Sports fandom deepened my friendships and gave me the superpower of small talk
Imagine a world in which you can engage in easy, casual conversation with just about anyone. This is the power of Knowing Things About Sports.
Better yet, becoming a sports fan can do more than give you small-talk superpowers. Over the last two years, sports have brought me friendship, pleasant weekly rituals, and emotional highs (and lows).
But getting into sports can be an intimidating proposition! Not all of them are easy to appreciate without knowing the lore — arcane rules, rivalries, and stakes. This stuff can be hard to learn unless it’s packaged in a way that appeals to you.
Always a Tentpole Sports Fan (The Olympics! The World Cup! Super Bowl Sunday!), I had never devoted myself to a specific sport until 2022, when a friend cruelly recommended I watch Netflix’s Formula One docuseries Drive to Survive.
I laughed it off. “Car racing is boring,” I believe were my exact words.
“But Simone,” my friend said, “it’s just like sports anime.”
Stupidly, my fate was sealed. Because Drive to Survive does package the extremely technical, often actually boring sport of Formula One like a sports anime. It gave me the impetus to go from being a casual Netflix watcher to someone who regularly wakes up at 6 a.m. to watch Free Practice.
Not every sports fan needs to develop a hyperfixation like I did. But if you want to become a sports fan in 2024, here are some ways to approach the intimidating world of sports.
Despite never watching sports regularly, I spent a lot of hours in college watching sports anime. When you sit down to watch Haikyu!!, Big Windup!, or Kuroko’s Basketball, it doesn’t really matter if you know anything about volleyball, baseball, or basketball. These are human-interest stories about underdogs with big
Read more on polygon.com
