Sports or Lack Thereof

 

The decline of sports in my life. It started before the pandemic shutdown. Everyone is affected now but I was weening of sports for some time.

I always liked to watch games on TV and to go to games. I started out very early going to Phillies games as a kid and later watched every game or listened to them on the radio. 

I liked watching the NFL and college football, major league baseball, the NBA and college basketball, hockey and Premier League soccer. I had season tickets to the basketball games at the college where I worked and especially loved going to the March Madness tournaments when they came to Buffalo. 

I always watched the Buffalo Bills games and also the Philadelphia Eagles. I was a two city sports fan across the board. I also liked to watch the Olympics and the World Cup soccer tournament. I liked watching tennis tournaments too. The only sports I didn't watch was golf and auto racing. And professional wrestling of course.

Then I retired four years ago. Something happened and I gradually lost interest in most sports. I stopped watching professional baseball, football, basketball and hockey. I also stopped watching college football.  I would still watch college basketball but stopped going to the local games. I also haven't been to a Bisons baseball game in a few years.

Recently I was thinking about this phenomenon and wondered why I had changed. Perhaps it had to do with the need for some relaxation after a day or week of work. Sitting in front of the TV watching a game was a way to relax. Also there was the social aspect of talking about sports at work and discussing teams and games. That all ended when I retired.

Now there is no need for a special time to wind down after a day of work. I just gradually stopped paying attention to the sports world in general. Last season I watched only one Bills game completely through to the end and that was a playoff game. During the season I would maybe watch a few minutes of a game then lose interest. I would watch a few minutes of a baseball game and then move on to something else. 

I've heard of some guys who retired and then did nothing but watch games on TV.  Not me. I still like to watch soccer but it really is just something on the TV while I'm doing other things around the house. Perhaps it's because there are no commercial breaks during one of those games except at halftime.

We will see how this goes as sports starts to return after the shutdown of the pandemic where everyone has gone through sports withdraw. It really didn't bother me at all.