http://www.slate.com/id/2237640/pagenum/all/#p2

An excellent essay on giving up sports fandom. I especially liked the last two lines. If every sports fan took the same attitude towards sports as this man, America would be a much better country.

Maybe so, but I'm not starting until after Anand-Topalov is over. If the Topster wins, maybe I'll be in the mood to give it a rest.

This thread could contain innumerable sound refutations of pro sports, but hockey would still be worth it just for the one time in the playoffs when Yzerman held the puck at the point, pointed his teammates into position, and passed off for a power play goal.

RE: world title in chess. I have to admit that I'm with the writer on this. I gave up following the world championship because it just took too much time. I'd rather play my own games that follow the careers of grandmasters.

RE: hockey. How does hockey recruit new talent? One thing I respect about baseball is the farm system. It keeps baseball from polluting colleges and universities with faux student sports programs.

NHL players mostly come from the Canadian major junior system, though NCAA programs in the US are becoming a larger and larger source. Canadian juniors get worked nearly to death for a small stipend and sometimes an even smaller shot at the NHL. If they don't make it... I guess they have to get real jobs. The 80-game junior schedule leaves virtually no time for anything but hockey. I understand the worries about college athletics, but at least the NCAA programs allow aspiring hockey players to acquire an education while they hone their skills. That way if they don't make it to the NHL, they'll have a degree, or at least some degree credits, to fall back on.

Maybe, but that's not exactly a reason to be cynical, is it?


Well, that's one good thing about a game like chess. Following the careers of GM's helps you play your own games. You don't become a better tennis player by watching other people play but you can become a better chessplayer that way. And it's hard to imagine actually participating in a game without following the people who are best at it.

RE: hockey players in college. I have my doubts that any hockey player who graduates from an American college gets a real degree. More likely a piece of paper with no substance behind it. I used to tutor college athletes, and if they graduated a pumpkin could graduate.

RE: following the world chess championship. Yes, it is a reason to be cynical. Kasparov gave way to Kramnik, who in turn gave way to Anand. I still have to get up to go to work in the morning. Too much is made of such titles and activities.

As for getting better as a player, there is a vile and nasty trade-off: the more you emulate the greats, the less your own play is original. It is a Nietzschean thing.

Favoritism for collegiate athletes must be addressed. They should be held to the same standards as everyone else. That said, there are two main reasons to believe NCAA hockey players receive more of an education on average than do collegiate athletes in baseball, football, or basketball. The first is that many of the best hockey programs are at places like Harvard or Notre Dame, which have stringent academic requirements. The second is that hockey players are smarter than those other athletes to begin with. Someone playing college hockey has to come from a family that could at least afford hockey equipment, power skating lessons, etc. during his childhood. There are no comparable expenses in the other three sports. This indicates that collegiate hockey players either come from a quality gene pool that has allowed their families to succeed socioeconomically, or at least that they have the type of socioeconomic background that tends to allow for the nurturing of intelligence (at least to a greater extent than the background of your average collegiate football, baseball, or basketball player).

Bah. Hockey players come from Canada. Then they choose to play in Canada. "National Hockey League" isn't even logical, since there are two nations in the league.

Plus there is a hockey team in Phoenix. To play hockey you need two things, cold weather and water, neither of which exist in Phoenix.

Maybe so, but this isn't really a reason to be cynical about pro sports. It's just a reason for someone who already dislikes sports (for completely unreleated reasons) to pile on. If somebody told me that they gave up watching baseball when the National League added the Expos without changing their name, I'd suspect that that wasn't really their reason for giving it up at all.



There didn't use to be any NHL franchises in warm weather cities. I remember years back, a friend and I joking that they should put a franchise in Texas and call them the Dallas Slushes (Get it!? Cause it's very hard to get solid ice there! Yuck, yuck.). But now there really is an NHL team in Dallas (although sadly, they're not called the Slushes).

But to me this seems less like a reason to be cynical about pro sports than a reason to be cynical about the northeast. People are fleeing states like New York and New Jersey in droves, to escape their confiscatory taxation rates, and when they arrive in other states, they bring their tastes with them. Unlike previously, there is now enough interest in hockey in warm weather cities to support a team.