People who are too loud about disliking sports (sportsball types)
This is coming from someone who went about 15 years not caring about sports and then fell back in love with baseball over Covid. Not caring about sports is absolutely fine and caring about sports is cool too. This is about those folks who walk into a room when a game’s on and have to let everyone know how little they care when nobody asked.
I think of these folks the same way I think about vocal atheists—I went through an atheist phase in high school and am ambivalently agnostic now. Being vocal about disliking sports is a way to signal superior intelligence and wit without ever having to go through the trouble of opening a book once in a while. It’s a way to project being erudite and well-read without having to be either. That’s all. It’s as lazy as pointing out that some religious text contains logical inconsistencies. As someone who works in academia (and also engages in artistic pursuits) who also likes sports, I can say there are plenty of us. It is not at all hard to find a sports fan in an English department or other arts or sciences programs. And yet “sportsball” people always act surprised or smarmy when I show interest in the game at the bar or wanna talk baseball with other fans.
It irks me to no end, and I know it’s probably an obvious point I’m making, but I always bite my tongue, so I had to dump it on here. Guess that’s it.