Sports burnout: Do you ever get tired of sports?

I talk music, television and comedy. That's really all I need outside of baseball season.

 

Am I burned out? That's hard to say. I do know I don't follow nearly as many teams or sports as I did before, and even the ones I do care about don't affect me nearly as much. There is only one team of which I would call myself a fan, and they'll never win anything of importance in my lifetime. More and more, if I'm going to watch a game, I just want it to be well played.

To the OP's point -- I can see how that would happen. It's refreshing, if not necessary, to be able to step out of Sports World every so often. For me, that usually involves flipping on the Discovery Channel or National Geographic, cracking open a good book or otherwise getting my geek on. If I tried to immerse myself in sports outside of work, I'd likely go stark raving bonkers.

 

Regarding your buddies who ask you about sports, I'll say this:

- If you friends don't ask you job-related questions, you have a boring job. "Hey, Bob, you guys see the new acturial tables? I think they went overboard on the 42 year male cigar smokers with diabetic symptoms."

- Sports is easily one of the better ones. Become a doctor and you can spend dinner parties being taken aside to look at a rash, even if you are a pedatric oncologist. Become a lawyer and have your barber asking how he can help his daughter get her no good ex thrown in jail for not paying child support even though you do bankruptcy law. Become a home builder and everyone wants you to give them a free estimate on how much it would cost to add a deck based on the sketches on a napkin. Yeah, it sucks to be asked for the 35th time what you think of ARod or if LeBron will stay in Cleveland when all you know about it is what you read on ESPN. But it could be much worse.

 

or you can look at what you cover more objectively.

passion is overrated and tends to be the root cause behind many, many major fuck-ups.

 

Nah. I'll take the passion any day.

 

If anyone wants to trade their job as a sportswriter for a job as a security guard I will gladly make the trade. I miss covering sports quite a bit.

 

Hell is for children.

 

so are crimes of passion.

 

Maybe it was the year I could no longer recite all the Super Bowl winners (and losers, and score of game).

Maybe it was watching three minutes of basketball (with a dozen free throws and as many timeouts) and deciding . . . "I've seen all this before."

Maybe it was Tony LaRussa's 8th pitching change, or watching an at-bat that took 10 minutes.

But I've lost almost all my passion for sports. Just don't really care who wins or loses. Can't even work up a good hate anymore toward teams or players.

Still love tennis, but mainly for the beauty of watching someone like Federer or someone as intense as Nadal . . . and of course all the beautiful women.