Why I can't quit the Raiders
Posted: Wed Nov 12, 2025 12:59 pm
This is the end of a great article written during the Covid era while a man was trying to replace sports with e-sports. I think his explanation of watching sport is on point and explains a lot. The collective memories through my life and experiences shared with all of you make it impossible to stop watching.
That, I think, is what sport is all about. If you follow a sport it becomes a thread which runs through your life and provides memories and narrative and meaning and context. Sport becomes a kind of companion, part of the richness and texture of lived experience. At the same time, you could argue that sport is the only thing on television that is real. The things you are watching happen are actually happening right now, as you watch. So much modern reality is mediated, packaged, predigested. This is obviously true for all forms of drama, but it is more subtly true of news and current affairs, where the effects can be more pernicious, because we’re seeing an image of the world which makes claim to be the real world. Sport isn’t like that. It is clearly artificial: it happens within a determined frame and a clear set of rules and in that sense is as mediated as human experience can be. But within that frame, when you’re watching live sport, you are watching reality as it really happens. It is perhaps the only completely, inarguably true thing you can see on TV. These events, which define the lives of the athletes taking part, are taking place while you watch.
You can have intense moments of feeling watching sport, just as you can have through reading or through drama or through art. The meanings it gives are both individual, because nobody else has seen exactly the things you’ve seen, and collective, because anyone with an interest in the sport has similar experiences, similar memories, and is connected to them, and to you, as a result. Esports give me none of that, which is the reason they can mean so much to people who play them, but nothing at all to me. And so although thinking about esports hasn’t made me get into esports – to be honest, if anything it has put me off – at least it’s made me realise where those thousands of hours have gone, and why. So thank you, esports. But also, respectfully, no thanks. I’m dancing with the one what brung me.