Watching Sports is Boring as Hell

Sports documentaries are amazing.

I will watch any sports documentary. That ten-part Michael Jordan documentary? Watched it. Six hours documenting the life of a sumo wrestler? I will watch every second and be devastated when it’s over. F1, bull riding, motocross, Little League: I’ve devoured films about them all. Watching the sports themselves, though, is boring as hell.  If we could get rid of sports altogether and only have sports documentaries, I would be a very happy man.

I know mine is an unpopular opinion. People love sports; they have opinions about sports. Sports are one of our main cultural currencies. For men in particular, sports are often the only thing we have to talk about. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean it literally. How many male friendships are centered around the question, “You watch the game last night?” Sports are communal joy and communal pain. They’re the connective tissue between generations. A source of pride in cities and nations. They’re also so, so boring.

Pictured, clockwise: boring, boring, boring, boring

How many times can you watch people bat a tennis ball back and forth without getting bored? How many three-yard runs can you watch? How many par fours? Soccer fans can talk all they want about the beauty of a 0-0 match. I don’t buy it. They can spout as much poetry as they want about the hitter who went 1-3 in a meaningless game between the Rangers and, I don’t know, the Brewers. (Do the Rangers play the Brewers? Is that something that happens?) But it’s a load of -excuse my language - hooey.

Actually, let me reframe that. It’s not exactly – and again, I apologize for my language but I’m pretty worked up here – hooey. Instead, I would say that sports without context are meaningless. What makes sports matter is the narrative. People don’t watch sports for the game itself. They watch for the story. Yes, we can all appreciate athletic artistry, but we can get all of that beautiful athleticism on SportsCenter. But the reason people will sit there for three hours on a Wednesday night is for the story surrounding that amazing center field grab that robbed Johnny Dinger of his 50^th salami of the year. It’s all about story.

Story is why professional wrestling remains popular decades after they finally admitted the whole thing was fake. Because the actual sport doesn’t matter. It’s never mattered. What matters – the only thing that matters – is the narrative. Sports have an incredible built-in narrative structure: at the end, one player or team will triumph, one will suffer defeat. Beautiful. But how we get there is often so tedious that it’s unwatchable. Wrestling is all narrative. It’s a clown show except instead of hitting each other with cream pies, they’re doing it with chairs. And it’s stupid enough that even somebody like me can understand what they’re watching.

People will DVR a game and then do everything in their power to avoid learning the final score. The sport doesn’t matter. Only who won and who lost. In other words, the story.

Why do you think people bet on sports? I read the most common bet amount on Draft Kings is one dollar. One dollar! Obviously, one dollar isn’t going to change anybody’s fortunes but it’s a way of injecting themselves into the game. Now the story isn’t just what happens on the field – which, again, is usually pretty boring - it’s what happens to you. People don’t bet on Better Call Saul. You know why? Because the story is enough to keep you interested. Not so with sports.

That’s why sports documentaries are so great. They’re stories within the stories of sport. How does somebody become the greatest bull rider in history? How does somebody go from being an All-Star tight end on a Super Bowl winning team to a convicted murderer? What happens to two Chicago teenagers with hoop dreams? How awesome to skip all the boring, you know, games, and just get to the hearts of the players, the coaches, the ancillary characters, to delve deep into the money or the injuries or the temptations. Sports documentaries flip the formula of televised sports. Instead of using narrative to give context to the (boring) game, they use the game to give context to the much more compelling narrative. Would you rather watch Tiger Woods finish 19^th on a bad leg in the Masters or understand how Tiger Woods came to throw everything away after a series of bad choices and a couple ill-timed Ambien? I know my answer.

Sometimes I’ll watch a documentary which will get me interested in the sport itself. Like I’ve seen every episode of every season of Netflix’s Drive to Survive. I’d never watched a second of Formula 1 racing before checking out that show. It got me so invested that I decided to tune into my first-ever Grand Prix. I knew all the stories of all the people involved, understood what they wanted, had some idea of what to watch during the race. In short, I was primed to become an F1 fan. I turned it off after about twenty minutes. So boring.