When Fandom Becomes Obsession

Here's a view a lot of American women have: their guys are obsessed with sports!

Certainly, if your only guides were the TV schedules, the newspapers and the magazine shelves in the stores, you'd have little choice but to draw that conclusion. With football, hockey, baseball and basketball, there's something to keep the men glued to their TV screens year round.

Is this a worldwide problem? When it comes to sports, American men are only mildly interested, compared with their counterparts elsewhere on the planet.

In South America and in most European countries, the guys are totally committed to football or futbol or however it may be spelled. It's pronounced the same, and it's what people here call "soccer." In India and the Caribbean, it's cricket they love, and in France, it's cycling.

In fact, the sports that are so popular in North America hardly make the "other sports items" columns in the newspapers around the world. Baseball is almost unknown outside of the USA and Canada, there's a certain amount of basketball played in the West Indies. Ice hockey (as it's known elsewhere) is played a little in colder climes like Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, but the game we know as football is really only played where there's a U.S. military base.

Of course, other cultures have their local favorites too. In Spain there's the Bull Fight, Australian's have "Aussie Rules," a weird conglomeration of soccer and rugby (the nearest the rest of the world has to football) and the Irish have curling.

The big sports events in America, the Super Bowl and the World Series, certainly attract big audiences—typically the TV audience for the Super Bowl is 90 million—about a third of the population.

In July, most of the French keep up-to-date with the Tour de France (2005 was Lance Armstrong's last). The official figures show 15 million Frenchmen will actually travel to watch the tour pass through. Out of a total population of 61 million, that's pretty substantial active involvement.

When the England and Australia cricket teams meet for the "Ashes," both countries come to a stop for five days at a time—yes, that's how long a "Test Match" is scheduled to last. In roughly alternate years, there's a series of six of these marathons to decide who holds the accolade.

It seems odd that, despite the significance the Ashes has for the cricketing fraternity in both countries, the actual trophy stays at Lords (a shrine for cricket lovers all over the world) in London. English and Australian interest is only perfunctory compared with India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, but then it's probably too hot in those places for anything more energetic than cricket.

Soccer is the top sport on the planet, though. Particularly in South America, Italy, Spain and Great Britain, everything else stops when there's a major soccer game on.

In Glasgow, Scotland, there are six major league soccer clubs but only two big ones—always referred to as "The Old Firm." When Rangers (primarily supported by protestants) and Celtic (Roman Catholic) meet, not only the whole of Scotland, but Scots all over the world stop to watch and that happens at least four times a year.

The same thing happens in Milan when AC play Inter and in Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Madrid, there are similar clashes.

At least Americans don't turn violent over their sports. In places like Brazil, Turkey and Holland, riots before, during and after major soccer matches are quite common. In Brussels 20 years ago, 30 Italians were killed when fighting broke out between fans from Juventus (Turin) and Liverpool in England.

The two teams were meeting for the European championship. It was some years before that when Bill Shankley, a dour Scot who managed Liverpool, complained about the supporters who saw the club's performance as a matter of life and death.

"People who think like that just don't understand," he said. "It's far more serious than that."

So why are the guys around the world so sports-crazy? Of course, there's the pure entertainment value. Watching people in combat has always been a major spectator sport—going back to the original Olympic Games in Greece 2,500 years ago and the spectacle of watching Christians being sent in with lions during the heyday of the Roman Empire.

One of the most profound reasons offered by the psychologists is that it gives a man a subconscious sense of belonging. By following a particular team, he becomes a member of that tribe. With jet airliners, the world is shrinking on a daily basis, so people don't necessarily live near where they were born or raised. A guy from San Francisco living in Frankfurt, Germany, can pick up CNN on his satellite dish or Internet connection and feel "at one" with the 49ers tribe back home.

Here's another offering that might apply when the guy actually goes to the game. He sits with his buddies, they catch up with each other's news, bitch about their love lives and have a beer or two afterwards. There's always the possibility though that the guys go to the game with the intent of getting away from the wife, the kids and mowing the lawn for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon.