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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.
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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