Why Team Sports Matter

I was on my way to hit some tennis balls against a wall, and I wanted to listen to the US Open on the radio. The sports commentators, despite knowing the heroics of one Tiger Woods, preferred to spend their time talking about basketball, in particular, game 5 of the NBA finals.

I wondered why.

To be fair, despite the dominance of Tiger Woods, the average American sports fan just doesn't care. To an average African American, are they going to find the NBA finals, with athletes that leap around, that play a sport that they can play in the gym or on the playground more enticing, or a sport that requires someone to pay for the golfing, with expensive clubs, that's spent more on your own than with other people, where trash talking doesn't matter so much because you against the course?

What did the commentators spend time on? Speculating whether Kobe should take over the game. Should the league's MVP decide to do all the scoring? How well were the Celtics playing? Could the Laker's play defense? How was Lamar Odom doing?

With team sports, you have at least 5 players you can talk about, maybe more. You can talk about how each are doing, you can talk about how the star is doing, you can talk about injuries and whether they'll play a factor, you can talk about home court advantage, you can talk about the coaches.

Now exactly what can you talk about for golf. Everyone knows it's a hard game. No one expects that Tiger can always pull out magic every single time, though this is one of those more magical moments where he does the seemingly impossible day after day after day (which would lead to him to clear victory if he would not start out so poorly each day).

Can we talk about how Tiger will deal with Ernie Els? Or Stuart Appleby? Or Rocco Mediate? There's no team to talk about, no co-operation, no head-to-head. It's really hard for commentators to talk about what might happen with only one person. When you have a team, you can talk about many people, and even people that don't play.

Commentators have to fill up minutes often spent talking about how many points a player should score, or how come this other player didn't come to play, or what have you. I'm surprised they can meaningfully talk about baseball for minutes on end given what seems to be an individual sport wrapped in a team sport.

So although commentators could agree that this US Open was amazing, they could not talk intelligently (or unintelligently) about it. They can merely state the awe they find themselves with Tiger Woods, but realize that it's such a difficult sport to win reliably that even Woods, who wins at a prodigious rate, isn't guaranteed any particular win. This isn't tennis, where people can predict Nadal to dominate the French as he has done now four years in a row. Tennis is played head-to-head, and so there ought to be some drama, except as an individual sport, the top players are significantly better.

With a team sport, even a top player needs teammates to help out, otherwise they can't shine by themselves. Thus, you don't expect, say, an NBA final where one team sweeps the other 4-0. It has happened, but usually a team can get one or even two games, and once they get two, it's a six game series, and interesting to watch.

If you had to look at individual sports, what's the most popular one in the US? I guess it would have to be golf, followed by tennis. Well, there's auto-racing, that's an individual sport. There's the Tour de France, but Americans love winners and without an American leader, they lose interest.

Maybe only Serbia cares more about an individual sport, tennis, than team sports (though if their football team were highly successful, I'm sure people would care more about that than tennis), mostly because they have so many successful players now.

Most countries care about team sports more, ultimately because the team represents the country or a city, and people can support the team, even as individuals change. In an individual sport, the player is only as interesting as his or her own personality. If you don't care for that person, that's it. But if that person is on your team, and you care about the team, then you can like that person because he or she is your guy (or gal).

Even so, individual sports have a hard time embracing the team concept. There's Davis Cup and Fed Cup for tennis, and Ryder Cup for golf. Players may treat it seriously, but the Grand Slams are still the big deal.

It's weird, the national socialization behind team sports and why it ultimately does better than individual sports in most countries.