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Performative Fandom. In particularly the NYKNICKS floor seat celebrities. Most are like Taylor Swift - she’s a celebrity and clearly not a fan but she will get her floor seats because celebs go to big games especially when the big games are in NY or LA. It’s Timothee Chamalet who since I barely know this stuff so many here may not too is like a big Hollywood Act. At first I thought he was loud annoying Hollywood guy whose there because he did videos like this Courtside. Which to me looks like he’s performing for the camera. Turns out he’s an actual fan and won some contest for free tickets as a teenager tickets
Some reason this has been living in my head for a few days as a feeling that’s not how real fans celebrate. Perhaps theatre kids it’s so natural to perform that it’s how they celebrate. Where it’s more an internal joy. Something just doesn’t feel natural to me here.
The other thing is it’s the blackification of celebration. Where you need to do things loud and visually to show how much it means to you. Yes I am now the old man who yells at clouds.
The other interesting sports related thing is the bifurcation of the ticket market for sporting events. With the rise of television, growing wealth inequality, and the ease of air travel very big events have seen their ticket prices skyrockets. The interesting opposing side is a lack of pricing power in similar but slightly lower tier events. True events have ticket prices going to infinity (World Cup/NBA finals) far above the rate of inflation (wealth has grown much faster). Supply being inelastic means prices go up a lot. But we can build a lot of supply of second tier events. World Cup has added teams to the tournament so there are both more total games but realistically only the same amount of seats for the top teams playing and championship games. This has led to much higher prices on big WC games and empty stadiums for other games. The one example that really stood out to me was College Football Playoffs. Championship game tickets were a 3k minimum ticket price watching team 1 and 2 play each other. The semifinal game say watching teams 2 and 3 play you could scalp tickets for $30. People are going because they want to be at the game that will be an event not for the quality of football. Which ties into television because watching the game is just better on tv now.
The games that are in the public conscious as the “Event” have high prices. The Knicks final being in NYC pulls in global wealth. The NC College Football game pulls in all the money in our Northern Indiana province which is a fairly wealthy province. These are far more than just games - also networking opportunities and serve a coordinating function of getting an entire group of people to all be at the same place at the same time. For a Knicks level event if you buy tickets at 15k get-in price even the nosebleed seats will be hedge fund manager sitting next to some rich kid from third world country or minor celebrity. For IU NC College Football it’s some dude who owns a 20m a year car parts company sitting next to a HVAC roll-up guy. I think if I were in an Econ PHD you could write an interesting paper on the modern ticket pricing market and what it means for a game to be labeled the “Event” for a population group.
I guess you could also draw a parallel with the SF escorts charge $4k an hour to ticket pricing. People supposedly have less sex now, but when they are it costs more. It’s just more enjoyable to jerk off to a porn star than put in the work or pay to have sex with a 6.
So what is exactly your main complaint here? Members of the upper class attending prestigious events, while not being true fans? Theater kids performing for the camera?
Half the arena for the Knicks game was suits/finance bros pretending expression of emotion was beneath them. You didn't see reels of them because it's fucking boring. Why is this even a complaint again? I remember the eccentric and extraverted kids always being in the spotlight starting from kindergarten. You wouldn't have written this post if everyone behaved like the boring suits. If anything, you're signal boosting the "black" way of celebration by posting this.
The K-shapifaction of economy is doing it's thing, but why are you acting that hasn't been this way since forever? I'm sure a gladiator event with top gladiator talent and with an emperor in attendance would attract a lot more heads than any other gladiator event in Ancient Rome too. Do you expect an even distribution in demand for lower tier sporting events/matchups?
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The USA world cup match was also absolutely full of celebrities chanting 'USA! USA! USA!' after every goal(well, except for Paraguay's single goal). Sports brought America together that night; libtard celebrities were chanting with Marco Rubio and jeering the ref when he made pro-paraguay decisions. The rich and famous seemed less like an alien race and more like a bunch of regular guys living unusual lives.
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I think it's always important to keep in mind that the type of thinking that most posters here have is pretty rare in the gen pop.
Normie sports fan are a high percentage of the population (and I bet most of them know about Chalemet's Knicks habit, including a lot of women because of his lady) and theater kids are probably an order of magnitude more common than us.
This means the motivations behind attendance of high ticket price games involves quite the variety.
Same for the celebration - extraversion is uncommon here but very much a thing.
So is FOMO - my partner is smart and has a high level of educational and professional attainment, she also barely cares about sport at all - she still wanted to go to a local World Cup party last night "because everyone is doing it."
Some examples of people I know personally at the NBA finals or know about from anecdote and the news:
-Celebrities who go to most if not all home games.
-A guy who can't afford it but is taking his Dad who has been waiting for A Long Time and is on his last legs.
-A guy who can't afford it but is taking his kids because this is the thing that brings them together. '
-A NYC finance guy who got caught cheating and doesn't like basketball all that much but is taking his wife who doesn't like basketball at all because it's expensive and fuck him.
-A nerdy wealthy guy who bought a 30k gaming PC and a condo and has no idea what else to spend his money on and is trying out vices.
-Celebrities who have more money than they need and are just looking to spend (and some of them are theater kids looking to be in the moment).
-John Smith a boring upper middle class guy who is buying seats for 10k and just not doing an expensive vacation this year.
Yes some of the meaning comes exclusivity and costs, but it comes from other places too.
Also - interest in this NBA finals and World Cup are stupidly high, the former because MSG is a storied place in a high wealth town and hella small, the latter because like 6 billion people are passionate about football.
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Wasn't part of that one that one of the universities involved was Indiana, which a) was historically awful, making this a novel event, and b) has a massive alumni network many of whom are business alums and on the richer end of the scale?
Yes. They have money. Though as far as rich universities go they are in the top 30-50 and not the richest. And the CFP playoff schedule being in random cities means fan bases won’t have the time to go to every game. But still the game before the finals for UI was $40. Versus $3000. And the game was at like 12 on Jan 1 so locals didn’t care to get up. But I still think it says something about how being the “coordinating” event really makes prices skyrocket.
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To quote your handle, I think people should just opt out of sportsball culture. The reason celebrities are at the game is because the billionaire franchise owners want you to think it is important. If they can trick you into paying attention to it, they’ll make money selling you $20 hot dogs and your son $200 sneakers. They conspire with the gambling companies to steal even more from you. If it were legal and profitable, they would skin you alive to turn you into a sportsball and make your children fight to the death over it like in Mesoamerica. The telos of this phenomenon is recruiters scouring the earth to find remnant populations of prehistoric man in Dagestan or the Congo or wherever and dressing them up in the flag of civilized nations. What’s the point? A single backyard game of touch football with a random assortment of neighborhood figures is better for the country than all of the franchises combined. Even the steelman argument that there’s joy in seeing expertise — just go get hibachi, it’s cheaper.
I look forward to your writeup of a local neighborhood game.
I'd be happy to do writeups of underwater hockey practices, which simply doesn't have enough players to get beyond rec league performance. Not sure if you genuinely interested, or just making a point.
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Perhaps the reason local sports are uncommon outside of city rec leagues (which I hear are weirdly competitive) is that we normalized professional consumer sports as the default male “sport” pastime. (Ignoring golf and video games). If we were united in hating them, then it would cease to be weird for unathletic adult men to gather for a casual game for the pure fun of exercise and socialization. Give me your tired, your poor, your fat masses yearning to play free…
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Honestly the Dagestan combat sports thing is more to do with it being like the only region in the world where grappling gets the A-tier athletes immediately as their primary sport than to do with them being some incredibly insane unique genetic outliers of ability. The best athletes in their population go into combat sports since everything else is pretty marginal there, then get to train with other great athletes (which helps to refine technique and stop bad habits forming) in a geographic concentration.
Everywhere else Wrestling is only getting those who couldn't make it in ball sports and a lot of people will never even actually try the sport at all.
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