People talk about the athleticism and artistry, and that's part of it. But it's not all of it. If it were, the ballet would have multibillion-dollar TV deals.
Then there's the way it mimics life, with struggle and uncertainty. That's definitely a key. Sports are fantastic because they mimic life (hard work pays off! everyone has to deal with loss!) but not too much. In real life, it's very often unclear who won and who lost, who's good and who's bad, even when the contest stops and starts -- and the rules are only sometimes enforced. In sports, they have uniforms and referees and strict rules to tell us all that. It's life, but more tidy.
I also have a homespun theory about war. A good chunk of natural selection through history has, gruesomely, come via war, where presumably those of us with the more militaristic-minded have fared better, and reproduced more. With every war the DNA for those good at war has had a little advantage. In other words, for a lot of us, probably, some part of our brains is wired for the adrenaline of battle.
We're lucky as hell to live in a time when a lot of us, most of us, don't actually have to fight for our lives. (And you have no idea how thankful I am to those who do that hardest of work for us overseas right now.)
But I suspect we still have that part of our brains that loves the thought of organizing into teams, training, preparing, and charging headlong into the conflict. We have that sensation, even if we don't really want that danger. Sports, for those of us, satisfy something deep. Whatever part of your brain has evolved for that kind of all-out insanity can be satisfied, a little, I allege, by watching or playing sports.
Watching sports feels like war to many of us like sucking on a binky feels like nursing to a baby. It's not at all the real thing, but often close enough to satisfy.
I'm just scratching the surface, though, of what it is that makes so many of us love sports so deeply, as I just learned from listening to a podcast of the excellent Radiolab.
For instance, one researcher on that show points out that three-year-olds have these wild imaginations, where you can make up people who commute from Antarctica to the moon. That's very different, however, three years later when those same kids are in first-grade, and they're obsessed with rules, fairness and limitations.
Good games, she suggests, exist in tension between those two things. Good games have both wild creativity (a sense of I-can't-believe-that-just-happened -- Larry Johnson's four-point play even gets a mention) and a fairly strict sense of rules.
Interesting ...
It would be worth a listen even during the playoffs. In a lockout, you have no excuse.
Source: http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/31679/whats-so-great-about-sports
Glen Davis Nate Robinson Paul Fiercer Rasheed Wallace LeBron James Ben Gordon
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