[skybrian]

I think this is getting cause and effect backwards. Many (not all) kids who became intellectuals were the last picked for the team in sports and generally suffered due to it. I went through school dreading gym class. Deciding that sports was not important to me and spending time on things I was better at was in part emotional self-defense.

Of course, dividing up into different tribes is not healthy. We should ideally try to leave such things behind and try to get along with everyone. But the nerds versus jocks thing lingers even in programming with the "brogrammer" meme and also in many programmers' expectation that everyone else should put in the hours to learn programming on their own because that's what they did.

Rather than indulging in moral shaming, I think better to say that the folks who are good at sports and at intellectual activities are in an excellent position to build bridges.

[s_kilk]

Ha, yeah. Some of us were abused mercilessly by the "jocks". On top of that, the school administration, and wider town culture didn't give a shit, because to them the young sports players were local superstars, and could do no wrong.

And if a few young nerds kill them themselves because of the abuse, what harm right? As long as our school sports team is on form it's all cool.

If not liking sports makes me a snob then ok, I can live with that. but let's not pretend working class sports culture is all good clean fun. It can be as venomous as any other culture.

[doktrin]

> If not liking sports makes me a snob then ok, I can live with that. but let's not pretend working class sports culture is all good clean fun. It can be as venomous as any other culture.

As evidenced by the top comment in this very thread calling out non-sports fans as being elitist snobs without social skills. What a joke.

[Rusky]

There's a big difference between not being a sports fan, and going out of your way to be an elitist snob about it (even if that "going out of your way" stems from emotional self-defense).

Same thing happens with math, or programming, or various other intellectual pursuits. People will specifically talk about how bad they are at math, and wear it like a badge of pride. Or, they can just not enjoy it without being rude.

[doktrin]

> There's a big difference between not being a sports fan, and going out of your way to be an elitist snob about it

This entire line of reasoning strikes me as such an epic straw man. What is the difference between not being a sports fan, and being an "elitist snob"? It's completely subjective.

[swatow]

In my school, bullies even at the time justified picking on nerds by saying we were elitist and snobby. It really annoys me when people make unfair attacks against nerds or intellectuals, because it doesn't just hurt adults, it hurts children.

And my experience was exactly the same as yours: people developed a kind of snobbery as an emotional self defense.

[wutbrodo]

This is a bit tangential to your post, but I think there's an important distinction that's being missed in most of the comments on this thread:

Not liking watching sports and not liking _sports_ (i.e. playing) are very different things with very different causes (though they are, to a degree, correlated).

The article is primarily talking about watching pro sports, so IMO what you're describing doesn't really give a complete picture of the topic at hand. As a single example, playing sports is one of my favorite things to do, despite finding watching pro sports to be extremely, extremely boring (regardless of the context: Soccer is my single favorite sport and even at a World Cup party I found myself bored out of my mind).

[teddyh]

“[…] sports are something one does, not something one watches on TV.”

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/physical.html

[analog31]

I suspect that most kids who become intellectuals have parents who are intellectuals.

Admittedly, my parents openly disdained pro and school sports, and rock music, when I was a kid. They are scientists, and into classical music. Today, I'm a scientist, I love classical and jazz, and am a performing jazz musician. Whatever "signaling" I might have received, I can't escape the fact that I love those art forms today.

But I wouldn't have stood a snowball's chance in hell of getting onto the hockey or football team. Today, I'm probably in better physical health than most of my classmates who actually played on those teams.

Oddly enough, when my musical interests become a topic of conversation, nobody ever feels any qualms about stating how much they hate jazz and classical.

[existencebox]

I wouldn't say that's true. I had a father who pitched college baseball, and tried to instill the same values in me, and it only drove me further away from it. I'd rather we consider the alternate view, and rather than discussing how those who don't like spots are somehow infringing on those who are, select the MANY occasions (as in the parent post of school gym classes) where the opposite is certainly true; those who chose to abstain from sports are shamed and learn that laughing about their stance as a joke to both sides is a good way to disarm that.

The takeaway being, there are infinitely many different reasons to like or not like something. The fact that this comes up in particular for sports communicates to me that there's a different dynamic at play here. Do we often see this conflict for things like soy? Ballet? Curling? Sports in america seems to stand alone in that any deviance from the norm gets picked apart with a VERY fine toothed comb, perhaps as a factor of societal norms. I wonder if we'd see the same examination of soccer non-fans in the broader world or if this is a more american phenomena, I honestly don't know, and it asks many interesting questions.

Even beyond that though, I "enjoy" (sarcastically) how there's a tendency to turn differences into conflict. Anecdotally, choices around interest in sports seem to cue more dissent than as mentioned in many other areas, but I see similar trends in the "big three" of politics, religion, and money. Similar patterns have sparked in other areas (gender differences; and I'm probably risking a hailstorm for even mentioning this) as well, there are certain topics people seem to be less willing to "live and let live" about.

This turned into such a ramble. I may edit it later, I hope there are some useful thoughts in there somewhere.

[analog31]

I agree that I was probably over-generalizing.

Interestingly, as an alternative to the "big three," a feature of talking about sports is that it risks no enmity because the taking of sides is assumed to be good natured.

[existencebox]

It's interesting you bring that up, since going out drinking with your boss in certain cultures is also a venue in which some degree of "friction" is assumed because "oh we're drinking of course it's all good natured" so that people can be more open; but has a reputation for some of this same "if you don't like it there's something off about you" effect for those who chose not to I was mentioning re: American football.

Not that I can't see the proposed appeal, I just mean to comment on the somewhat unique additional pressures these interactions carry with them.

(Deleted following post due to accidental double reply-click)