King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Sports likes and dislikes: Why I love the sports I love, hate the sports I hate, and make exceptions all the time.

July 8, 2004 | It's that time of year again. They're having that bike race in France, and as a courtesy to fans of that race and that sport, I'm not writing about it. I worry about their blood pressure, you see.

But that race, the Euro 2004 soccer tournament and a letter from reader Daniel Flemming have all got me thinking lately about why it is that I'm a fan of certain sports and not others. I wonder the same thing about you too, but I can't speak for you.

Flemming was confused by an offhand mention I made recently that I love curling. He actually understood that, since I also love baseball. "These sports line up nicely. Ponderous, slow," he wrote. "And yet, you seem to also really like basketball and hockey. Either you're the Dream Sports Columnist, and you like all sports, even hurling, volleyball and water polo, or there's something there that confuses me."

Let's just say I'm not the Dream Sports Columnist.

I grew up watching the "big four" American sports and boxing, and the effect that had on my likes and dislikes can't be underestimated. But there are other sports I saw as a kid that I don't care about, and sports I saw little of that I like, so what I grew up with doesn't explain everything.

I wrote back to Flemming trying to explain why it is that I like curling, which was about 750 words' worth of saying, "I dunno, it's just cool." For the record, I love hurling and get little from volleyball and water polo. And as readers looking for Euro 2004 coverage in this space have been reminded, soccer bores me silly.

Any sport where man, beast or machine is racing other men, beasts or machines is not for me, with the sometime exception of horse racing, though in that case what I like is the culture around the track, not the sport itself. If I'm present at an auto race, I'm awed by watching cars go 200-plus miles per hour, which doesn't come across on TV, and I really like drag racing, for the same "wow!" reason. But the sporting part of it, who wins, doesn't interest me in the least.

I just don't care who can get from Point A to Point B faster, ever, unless I am one of the people trying to get from Point A to Point B, and even then only if there's something really worth having once I get there first. I also don't care, when people are doing the same exact thing in sequence -- jumping off of a ski-jump ramp or throwing a javelin, for example -- who does it better. Junk sports, newly invented, X Games-type sports, invariably follow this format.

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