Imagine, if you will, a hipster. Now wipe that sour reactionary grimace off your face. Imagine that hipster at, say, a sports bar. Impossible? How about at a tailgate party? No? A football game? For whatever reason, hipsters tend not to associate themselves with team sports.
In Canada, hockey seems to be the one recognized exception to this generalization. But for the purposes of this blog, we will assume that the love of hockey among select hipsters is simply an irrational anomaly.
(NOTE: This article is about team sports only; sports such as tennis and golf do have a small following among select hipsters, as they do not fit into the main criticisms of team sports.)
Having holistically ensconced myself in hipster ideology, I consider myself (unofficially) authorized and thoroughly prepared to speak on behalf of hipsterkind about the benefits of Not Liking Sports. I will address my arguments separately by topic.
Violence & Competition
Violence in sports is virtually unavoidable. Sometimes it is built into the game, as is the case in American football. Players have to physically struggle against one another, offensive line against defensive line, in order to execute their plays and accomplish the goal of scoring points.
In other sports, violence can be a by-product of the game. Many fights break out between players in sports like hockey or soccer. While it is not technically part of the rules, it occurs frequently, and many fans are even more engaged when it does happen.
Fan violence is another aspect of many sports, but this ties nicely into our next topic...
Patriotism & Allegiance
When a person likes a certain sport, they often have a specific team which with they identify themselves. This creates a sense of allegiance, which in practice looks very similar to patriotism or even nationalist pride. A fan of a certain team will do anything for their team, and is heavily emotionally invested in the games played by "their team." They are not simply a fan of the sport - they belong to that team.
(As a side note, hipsters also have a distinctly negative view of patriotism, and generally hate the United States of America.)
This allegiance often leads to fan violence, especially in countries where their national sports team is a source of pride. This is exemplified in European football, where deaths related to fan violence are not unheard of. While a sports fan may feel that this extreme allegiance to a sports team is completely normal, a hipster - who probably doesn't even own a television - sees it as completely ridiculous and irrational.
Which again ties into our next topic...
Irrationality & Unconstructiveness
Hipsters do not understand the allegiance of sports fans to their teams, especially when they are not teams local to one's own place of residence. They also fail to understand the need for violence in (or as a result of) sports, since they understand it to be "just a game" and are generally believers in nonviolence anyway. Sports also fail to add to what the hipster defines as "culture" - art, music, charities & humanitarian things, etc. - and are therefore irrelevant to anything that matters.
Conclusion
Hipsters see sports as negative and useless, since sport promotes violence, does not add to culture, promotes patriotism, and - perhaps above all - does not include the physically inept...
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