accidentally taste it..."

But of course there are plenty of excellent American beers, so much so that I gave up brewing my own several years ago when I realized that I could now buy better beer than I could make, for a comparable unit price. So I switched to making mead - while there are a number of commercial meaderies operating at the moment, I have not found one that makes a good dry mead the way I like it.

There are a lot of fine microbreweries all over the United States. Why people continue to drink Coors and Michelob and Bud I don't know.

>18 aspirit: tailgate parties

That's a term that doesn't cross the Pond, and I only discovered what it meant when I experienced it in the USA at the one live American football match I attended. In UK tailgating is driving at speed dangerously close to the car in front whom you believe to be driving too slowly.

>21 lriley: Why people continue to drink Coors and Michelob and Bud I don't know

Me too. Are they cheaper than the craft beers? Cheap way of getting drunk, perhaps?

#22--easy availability and cheap. Some people are put off by stronger flavored or heavier beers.

A lot of smaller microbreweries don't have the production capabilities to have any regional or national distribution. People actually have to go to the source.

Really with the treatments I'm going through I'm not drinking anything right now but I like IPA's best.

I never appreciated American football, though college games were fun to attend.

Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), though, finished it for me. I actively pressed back against a HS coach trying to recruit youngest son (not big, but fast). A high school classmate who played for Hamilton (CFL), now a plumber with bad knees, agreed with my assessment of "20 seconds of glory, a lifetime of bad knees."

Likewise, I was happy when oldest son gave up hockey soon after checking commenced. At that age, kids varied in size, and there was always someone (too often egged on by parent) who looked to crush an opposing player. My brother-in-law (70s) has played all his life, and at least once in last decade came home with stitchable face wound...

* "In CTE, a protein called Tau forms clumps that slowly spread throughout the brain, killing brain cells. CTE has been seen in people as young as 17, but symptoms do not generally begin appearing until years after the onset of head impacts." https://concussionfoundation.org/CTE-resources/what-is-CTE

#24----that is a good point. Between the mid-70's and say about 2005 the violence in pro hockey increased exponentially and it eventually led to numerous deaths away from the rink--from players suffering brain trauma including CTE (for instance Bob Probert, Derek Boogaard) or other post concussion issues. A number of suicides as well (Rick Rypien, Wade Belak come to mind but more than just those two). A lot of it was from all the fighting but probably even more from targeted head shots from body checks. It eventually also led to several class action lawsuits that the NHL has done their level best to deny any responsibility for.

If you were watching hockey in the 80's and 90's and early 2000's this was all marketed to sell the sport and I have to admit that I liked it. It was a fast, hard and mean game. Then again I like a lot of others really wasn't getting the damage being done to a lot of these players. When you see literally hundreds of former players names on these lawsuits or when you hear stories like that of Joe Murphy or Matt Johnson wandering around homeless and in a deranged state it kind of opens your eyes. It's true that the NHL in the last 10 years or so have taken steps to curtail a lot of this and IMO it's for the best because at the end of the day it's just a game and shouldn't be something that destroys lives.

I remember my son's hockey team being crushed by girls' team, which skated circles around them... When you can't smash opponents into the boards, you play a much different game. Oh well, my kid sure can skate backwards!

#26---mind you I like that it's toned down a lot. Part of that is influenced by players coming over from Europe. It is a physical game though and even in no hit rec leagues I found that it's almost impossible not to have contact at times---opposing players arriving at the puck at the same time are not going to back off. I've watched a bit of NWHL and I've seen the same. That league doesn't really want a lot of hitting but when the puck is in a scrum they knock each other around and you see the same in the Olympics when the Canadian and American women are playing. Those are highly competitive events.

The main thing is to take the predatory hits out.