Sports

Bored with women’s sports? You’re boring

Bob CollinsBob Collins Jun 25, 2015
26

A Sports Illustrated reporter has apologized for his assault on women’s sports.

It started with a Tweet (since deleted) the other night after someone questioned why he wouldn’t want to watch women’s World Cup soccer.

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Even a man could see the reaction coming a mile away and Andy Benoit has since apologized.

But it was too little too late. Last night Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers reunited to reprise their “Oh Really?” segment from their days together on Saturday Night Live.

Will Leitch, who writes at Sports on Earth, is bored by people who are bored by women’s sports.

People like Benoit toss out these justifications for not watching women’s sports out of some sort of faux sports purity, like he’s really just out to watch the pinnacle of athletic achievement every night, like anything less than the “best” and the “fastest” and the “strongest” is somehow a waste of one’s time. But this isn’t why we watch sports at all; we watch because every game we watch, we have a chance to see something we’ve never seen before. Dismissing that out of hand isn’t a way of demanding the highest quality performance every game (as if that’s something that could be done anyway); it’s a way of confirming your preexisting biases. It also devalues the actual athleticism on display, and the amount of work it required of everyone to get there.

“If you can’t look into what’s fascinating about this team, and this tournament, and this sport, and then go out Friday night and cheer on the USWNT with a bar full of like-minded Americans, then the problem is not with the sport. It is with you,” Leitch writes. “This is only boring to someone who has already determined they are going to be bored. This is only boring to boring people.”