Like To Watch? It Could Cost You Your Life!

When we attend a sporting event, we must accept that there is a certain amount of risk involved. For example, you could get hit by a ball, crashed into by a racing car, or the guy in the next seat might dump half his hotdog in your lap.

Of course, we also accept that the chances of such things happening are normally quite small. We also recognize that there are some sports that are intrinsically safer than others.

But how confident can we be that our preconceived notions about which sports are safe to attend are actually correct?

For example, croquet seems innocent enough, but as Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes fame) states, the temptation to misuse a croquet mallet is "awful".

To solve the puzzle, I decided to perform a simple test. The method used in conducting this test was to type a series of quoted phrases into the Google search engine, all resembling the following example:

Where obviously the blank section contains the name of a sport. The results of this experiment are shown in the tables below.

Sport	Pages Found
Soccer	57
Baseball	28
Martial Arts	15
Wrestling	10
Cricket	10
Rugby	10
Basketball	7
Hockey	6
NFL	2
AFL	1
Boxing	1
Cycling	1
Source: Google.com

This doesn't necessarily prove anything. For example, all 10 of the articles returned for "cricket fan killed" referred to the same incident of a Pakistani who killed himself due to disappointment over his team's performance at the Cricket World Cup.

The boxing fan's death was caused by a car crash, and was not related to the event, and most of the baseball results were based on one incident of a fan who killed his mother.

What we choose to make of these results is a personal decision. But it is interesting to note that an extensive list of other sports failed to return a result, which I feel must indicate that these sports could possibly be safer to watch.

The list included: athletics, bullfighting, croquet, curling, golf, gymnastics, jai alai, lawn bowls, motor racing, netball, polo, racquet ball, squash, swimming, tennis, and ten-pin bowling.

I did this experiment so you wouldn't have to.

Of all the results, the most amazing to me were the fact that bullfighting and motor racing both seem to be safer for spectators than basketball!