Sports Editor Chris Teale experiences the very alien feeling of sports fatigue on New Year’s Day while in the United States, and hates it.
I spent much of my Christmas holidays on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and one of the major things that struck me was the complete obsession with watching sport, especially around Christmas and new year.
Of course, I knew about America’s love for sport and their almost universal desire to “be the best”. Seeing about 200 people at a high school basketball game one evening confirmed this. However, I was completely unprepared for the sporting marathon that happened on New Year’s Day.
As the first day of 2012 was a Sunday, naturally the day began with the National Football League (NFL), and the final round of regular season matches. As something of a New England Patriots fan, I was interested to watch them play the Buffalo Bills, and of course delighted by their convincing 49-21 win. With the conclusion of this game, the day was still young, so I flicked around the vast number of television channels to try to find something else to watch.
This strategy succeeded for a while, despite Star Wars: Episode VI being ruined by near-constant adverts for new cars, insurance for said cars and the newest medication designed to apparently help you lose weight. All very enlightening. However, as the afternoon wore on, we were quickly running out of things to watch, particularly with the traditional New Year’s Day Rose Parade not being held until the following day.
Then, at around 2pm, it started. A marathon of college basketball games across the various ESPN channels from right across the country, with my girlfriend’s father deciding he wanted to watch every single game. Yes, every single one. Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite a fan of basketball, and enjoyed playing it for a few years in my school days. However, this was far too much.
With the United States being spread across four separate time zones, this meant there was always a game on from somewhere in the country, and after a couple of hours of unrelenting basketball, I was bored. For the first time in my life, I felt I had watched too much sport. I rapidly lost interest in the games themselves, finding the adverts more enlightening than University of Pennsylvania against Duke University.
I hated feeling like this. After all, watching sport is essentially what I want to do for a living, with a bit of writing thrown in. This was just too much, though, and led me to asking myself a question I never thought I’d ask: Is there not more to life than sport?