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What are your favorite sports, how they're different from other sports, and what do you like about them?
Here, I am asking you to talk about the sports you love. They may be either obscure or popular and well-known. What is their place in your life? Have you practiced those sports, or are you simply a fan and an expectator? What people don't get about the sport you love? What are some common misconceptions you would like to dispel? How would you convince someone to learn more about those sports?
Surely the fastest sport in the world goes to Air Racing. And if we're talking human powered, downhill skiing. And if we count projectiles, rifling.
It's exhilarating and fast, but we don't need to make fictitious claims about it being the fastest sport in the world imho.
I like ice hockey. It's fast, physical, interesting and there's not a ton of standing around doing nothing. There's actually 60 minutes of play. Goal celebrations are fun.
My favourite sport for a long time was Ultimate (aka Ultimate Frisbee); here are some highlights. It is fast paced, generally requires good cardio, and favours running and long throws. I love throwing things, and really enjoyed playing as a handler, but my knees can't really take it.
I have mostly switched to Disc Golf as the disc-throwing based sport that I play. It is a lot lower impact, and I'm not destroying my knees by playing it.
Football!
Easy to play as all you need is a ball, some friends, and a couple posts at a stretch.
Wide audience, some say it is the only true international sport
Chill games are easy, yet still very fun
Basketball.
Bias, I'm tall.. lol
Favorite sport is soccer/football. It was the first sport I played as a kid, and it has always just stuck for me. There's something about the athleticism needed to be able to run up and down the pitch for ninety minutes that fascinates me. It's a team sport, but the individual needs to excel as well.
I would say that my favorite sport is paintball. I love how varied the different playstyles are, ranging from just having fun with a couple of friends to the tournament scene. I love how every location will have its fields set up differently. But if you still want a more standard experience, you can get that with almost identical fields with the same standard set of bunkers no matter where you go.
Cool! Are there paintball competitions that people can watch?
Oh, absolutely; the most common tournament style that's televised is speedball which is the style that uses inflatable bunkers in a mostly standardized field. They're usually 5v5 elimination, but there are a lot of different rule sets for tournaments, and they're all a ton of fun
MMA. Because I like watching people punch each other in the face.
That's a bit tongue in cheek - my favourite part of MMA is the part most people would call boring, the ground game. Top level wrestlers and BJJ guys make mma for me.
PRIDE NEVER DIE!
And yeah, MMA definitely attracts a lot of Affliction bros that make me cringe. The sport itself I enjoy, the fans... ehh.
Joe Rogan is a whole other story. He has a deep knowledge of martial arts, and back when his podcast was about silly conspiracies like bigfoot, it was fun. Now? Dude's gone completely off his nut.
I tried many times to get into BJJ, but it does nothing for me. The instructors I met were not used to or really willing to separate time in their classes for clumsy grown adults that are highly incompetent in the use of their bodies (/me).
To me, learning BJJ is like learning a new language from scratch. If you don't start early, it gets progressively harder, and I'm talking about muscle memory and mental capacity, not athleticism. On the other hand, it may take years to perfect striking skills, but I understood "jab - jab - cross" the first time I saw it.
Unfortunately, for most people grappling is like watching chess without knowing the rules. We have no idea what is going on. However, if you do know chess, it can be exhilarating to watch Magnus Carlsen play.
Grappling would be more like baseball or American Football, while boxing is more like football or basketball -- simple and easy to understand for anyone with eyes.
Exact opposite experience for me - I never got into boxing.
The fight that got me into MMA was one that'd probably bore most fans to tears, Royce Gracie vs Dan Severn at UFC 4. 15 minutes of grappling, with comparatively small Royce pulling ground on the massive Dan Severn. I remember the announcers constantly talking about how Royce was in trouble, he had no leverage, then boom, Dan tapped out.
That was the night I fell in love with MMA.
There are stories about people that understood chess with little to no lessons, just by observing others play the game. So it makes sense that there are also some people for whom grappling feels like a natural thing that they are able to understand without explanation. I believe that many BJJ fans and athletes will agree that their art is one of complexity that is comparable to chess, and that is exactly what they love about it.
That's kind of what it feels like - there's a lot of things in grappling (which encompasses so much more than BJJ! Wrestling, sambo, and judo to name a few) that aren't immediately obvious, from the way they use their toes to gain leverage, to how they position their weight to make their opponent work harder to breathe. It's fascinating to watch.
So yeah, my point is that the very complexity that makes grappling awesome to you can make it difficult for others to get a grasp on what is actually happening in grappling combat. This doesn't mean that grappling is boring, it is just a complex set of skills that must be understood in order to be appreciated. And learning to understand those skills is not trivial for most people (even though it is certainly trivial for some).
That's fair. The stand up striking is obvious - you either hit, or you don't. Something like the Showtime Kick is always going to make the highlight reel and get people excited.
I love road cycling. I raced at the amateur level for a while, both on the road and on the velodrome and I still ride with a club. Was Cat3 on the road and Cat2 on the track. It’s kind of a dying sport in the US. Lance Armstrong kind of killed it a bit after pumping it up and the pandemic did a number on the sport at the amateur level with a ton of races being canceled.
Nothing beats winning a sprint at 40mph pedaling under your own power. That’s some real fun you don’t get with any other sport. Lots more contact between cyclists than you’d think for a “non-contact” sport. We were almost head butting on some of my track races. I was involved in some pretty spectacular crashes too.
Cycling too. I raced a bit when I was a kid, I was riding for fun whenever I got the chance since then and now I am trying to get back to racing at 47 (if the body allows it). What I remember the most were little training races with my buddies... who will be the first at the top of this or that hill. Good times.
Also as a spectator... I was lucky to see some epic La Vuelta mountain stages and hearing the crowd roar when Alberto Contador and Chris Froome were battling it out was pretty awesome.
BTW, I do not know that much about the US scene but I watch some US cycling YouTubers regularly (NorCal cycling) and at least amateur cycling seems to be alive and kicking. And the US gravel scene (The Vegan Cyclist, Dylan Johnson) seems so interesting that it made me consider buying a gravel bike.
Soccer aka football. I liked playing it, but as I’ve aged I’ve found I enjoy watching more than other sports because the only commercial break is halftime.
I like baseball.
American Football. It is a sport everyone is aware of, and is the most watched sport in America, so it is a little dumb to say this, but I think it is underrated. I think it is one of the most team-oriented of sports.
The average fan doesn't really know the depth of complexity in the sport. It is exciting to casual viewers because of the passing and big hits; however, that is just what pop on screen (and what they mostly show on screen is so little).
Every play has 22 players on the field, 11 vs 11, which is already more than any other major sport. At the highest level (NFL) every position on offense, defense, and special team (the "three phases" of the game) is important and nearly always has to give maximum effort because a mistake of turning the ball over or letting the other team score can lead to a loss.
As for losses - they are terrible (duh)! But seriously in order to get into the playoffs (in the NFL), each team only has 17 games to make it happen, so each game is high-stakes, especially compared with a sport like Basketball or Baseball where they are playing series of games against an opponent. And every playoff game is win or go home.
As for the strategy play to play there are so many different ways to move the ball, and everyone of them is a highly coordinated effort of 11 players on offense given a play by a coach/coordinator, lining up correctly, and executing. The problem with watching a TV broadcast is that 55 yard wide field looks so much narrower and the side-to-side dimension of the sport is lost for most of the game. Not to mention how little of the defense is shown pre and post-snap.
Many of the defensive backs are not even in view in real-time on the screen for TV viewers, so yet another dimension is lost.
I think a lot of people think the sport has too much down time with commercials (unfortunately SOME those stoppages are mandated by TV deals), but in reality every second on the clock counts. I could talk forever about the time management aspect of the game, and how players & coaches have huge control over it.
I think many think it is a dumb meat-head sport, but defensive strategies as well as offensive execution is complex.
Football (soccer) has exactly the same amount of players on the field, and I believe rugby has 30 :)
My uninformed impression of American Football is that it's essentially a complex board game with sentient miniatures. They even have armor!
I could learn to like this sport.
In my head I totally mis-counted Football/Soccer player count. It is a sport I've been trying to watch and learn more of recently.
It's a very different sport than American Football! Not nearly as complex. Or, to be more precise, it is complex in a very different way.
The reasons I like team sports more than individual sports is they all have strategies that mean most of the time the team has to work as a unit with a gameplan to succeed.
Football/Soccer has a good flow and the players are impressive athletes. The stamina and endurance it takes for those games is pretty unmatched by many other team sports, imo.
Been a San Francisco 49ers fan almost as long as I remember, just because my parents bought me some merch when I was a kid. We've not won a Super Bowl since I was 1 years old, and had some awful years, but our newest head coach & general manager are very competent and here to stay. We've got one of the best rosters in the league as well, we've just had some bad injury luck causing the team to fall short of the championship for the past several years.
Running. I’ve only gotten into it in the last two years, and swore that I hated running before then.
I love the simplicity of it — all you need are a pair of shoes, and you can just step out your front door. The community aspect is also great — good way to meet people.
My personal favorites are climbing, snowboarding, and biking.
Climbing gets you to slow down and solve problems under your own strength and there’s a good amount of technique involved.
Snowboarding is something I’ve been doing for 28 years at this point. It’s so fun to go 60mph and enjoy the mountain air. It’s also fun to go slow and jump off cliffs into powder without a care in the world. Even just riding groomers with side hits can make an otherwise shitty snow day into a memorable one.
I did tear my meniscus last year so haven’t gone back but planning this winter to test it out.
Biking is awesome and I have a road bike for cruising around town and a dirt jumper for more hitting pump tracks and jump tracks. The dirt jumper is kind of like a bmx but with a front suspension and 26” wheels
Auto racing - NASCAR, Indy Car, F1 and ANY dirt track racing
Baseball - love my Diamondbacks
NFL - Chicago - da' Bears
CFL style football. It differs from American in that we have 3 downs instead of 4, the field is bigger and so is the ball. I played a bit in highschool and always cheer/ watch every game for my local team. I probably prefer it over NFL style because it's what I grew up with.