Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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I'm digging women's hockey this olympics, for the obvious patriotic reasons. I'm actually thinking it's a vastly underrated women's sport: the level and pace of play actually makes it more watchable than the men's, the girls are pretty and normal. It's much more entertaining than women's soccer, and the players are much easier to like than women's basketball.
But at any rate, the culture war angle interesting to me: lesbians have fallen off hard as a sexual fantasy, while at the same time homosexual men have surged, compared to when I was young.
At twelve in boy scouts, there was a common dirty joke: Right (index finger inserted into thumb and finger loop), Wrong (two index fingers bumping into each other), Fun to Watch (two thumb and finger loops bumping into each other). This more or less reflected the common understanding of homosexuality at the time (and our painfully stupid understanding of sex): two guys hooking up was disgusting and bad, two women making love was maybe not normal or moral but boy was it hot. This was reflected in media like The L Word (which my painfully square sister loved), episodes of shows like Sex and the City, etc. A woman could dip her toe in gay, or be turned on by lesbians, without it permanently scarring her as a partner, the male gaze was happy to absorb the content. Gay men were almost never eroticized, they were generally treated as jesters or sexless, gay sex took place exclusively off-screen. Lesbians reached acceptance through straight male and female masturbatory fantasies, gay men through pushing what was really happening as far out of mind as possible.
Compare to today, where Heated Rivalry is such a hit that seemingly every woman is flicking the bean to it, and women's hockey appears to be doing it for real and no one cares. Heated Rivalry has a huge following for the fantasy of maybe, what if, somehow, there were two gay guys in the NHL and they were actually good at hockey? Where we have like a dozen confirmed lesbian couples in the olympics playing against each other, and I'm not seeing any dirty fantasies about it. We've lost the raunch culture, the male focused Vulgar Wave of entertainment. There's not the Bulldog Briscoe to bark lasciviously and yell "hot" after every mention. What culture seems to be saying is that we've gone from Right Wrong Fun to Watch, to Right Right Who Cares.
Is this a fall-off in the lesbian fantasy in particular among younger straight men and women? Is it a fall off of male sexual power versus female sexual power? Is it the painful wokism of modernity? Am I just not looking at the right media?
Come on boys, let's get out there and RETVRN to tradition and objectify some female athletes when the pads come off!
I've been unable to watch it because I'm used to men's hockey, but I guess it might be a good on-ramp for people not already into hockey. It is overall the world's best professional sport for spectators, but the fact that somehow other sports are more popular show that there might be an issue of easing people into it. It's fast, it's strategic, it's robust, it highlights personal courage and grit, it requires its athletes to be complete well-rounded athletes instead of min-maxxing specific traits, it's exciting with games (at the pro level, not as much in the Olympics) usually ending with a close score. It hits the perfect balance of personal and team effort in success. Goals are neither infrequent (soccer) nor too frequent (basketball). The flow of the game feels mostly natural, less artificial stop and go (football, baseball). The only thing I'll grant other sports over hockey is that hockey is perhaps less relatable especially in places with less ice rinks; any kid on the planet can play pickup soccer, you just need a ball and a big enough field. Basketball you just need a ball and a court. Hockey needs a bit more than that.
Problems for Hockey that hold it down:
-- You can't see the puck on TV. The author in the linked article defends that you don't need to, but that's kinda goofy, and also pretty telling that he isn't saying "yes you can," he admits it is a problem even if he claims that it shouldn't keep you from liking hockey. Not being able to see the ball in any other sport is an immediate crisis.
-- It's freakishly expensive for kids in the USA. Travel team hockey costs around $7-15k/yr and some higher than $20k. That's crazy numbers. Competitive youth golf is cheaper than that. That's getting into "cost to keep a horse" territory in a lot of places. While travel teams are a problem in all sports, the rest of the big team sports in America still have a viable path for a kid who joins rec league teams and then makes the high school team. In hockey there's very little pipeline to the NHL other than through elite youth programs. It's a rich kid sport.
-- The population center of gravity in the US keeps shifting south, and even the northeast has had mild winters preventing ponds from freezing to safe levels in recent years, so nobody is playing hockey outside the way it was meant to be played.
Not being able to see the puck to me is a weird complaint although I guess it might be valid for people not used to hockey. It's not so much that nuh-huh, you can see it, but that with a bit of awareness of the game and a decent sportscast, it's obvious where the puck is whether you see it or not. The player with the puck moves differently, other players move differently with regards to him and the camera usually follows the puck.
Sure, but at that point I'm not really watching the game of Hockey, I'm watching the reactions of the players to the game of Hockey. Yes, I can pretty much follow who has possession of the puck, but I can't really see the puck being shot or going into the net in real time. For Larkin's goal against Slovakia I can't process the movement of the puck during the shot to know whether the shot went in or not prior to seeing the player reactions. I don't actually know what is going on if the broadcast cut off before the reaction. Where I can see that Devonta Smith caught the dagger, or a VJ Edgecome put back, or a penalty kick. I suppose if I spent 10,000 hours watching hockey, I might acquire the perception "at the level of baseline skill" to pick up the puck going into the net, but like, why? To impress rich kid Canadians?
Due to the pace of hockey, one pretty much has to be glued to the screen to get anything out of it in real time. I have to be watching and focusing to perceive what's going on, not chatting with guests or cooking dinner. Where baseball and football (both, in their own unique ways) are so slow that I can mostly just look up every now and then and not miss anything important; and also enjoy them audio only, where hockey audio just sounds like a random listing of mixed English and slavic names.
I actually think one of the downsides, or overapplications, of instant replay has been that increasingly I can't see live whether something is a "catch" or a "foul ball" or a "goaltend." Instant replay should mostly be for situations where the ref had a bad angle on it and the whole world can see he was wrong, not for Zapruder film style breakdowns looking for whether a single toe touched the line, or talmudic interpretations of what constitutes a "football move."
FWIW, I don't think the problem of the inferior product being more watchable is limited to hockey. MMA, depending on the meta of the time and styles making fights, has often suffered from lay'n'pray championship bouts that were like watching paint dry; while undercard fights between two bar bums can be exciting as hell. March Madness is a strictly superior entertainment product to the NBA, pound for pound, despite the fact that even a poverty franchise like the Sacramento Kings would rip through every college team like butter.
Here my Euro background comes through, but focusing at the ball is very amateur level of watching soccer, too. Like, my dad used more unkind words when I said stuff like, I am looking at the ball. Yes, certainly be aware of the ball, but you don't focus at the ball. Watching the players' reactions is bit better as it is the losers' game, kids who only react to other players don't make it to a farm league. You are supposed to watch what they all are doing in anticipation where the ball and other players will be.
Concerning penalty shots: He was disappointed every time a game ended with a penalty shootout. Goalkeeper has only very few indications to go by, he is mostly guessing where the kicker will aim and if he gets it right, the goal is huge compared to dimensions of average human being on purpose. Every pro player knows how to kick the ball into one of the top corners where the keeper can't catch it. Mostly it is about whether the kicker loses their nerve or not. No longer about football, my father would say.
Looking at the puck is same in the hockey. But I though the complaint of not seeing the puck was about old 480p anolog tv tech. I can see the puck most of the time in the Youtube video you linked, except for the subsecond moments when it is flying. And when it is flying, it is about to get where its going before I can react, feels petty to complain about that. What I dislike the MMA part of the hockey (legal checking and sometimes tactical illegal checks).
The original question here was not "how does a true genius-level connoisseur watch sports" but "why isn't Hockey more popular?" The answer: because you can't see the puck. Saying "Well if you really knew hockey you'd know that watching the puck is for fools and amateurs..." doesn't really help when the audience we're discussing, the casual fans that make the NFL and NBA bigger than the NHL, are by definition fools and amateurs. All else being equal a sport that takes dedication to understand how to watch on TV is going to be less popular than a sport like basketball, which takes about five minutes to explain to an immigrant.
Like yeah, serious NFL fans know the right tackle is more important than the running back, but the NFL wouldn't be more popular if it was just a camera focused on Penei Sewell.
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