Zip It, Gammas

The limp-wristed anti-sportsball crowd needs to shut up

One of the site’s resident Gammas, who presumably has never caught a ball thrown to him in his life, opines on how others should spend their free time.

There are far too many men whose only participation in sports is watching a game while getting drunk. Lazy, Lazy, Lazy. If you have enough time to watch a mere 3 games per week, you have enough time to get off the damned couch and join a league of some sort.

He also opined, in obvious ignorance, that hockey is the most mentally-demanding sport.

This is not true. This is not even remotely close to being true. And I speak with some authority on the subject, having grown up in Minnesota, where I began playing hockey at the age of six. Hockey is actually less mentally-demanding than soccer; although it is faster paced than soccer, there are fewer variables and one only has to maintain focus when one is on the ice for an average of 45 seconds per shift.

And football is vastly more intellectually challenging than any other sport, which is why there are barely ten men in the entire world who are both a) sufficiently physically gifted and b) sufficiently mentally quick to effectively play NFL quarterback. Bill Simmons, a smart lifelong football fan, once spent a week with an NCAA coaching staff preparing for a bowl game and was astounded to discover that he didn’t even understand the language that the coaches were speaking.

The remarkable thing about football, and why the NFL coaches always stress discipline uber alles, is because it’s a dynamic form of chess with human pieces. Sure, many of the players are not very smart, but they are disciplined to the point of being programmed like robots, so that they perform their roles instinctively.

In 2025, 1,031,508 American young men played high school football. Accounting for lower populations in the past, this means about 25 million American men under the age of 80 played high school football, which is about one-in-five. And this doesn’t include all the men who played other sports, including me, since I chose soccer over football in junior high because both sports are played in the fall in Minnesota.

The “sportsball” sneer comes almost exclusively from men who never competed at anything. They’ve reframed their absence from the field as intellectual superiority, when it’s actually just an indication of their past inability to compete on the playing field. A man who played football and watches the Super Bowl isn’t living vicariously, he’s watching his sport played at the highest level, the same way a musician watches a concert or a chess player follows a grandmaster tournament. He has the physical memory of what it feels like to hit and be hit, to read a coverage, to execute under pressure. The viewing experience is qualitatively different from someone who never played.

You can’t dismiss a fifth of the adult male population as mindless consumers of bread and circuses. These are men who put on pads, got knocked down, and got back up. They earned the right to care about the game.

One thing the Gammas will never understand is that everyone who has ever been part of the game at any level remains part of the game. Even those who reach the pinnacle of professional achievement remember what it was like to be looking up at the greats, and no one guards the game more vociferously than those whose glory days are long behind them.

That’s why I can relate to the professional soccer players with whom I speak from time to time, and why they listen to me. I never played at their level, but we speak the same language and they can tell I know what I’m talking about when I offer an observation or give a word of advice.

Because even when you can’t do it anymore, you can still remember what it was like back when you could. In many cases, you can understand what is happening much better than you could back when you were playing. And one of the reasons we watch is because it takes us back, very vividly, to the recollection of what it felt like to be able to do those things.

And to tell men that they should not do that, to dismiss that as a distraction or worse, accomplishes nothing more than to tell all of us who know what it was like that you were never there and you will never know.

UPDATE: A pertinent observation:

It’s becoming clear that lower-status men live in a wholly different world than higher-status men. And due to their lack of empathy, they absolutely cannot understand this.