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I was brought up in the United States, a sports-mad country, much like Australia. I recall the seasons revolving around the sports calendar – you knew it was really autumn when football (the American kind) began, and the same with baseball in the spring.
As a kid, I played baseball and soccer – not particularly well, to be sure. In high school, I was on the cross country, track and tennis teams. Organised sport was how many people in small towns like mine defined themselves. Anyone who’s ever seen Friday Night Lights will understand.
For some brought up in such a baseball-hat-wearing, pom-pom-shaking culture, sport becomes a lifelong love. That’s definitely the case for me.
For others, however, the ubiquity of sport in society can be a source of disgust or distress. These are the self-described sport haters whom researchers Hunter Fujak and Heath McDonald are studying. In Australia, they comprise about 20% of the population.
Fujak and McDonald are trying to understand why some people feel this way about sport and what their experiences are like living in a nation where sports are so culturally prominent.
They explain some of the reasons they’ve identified so far. Some people, for instance, are turned off by the hypermasculine nature of some sports – both on the field and among fans in the stadium.
Others had negative experiences as children playing sport. And for some, the cultural dominance of sport can overshadow other worthwhile passions and pursuits, contributing to a feeling of exclusion.
Sport haters are not a new phenomenon. Back in the 1960s, two Melbourne journalists founded an Anti-Football League for “all of us who are tired of having football personalities, predictions and post mortems cluttering our newspapers, TV screens and attempts at alternative human converse”, as one of them so eloquently put it.
It was short-lived, but as Fujak and McDonald write, there’s certainly enough sport hate around today to create another such support group.
So, if you’re dreading footy season, these researchers want to hear from you. Anyone interested in participating in their ongoing research can contact them here.
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