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Post by Stan on Jan 7, 2016 11:55:55 GMT
Ha, no, no one has. I studied Chinese for a few years. I was born here. In Russia I lived in Peter, as they like to call it (St. Petersburg is so hard on the mouth).
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Post by ShadowAngel on Jan 7, 2016 15:03:00 GMT
American Football just didn't seem like an exciting sport, rather it was more about the event of the match itself. That's generally a problem in the USA. They don't have a "proper" fan culture like european sports, most people go to the games because it's probably their only chance, outside of working, for them to leave the house. Then they sit around there, eat and drink and only react when the PA/Scoreboard tells them to "clap your hands" for 5 seconds, immediately going back to silence. And i think that's a big reason why most of the US Sports just come across as boring. That and the fact they are constantly interrupted by commercials. It's the same with the NHL: They use every chance for a commercial break they can get, there are even forced breaks sometimes. It's annoying to watch. Then again, hockey is the only north american sport i can watch. All the others are either completely boring (American Football, Baseball where i wonder why it even exists) or too "dumb" (Nascar, Indycar or whatever it's called...driving around for 500 hours in a circle isn't fun to watch, in my oppinion, especially not compared to Formula 1, WTCC, DTM or even Fomula 3) to be actually entertaining. I know that American Football has some tactic to it but you have the same in every other sport, just that those sports, like Hockey don't get interrupted every 20 seconds for a long break and while Football/Soccer doesn't have interruptions outside of the half-time break there's also tactics going on, it just flows better because you can watch 45 minutes without being annoyed from commercials or too many stoppages in the game. I also don't like some of the culture that surrounds it. There are plenty of great people who play football, but too often we're fine with allowing complete idiots who shouldn't be in the public spotlight at all to play regardless of what they do. That's a problem with all sports worldwide though. Most athletes come across as kinda dumb and i always think "If that guy hadn't this athletic ability and talent, he would work at McDonalds" And you have the same kind of drunks/junkies, violent outbursts and other problems. Altough i have to say that the NFL does come across as a league full of drugged up, violent criminals. When you look at the stats: 38 players were arrested in the year 2015. September 2015 was the first month in over 6 years where no NFL player was arrested and 810 arrests in 16 years is completely insane. You really have to wonder how that is possible and why the same doesn't happen in equally violent sports like Rugby or Boxing or maybe even Hockey (altough the NHL had it's fair share of scandals over the past few years with rape allegiations and violent outbursts like that one russian player that beat his girlfriend half dead) but it's nowhere near the crazy amount the NFL has
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Post by englishinvader on Jan 7, 2016 21:42:21 GMT
Currently watching Superbowl XIX on YouTube with legendary quarterbacks Dan Marino and Joe Montana: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wftI5kX2h-EI love watching retro stuff from the early 80s so the commercials are all part of the fun for me.
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Post by Centrale on Jan 8, 2016 2:49:58 GMT
That's generally a problem in the USA. They don't have a "proper" fan culture like european sports, most people go to the games because it's probably their only chance, outside of working, for them to leave the house. Then they sit around there, eat and drink and only react when the PA/Scoreboard tells them to "clap your hands" for 5 seconds, immediately going back to silence. Heh, all right ... I guess I'll take this as satire, I'm not sure what a "proper" sports fan culture entails... to be equally absurdist I would have to assume it is characterized by roving bands of fascist skinhead soccer hooligans rampaging through the streets (isn't there a notorious video game about this, your sports culture?), with the remainder of the fans in the stands too preoccupied with endlessly buzzing their vuvuzelas to pay attention to the game. I hope you find my grotesque caricature as amusing as I find yours! I think you'll find really dedicated fans in every sport... ranging from healthy, positive ways to rather worrisome and disturbing ways. College football in the U.S. is a bigger live event than NFL games, with some of the biggest stadiums holding over 100,000 fans who show up early to tailgate and make a day of it. The downside are the sometimes toxic intrastate rivalries, which can flare up from fun ribbing to really ugly, misplaced hostility. In the sport of baseball (sorry if you can't comprehend its appeal; I feel the same way about the stuffy sport of Cricket with its surprisingly legal brutality of intentionally beaning the batters or whatever they're called) there are a lot of long-time fans who enjoy fanatical yet quiet practices like keeping their own box scores. Especially in minor league teams. Basically you have to realize that NFL games are priced out of the range of most average fans, so the stands are largely populated by rich people, and everyone knows that rich people don't know how to get down. Only when teams have years-long periods of losing seasons will tickets become available and prices come down a little. So to get the sense of a true sports culture, I think you have to look at less famous and less lucrative leagues. On the other hand, there are the sad, superstitious fans who can't accept the fact that, in spite of being totally emotionally worked up about the games, they have no influence on the outcomes. I used to go to a sports bar that had enough TVs to show all the NFL games. A middle-aged Steelers fan would set up a whole array of tchotchkes in front of her - a "Terrible Towel," various bobbleheads of players, etc. - and as I watched her, I noticed she would touch various items in what appeared to be a superstitious attempt to cause specific outcomes on the following plays. Most people don't have it that bad, but many will admit to wearing a specific jersey or other clothing item. A friend of mine sadly believed during one period of time that he was jinxing his own favorite team by watching the games - they kept winning the ones he missed, and losing the ones he was able to watch. It's crazy and sad... finally he got over that.
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Post by Centrale on Jan 8, 2016 2:58:17 GMT
Flatapex - Thanks for the suggestion to check out BTCC... I have heard of touring cars but wasn't really clear on what it was all about.
Englishinvader - Great link! I wish it were easier to see specific past NFL games. There was a Monday Night Football game between the Bucs and the Rams in the early 2000s that was the most exciting game I've ever seen. But the NFL and the networks make it really hard to ever see old games.
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Post by englishinvader on Jan 8, 2016 12:40:40 GMT
One of the things I've noticed is that teams hardly ever gamble on the 4th down (even when they're two or three touchdowns behind). When I'm playing Madden, I almost always gamble or go for a fake punt.
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Post by Stan on Jan 8, 2016 12:42:01 GMT
Shadowangel's depiction of American sports fans is really not so much satire, sadly, but I personally don't know enough about European sports culture, other than Russia, from first-hand experience. Knowing that and what football culture is like here, I can tell you it's much, much different. We are definitely, no question, a sedentary culture, and it gets worse every year.
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Post by Centrale on Jan 8, 2016 16:20:51 GMT
One of the things I've noticed is that teams hardly ever gamble on the 4th down (even when they're two or three touchdowns behind). When I'm playing Madden, I almost always gamble or go for a fake punt. True. The first factor is how much time is left in the game. Usually teams won't start to go for it on 4th down unless the game is in the 4th quarter. The other factor is field position... if you're down by 14 points, it's the 4th quarter of the game and you have the ball, 4th down, on your own 15-yard-line, it's usually going to be better to punt it away than to risk a turnover on downs that will set up the other team with such great field position. As for fake punts, in real life it's a lot harder to fool experienced players than it is in a video game. It happens but it's something you probably only see work out well a handful of times each season. Shadowangel's depiction of American sports fans is really not so much satire, sadly, but I personally don't know enough about European sports culture, other than Russia, from first-hand experience. Knowing that and what football culture is like here, I can tell you it's much, much different. We are definitely, no question, a sedentary culture, and it gets worse every year. Still it's a generalization. It's equally true to point out that there are lots of what some would call "health nuts" in American culture who are into regular exercise as a lifestyle, e.g. Crossfit, running, rock climbing and so on. The descriptor was "proper" fan culture... what does that mean? An NFL crowd is going to look a lot different from a regional Southern wrestling league crowd when it comes to fan engagement, that's for sure. What's the point of direct international communication if we're going to be reductionist down to the most base level stereotypes of each other's cultures? Edit: by the way, is there a way I can quote from multiple posts? I copied the quote tag but don't know how to get the thread and timestamp from Stan's post after I quoted englishinvader.
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Post by ddevilfingers on Jan 9, 2016 1:06:29 GMT
We have football in Australia too. AFL is a pretty big deal here and pretty different from Soccer, Rugby, NFL etc. I'm really not that into sports in general but in my biased opinion it's a more exciting game to watch than the rest. Worth checking out if you've not heard of it - and I guess not that many outside Australia which I found out during my time living in the US. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Football_League
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Post by Stan on Jan 10, 2016 12:46:15 GMT
You're not right at all, Centrale. It's not a generalization. Though there are "health nuts", as you say, almost everywhere in the world, in comparison to other countries we are very, very unhealthy here. We have THE highest obesity rate of all industrial countries, at roughly 2/3 the population. Looking back at old pictures, newspapers, and the like reveals how bad we've become in that regard. That's definitively not a generalization.
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Post by ShadowAngel on Jan 10, 2016 15:54:19 GMT
I think you'll find really dedicated fans in every sport... They are very rare though. From me being on US Sports Forums, i'm surprised that many people are actually either simply Bandwagoners who jump from one successful team to the other or are fans of 3-4 teams (in the same league) or going "if my team doesn't make the playoffs, i simply cheer for another one and if they get eliminated, i just look for another team to like". That's completely different to sports culture in Europe where you stick to "your" team for all eternity. A lot of dedicated fans even become members of the club. We don't jump from one team to another. We don't go "Hey, the team sucks now, i look for another team that is successful". Then there's the whole part of Fanclubs. From what i can tell, there aren't even proper Fanclubs in the US, where the fans meet up, meet with players and of course drive to away games (which apparently is something that also doesn't exist in the US, unless it's to city close by but when i watch the Red Wings play at home, say against the New York Rangers, you don't see or hear a lot of New York Fans, totally different to how it's here in Europe where a part of the stadium is always reserved for away fans and usually filled, you have the fan groups battling it out by chanting and singing, also sometihng you will never see in North America) Also this whole weird concept of moving Teams from town to town if they aren't "successful" enough or a team simply folding because the owner decides he doesn't like this "toy" anymore. This doesn't fly here in Europe. In Football we have the problem with investors taking over clubs (especially in England and Spain) and then rubber duck around with the club, changing the logo, the colors, sometimes even the name. Fans protest and go nuts over it, they simply don't accept it and for good reasons. A good example of that is Wimbledon F.C., the owners decided to move the club to a different city (Milton Keynes) with a name change (Milton Keynes Dons F.C.) so what did the fans do? Stop supporting their club and simply creating their own club, Wimbledon AFC. You think americans would ever do that? Like Basketball fans cry about the Seattle Supersonics vanishing, but most of them simply started to support the Oklahoma City Thunder as if nothing happened. I saw the "american way" first hand in Hockey here in Munich when Philip Anschutz (who owns clubs like the L.A. Kings) came over and simply bought out ESC Munich (at the time a extremely popular hockey team, that even in the fourth league managed to attract 5000 visitors to their games) and they first threw lies around ("We will definitely keep players from ESC" - that never happened, "We will keep ticket prices affordable" - they doubled the price immediately) and then created an entire new team, Munich Barons, with no players from ESC but a whole bunch of foreign players they bought from all kinds of leagues around the world. It went as expected: With some Ex-NHL players they dominated the german league and won the championship in their first league, only, nobody gave a faeces about it. They barely managed to get 2000 visitors to their games. Nobody wanted to watch, what was universally called a plastic fake team. So after 3 seasons full of success, the typical american thing happened: Anschutz lost interest, the team was sold and moved up to Hamburg. Same with rivalries: When you take a look at european football, you have rivalries that go on for decades and hundreds of year. Real Madrid - FC Barcelona for example, it has been ongoing since the clubs were founded. Juventus Turin - AC Turin is a feud that still exists despite AC Turin most of the time not even playing in the same league as Juventus. Here in Munich the feud between 1860 and FC Bayern is legendary. What do you have in the US? "Rivalries" that come and go at will with fans wondering why they even should dislike a certain team. Like the Red Wings - Avalanche rivalry in the 90's: Fierce battles, lots of fighting, lots of blood on the ice, even the press and media went right into it and then? After about 6 years, this fierce rivalry simply ended, because according to the "fans" the "players aren't there anymore, it's a new generation, so why dislike them?". I don't get this kind of thinking. Same way americans seem to have a fetish about being "classy", when sports fans discuss that you shouldn't even be buying and wearing jerseys because "you're not part of the team", it kinda leaves me baffled. So, no, it's not satire. Just my observations and comparrisons to Europe.
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Post by Centrale on Jan 10, 2016 19:52:56 GMT
I think you'll find really dedicated fans in every sport... They are very rare though. From me being on US Sports Forums, i'm surprised that many people are actually either simply Bandwagoners who jump from one successful team to the other or are fans of 3-4 teams (in the same league) or going "if my team doesn't make the playoffs, i simply cheer for another one and if they get eliminated, i just look for another team to like". The term for that is a "fair weather fan" and obviously since the term exists, it was created by real "die hard" fans to disparage that phenomenon. I'm sure no European is a "fair weather fan" with casual interest when their regional team becomes successful? That's completely different to sports culture in Europe where you stick to "your" team for all eternity. A lot of dedicated fans even become members of the club. We don't jump from one team to another. We don't go "Hey, the team sucks now, i look for another team that is successful". That's great, just because you've never encountered die hard fans doesn't mean they don't exist. I myself have been a fan of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for well over 30 years, and anyone who knows their history knows most of those years have been miserable. Every team everywhere has those kinds of fans. The more winning teams will attract more fair weather fans, the losing teams will have long-suffering die hard fans. It's funny that I'm having to explain this. Then there's the whole part of Fanclubs. From what i can tell, there aren't even proper Fanclubs in the US, where the fans meet up, meet with players and of course drive to away games (which apparently is something that also doesn't exist in the US, unless it's to city close by but when i watch the Red Wings play at home, say against the New York Rangers, you don't see or hear a lot of New York Fans, totally different to how it's here in Europe where a part of the stadium is always reserved for away fans and usually filled, you have the fan groups battling it out by chanting and singing, also sometihng you will never see in North America) I mean, I think the general response to everything you're saying could just be, just because you haven't seen something, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. I've been to the Bucs training camp which is free to fans and you can watch practices and meet players. Fan clubs of the same kind might not be as widespread in the US but I went to sportsbars near Seattle for years and would regularly see Packers and Steelers fans coming in groups, as well as fans of teams from other cities. As far as fans traveling to away games in distant cities, if you show me a group of fans that travels from one end of the European continent to the other end on a regular basis just to attend sporting events, I'll show you a group of rich people. Average Joe or Average Johann isn't globetrotting just to attend games. Also this whole weird concept of moving Teams from town to town if they aren't "successful" enough or a team simply folding because the owner decides he doesn't like this "toy" anymore. A good example of that is Wimbledon F.C., the owners decided to move the club to a different city (Milton Keynes) with a name change (Milton Keynes Dons F.C.) so what did the fans do? Stop supporting their club and simply creating their own club, Wimbledon AFC. You think americans would ever do that? Like Basketball fans cry about the Seattle Supersonics vanishing, but most of them simply started to support the Oklahoma City Thunder as if nothing happened. To me it sounds exactly like what happened with the Cleveland Browns being moved by their owner to Baltimore, then within a few years the city of Cleveland rallied to create a new Cleveland Browns. You won't find many people in Cleveland cheering for the Baltimore Ravens. I saw the "american way" first hand in Hockey here in Munich when Philip Anschutz (who owns clubs like the L.A. Kings) came over and simply bought out ESC Munich (at the time a extremely popular hockey team, that even in the fourth league managed to attract 5000 visitors to their games) and they first threw lies around ("We will definitely keep players from ESC" - that never happened, "We will keep ticket prices affordable" - they doubled the price immediately) and then created an entire new team, Munich Barons, with no players from ESC but a whole bunch of foreign players they bought from all kinds of leagues around the world. It went as expected: With some Ex-NHL players they dominated the german league and won the championship in their first league, only, nobody gave a faeces about it. They barely managed to get 2000 visitors to their games. Nobody wanted to watch, what was universally called a plastic fake team. So after 3 seasons full of success, the typical american thing happened: Anschutz lost interest, the team was sold and moved up to Hamburg. Okay... sounds like those "fans" got schooled when some players who could really play showed up. I've never heard of Germans being great hockey players, no surprise there. What's your point, Germans like second-rate hockey better? What should the owners have done, kept the team there when the people wouldn't buy tickets? Same with rivalries: When you take a look at european football, you have rivalries that go on for decades and hundreds of year. Yes, European countries are older than the US, good point. Still with the oldest leagues and teams there are rivalries that span many decades. You can cherry pick examples all you like, no point in debating that a team that has only existed for 10 years should have a rivalry lasting 150. I could name long-term rivalries in various sports all day. St. Louis - Chicago, Boston - New York, every team in the NFC North. Same way americans seem to have a fetish about being "classy", when sports fans discuss that you shouldn't even be buying and wearing jerseys because "you're not part of the team", it kinda leaves me baffled. Huh? I don't understand the "classy" reference. I see literally thousands of people wearing team jerseys at American games... it's a huge industry, and those jerseys can be upwards of $300 if they're authentic... I have one myself. In summary I would say that it's ironic that I'm even stepping up to debate this. Personally I have a critical analysis of professional sports - as I mentioned before, I don't think they should be the big money business that they are. And the type of blind fan loyalty you describe for peoples' favorite teams is not too many steps away from jingoistic nationalism, a failing of the human intellect. Watching soccer fans idiotically waving national flags is disturbing to me - I don't consider most national governments representative of the cultures of their people. I'm also a strong critic of American culture. But neither do I like the attitude of reducing an entire country to a single stereotype. Every culture has many subcultures. I'm a musician and have been fortunate to travel a lot thanks to music, meeting creative people, artists. I'm a fan but also a creator. Personally I don't like the idea of being a consumer - a fan of a sport - as a personal definition. But perhaps having an identity as an artist, I can see the spectrum of people involved and don't think in reductive terms, trying to simplify a mass of individuals into a single group. You don't like what you've seen of American culture, it sounds to me like you haven't seen much. How about completing this questionnaire: True or false - I look down on things I don't fully understand. True or False - I'm convinced I know everything about things I superficially skim. You're not right at all, Centrale. It's not a generalization. Though there are "health nuts", as you say, almost everywhere in the world, in comparison to other countries we are very, very unhealthy here. We have THE highest obesity rate of all industrial countries, at roughly 2/3 the population. Looking back at old pictures, newspapers, and the like reveals how bad we've become in that regard. That's definitively not a generalization. I'm aware of that, but what I take exception to is painting with such a broad brush that an entire culture is reduced to a single definition. It also depends on where you live, what you encounter daily. I happen to live in a place where there are a significant number of people who I would personally describe as "obsessed" with exercise, almost the opposite end of the spectrum of healthiness taken to an unhealthy extreme. I took exception to Shadowangel's description of some kind of drone audience responding only to light-up cues of when to cheer in unison.
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Post by Transatlantic Foe on Jan 10, 2016 22:11:05 GMT
Actually, average joe does go on long journeys for away matches - not just rich folk. In the UK, there are domestic fixtures which are tougher to get to than European matches - for fans as well as teams! And yes, they do it for a 1945 kickoff on a Tuesday evening. Hardcore is facing the 6+ hour trip from Plymouth to Carlisle, so what if you don't get home until 3am and happened to lose 3-0 anyway!
If anything, cheap flights mean it's easy to follow your team in European fixtures. Probably cheaper than internal UK train fares!
Football is pricing fans out but ordinary people still save up so they can afford an extortionate season ticket. Every so often you'll hear stories of 90 year old fans and entire families going to the match. That sort of thing is why people in the UK connect with football - because often it's passed down and is such a family event. I don't think any other European nation has such support outside of the top division in football as England. 4 professional divisions and fanatical support in all of them - pretty much everyone else has 2 divisions before it goes amateur or even amateur regional.
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Post by flatapex on Jan 10, 2016 23:35:28 GMT
In btcc it is different, the driver is the main focus, so people have their favourite driver, but some only stay for a few years, so multiple driver support is common. The level of fan engagement is different, I have met my favourite driver twice, the other guy I support I have also met and can safely say I have either met directly or spoken to in fan q and a's about half of this upcoming seasons grid, one of the presenters, and the head of the largest fan group. Just need a few more autographs and maybe to meet a certain mr gow.
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Post by Centrale on Jan 10, 2016 23:55:25 GMT
Transatlantic Foe, that's great if so... I've never looked at airfares in Europe, I'd be curious to hear what the cost is to travel across the continent to attend a game. It's hard for me to believe that's something that most people can afford to do, but maybe so.
flatapex, have you played the Sega Saturn game Sega Touring Car Championship? And if so what do you think of it? I've got it but haven't gotten into it.
In NASCAR, they have "teams" but they are really more like companies, with a few cars owned by the same company. There's not much teamwork or motivation for it during the races, so I think the drivers are still the main focus.
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