Why We Watch
May 7, 2017
It’s because we don’t know the outcome that we watch competitive sports.
If we know in advance who will win, we are much less inclined to watch.
This explains why television viewer ratings for live sports events are many times greater than for tape-delayed broadcasts and reruns of the same event.
It helps explain why onsite attendance for the Quarterfinals of the MHSAA Team Wrestling Tournament declined after seeding began. Pairing the No. 1 seed against the No. 8 seed, and No. 2 vs. No. 7, had predictable results and didn’t draw as much interest as in previous years, before seeding.
It is not automatic that seeding MHSAA tournaments will increase tournament attendance. Random pairings is a fair system, and random results an exciting experience.
Loss of random results is what worries U.S. professional sports leagues and united them against legalized sports betting. It is why sports organizations have tried to restrain the use of performance enhancing drugs – we don’t want PEDs to predict results.
The lure of participation for adolescents is that competitive school sports is difficult fun. The attraction for spectators is that the results aren’t known in advance. It’s what puts us on the edge of our seats, holding our breath, biting our nails.
Destiny
January 9, 2018
Editor's Note: This blog originally was posted May 01, 2012, and the timeless message is worth another read.
A University of Wisconsin football player from my hometown years ago was hit from behind in the closing minutes of spring football practice. It caused an injury that required surgery. That caused him to miss the next fall’s football season; and to protect him from further injury, he was allowed to skip the following spring’s football practice and to work out with the Badgers baseball team.
He ended up leading the Big Ten Conference in hitting, and he eventually received the largest signing contract in the history of professional baseball, becoming the first “Bonus Baby” for Gene Autry’s Los Angeles Angels.
“If not for that injury in football,” he once told an audience, “caused by an unskilled walk-on in the last five minutes of the last spring football practice, I would never have played college baseball. I would never have played Major League Baseball for 11 seasons.
“You never know,” he said, “when you are five minutes from your destiny.”