Thoughts on watching sports from reading
discussion around Mike's post on the Steelers-Browns game:
This last October I made it out to Shea for some concrete-and-steel-shaking soul-affirming post-season baseball. Despite upper deck seats, it rocked. Well, game 1 rocked anyway.
The crowd experience and its relation to the on-field game is the foundation of attending a sporting event. That connection with the players and the fans can and should trump almost any technical & perceptual limitation of being there.
I was lucky enough to go to the Steelers playoff win against the Browns in 2002 and it was awesome. What I lost in focused understanding about any particular play was made up for in spades by the screams & elation of 62,000+ when the Fu ran the ball in to take the lead late in the 4th quarter. Even without a real connection to the Habs, I was taken with playoff hockey in Montreal because of the sheer energy packed into whatever-it's-called-that-replaced-the-Forum.
Attending the live event with the right foundation will beat TV any day of the week and 13 times on Sunday. That foundation of the sporting experience lies in the details: is it your team? how crazy are the fans? how big is the rivalry? how good is the team? how meangingful is the game? what is at stake? Being there when the setting is right will transcend an uncomfortable seat, constrained sight lines, and even having to endure the god-forsaken wave.
Without that foundation, you can still enjoy the craft & particulars as a student of the game, but it's not even in the same ballpark (ahem). Yes, you can tally the different levels of technical appreciation available at a sports bar vs. at home with 1080i & tivo vs. front row seats vs. the nose bleed section. If you find yourself thinking too much, you've already given up on the way it ought to be.
If you are resigned to looking for a good technical experience, hockey is significantly better live than on TV. The speed & elegance of good skaters on top of continuous intricate play development (go post-strike rules!) is something to behold. Baseball does well because being outside staring at green grass with beer is an age old trigger for the slow release of serotonin. If you're looking for more, you either need to be a fairly studious fan or have seats that let you see the break of every pitch.
For football, there is a big tension between tree-view and forest-view. Getting close gives you a peak at the human scale drama: the raw physical execution of blocking, the body language of the QB, and the quick decision making amidst confusion. From up above you get an abstract view of play orchestration: how many stay in to block? do they play the run or the pass? Watching on TV conceivably gives you a good blend of the two but it also comes with shifty animated football robots pimping low carb beer and even more inane commentators.
Going to the game and spending some time at field level is great because it reminds you just how complex & hard basic execution is. The shoving, the pushing, the looking, the evading. You can't take it for granted at field level. There is a fog of war on every play. The two big problems are that it is pretty hard to get seats anywhere at field level let alone along the whole length of the field for good perspective on every scrimmage. The second is that the fog of war is contagious and it becomes pretty hard to follow any of the higher level strategy and narrative. You get to watch the outside blocking action in good detail but you need the humungotron to understand what happened. Getting a seat up top is generally good (despite losing the whites-of-their-eyes detail) because you can watch the play development, track the strategy, and watch the part of the game you want to (line play!). It can however get pretty cold.
