It helps a lot if you have a friend who's really passionate about the sport; you can leech off of their passion until you develop some of your own.
When I started dating the woman who would later be my wife, I would occasionally watch hockey games with her; she is from Detroit and grew up an ardent, passionate fan of the Red Wings. After a few games of her explaining the rules and strategy, telling me about the fantastic teamwork between Datsyuk and Zetterburg, and relating the history of the team with regards to their regional rivals, I got in to it on my own time. We aren't able to watch many Wings games now that we live in California, but we've got tickets to watch them play the Sharks in a couple weeks.
The parent post is pretty spot on; you can really choose how much effort you want to put in to being a sports fan. You don't need to know who's having a good season or which players are the best if you don't want to; even just casually browsing the sports page a couple times a week to see the standings and the outcome of the latest game is enough to be able to hold a conversation about it with somebody else.
I think you're underestimating the crashing indifference some of us feel toward all sports. It's not cultivated, and it's not that we haven't tried or been exposed to other's enthusiasms. It's not that we haven't played a bit ourselves, even, at least at beer-league level.
My whole family is pretty nuts about American football, so I grew up surrounded by it and can still appreciate the beauty and complexity of the game, the strategy and execution. But I watch the Superbowl and that's it. I just can't be bothered with anything else.
I used to play soccer with a bunch of Europeans who could happily discuss Champions League play for hours. Never was able to muster up the interest to do more than fake a short conversation.
I followed baseball for long enough to survive a World Series while living in the US, during which time it was impossible to have a conversation with anyone about anything that didn't involve the game. My interest lapsed the moment the last bat was swung. It was just too much work to maintain.
Why do sports leave some of us so utterly flat? I have no idea (although from reading some of the comments here apparently the world is full of people who can tell on the basis of a few short sentences the entirety of a person's motivations, which is a pretty good trick.) But it's the reality. So yeah, you can choose how much effort you want to put into being a sports fan, but for some of us the amount of effort required to engage beyond the most brain-dead superficial level is huge compared to the effort the average fan puts in following their favourite team.
For whatever reason, some of us face a wall of indifference that makes the effort of surmounting it simply not worth it.
[I half expect replies to tell me that "no I really just don't understand how beautiful $GAME is", which is the flip side of that uncanny ability to know everything about a person's motivations.]
>But I watch the Superbowl and that's it. I just can't be bothered with anything else.
That's totally fine! If the extent of your emotional commitment to football is "I watch the superbowl and that's it", that's still a passing interest in the sport and the sort of thing the article is encouraging.
The attitude that the article is lamenting is the people who go out of their way to avoid being interested in football, the people who take pride in their lack of interest. The sorts of people who, next Monday, are going to be saying, "Oh, the superbowl was yesterday? I figured I'd just catch the commercials on youtube; that's the only interesting part anyways. I don't even know who was playing." That sort of disinterest is cultivated.
Agreed. My girlfriend thought she'd never be into basketball. I asked her to watch a game with me, made a point of talking to her about what was going on, and some of the decisions being made. A few months later, she's as avid a fan as I am.
I have zero interest in baseball, not a huge interest in football, despite being in Seattle. But we find basketball a lot of fun and make the trip down to Portland about once a month or so to see the Trail Blazers play - a team that still tries to live the "Keep Portland weird" ethos.
What's intriguing, too, is that despite her dad's best efforts - he definitely sees himself, at least in his mind, as a counter culture revolutionary who despises professional sport as being "what the mindless drones pay attention to", our step-daughter, a seven year old who alternates between My Little Pony, Frozen, and being a self-avowed pacifist vegetarian, also loves and begs to go to games because of the atmosphere - somewhat made curious by the fact she has near zero interest in watching them on TV, but at the arena she is entirely involved, cheering, chanting, dancing, having a whole bunch of fun.
Interestingly, this interaction between my wife and I has gone both ways. The same way she got me into watching hockey, I ended up getting her into watching professional fighting games. She likes to watch Street Fighter because the footsie game is a bit slower, so it's easier for her to track what's going on. After I spent a few tournaments explaining some of the mind games and telling her about the various players and the common matchups, she's ended up getting pretty invested in watching major streams when they're on, and she has her own favourites characters and players that she likes to root for.
When I started dating the woman who would later be my wife, I would occasionally watch hockey games with her; she is from Detroit and grew up an ardent, passionate fan of the Red Wings. After a few games of her explaining the rules and strategy, telling me about the fantastic teamwork between Datsyuk and Zetterburg, and relating the history of the team with regards to their regional rivals, I got in to it on my own time. We aren't able to watch many Wings games now that we live in California, but we've got tickets to watch them play the Sharks in a couple weeks.
The parent post is pretty spot on; you can really choose how much effort you want to put in to being a sports fan. You don't need to know who's having a good season or which players are the best if you don't want to; even just casually browsing the sports page a couple times a week to see the standings and the outcome of the latest game is enough to be able to hold a conversation about it with somebody else.