more proof I am un-American, Senator McCarthy

Harris has been polling this question for about 25 years now.

"If you had to choose, which ONE of these sports would you say is your favorite?"

Base: All adults who follow one or more sport
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
Pro football 29 30 33 29 30 31 35
Baseball 13 15 14 14 15 16 16
College football 9 11 13 13 12 12 12
Auto racing 9 7 11 9 10 8 9
Men's pro basketball 10 7 4 7 4 6 5
Hockey 3 4 5 4 5 5 4
Men's NCAA basketball 6 6 5 5 4 5 3
Men's golf 5 4 4 4 4 4 4
Men's soccer 3 3 2 2 2 3 2
Boxing NA 2 2 1 1 2 2
Horse racing 2 1 2 1 2 1 2
Women's tennis 2 2 1 1 * 1 1
Swimming NA NA NA NA NA 2 1
Bowling 1 1 1 1 2 1 1
Track & field 3 1 * 2 1 1 1
Men's tennis 2 1 1 2 1 1 1
Pro football's lead 16 15 19 15 15 15 19

If I were to assemble a list like this of my own preferences it would look something like this
NBA (for now, it occasionally swaps with the MLB)
Baseball
NCAA basketball
Track (not so much the "field part", but I'll watch that every four years)
Women's Tennis
Volleyball
Tiger Woods (but not the PGA, which would not be listed)
NHL
Soccer (yes I said it)
NFL
Men's Tennis (lots of aces, less "tennis")
College Football (lots of mediocre teams/games, too much tribalism, and everyone gets a goddamn trophy at the end of the year it seems by getting to these meaningless pre-New Years Day bowl games)

My list looks different in part because I'm a tall guy who used to run (or at least tried to) and who is something of a cultural snob. Golf and tennis, and to a lesser extent track, are basically snobby sports, though I find golf sort of boring usually to watch (and haven't played much of any of it to think otherwise). Auto Racing and boxing or wrestling/UFC do not make any appearances in my daily life because they are not snobby sports. Ever. You can see auto racing by driving around all day and boxing doesn't have the media attention that it once might have deserved in the Ali-Frazier days. If I have to pay lots of money just to pay attention, that sounds like a pretty snobby activity, but then it's just two guys beating on each other for a while with accompanying bruises. Worse, boxing movies are better than the actual fights (and are cheaper). Horse racing is a classical snobby sport, but it's so snobby that it practically doesn't even involve human beings. Which means it doesn't merit my attention.

The NBA or basketball or baseball being at the top of my list probably wouldn't set people off that much. What probably would is soccer being ahead of the NFL. At least I assume that would, since soccer is one of those provincially European things as far as Americans are concerned that supposedly uses our name for a game (it's not called soccer anywhere else, because football of our style isn't all that popular anywhere else). My own preference for baseball over football is pretty easy to explain. Both have long historical ties to the culture of American life. Football has no history however. People may know who won the Super Bowl or the #1 ranking in college or when their favorite team won it all. But there are no numbers attached to it. Unless someone is breaking a record or being considered for their Hall of Fame, there is no history for the players themselves. There's basically none at all for several positions (offensive linemen for example), and often very scant numerical supports for others (cornerbacks and safeties). Baseball has numbers for everything. If you want to try to figure out how the Yankees won all those titles, you can go back and piece it together usually. It's pretty obvious that they've had some of the best players because their best players were leading the league in hitting or pitching statistics. Sometimes there's some luck, just like the David Tyree catch in the Super Bowl a couple years ago. But it's all there in black and white. You don't have to guess that team X had a good offensive line that year or not. Occasionally you would have to extrapolate how good the team was defensively, because this is the one statistical area where baseball is sort of vague (this is also true of every other team sport however. You can usually figure out how good the team's defense, but not quite how good the individuals are at contributing to the whole). You don't have to wonder how they scored runs or how they got people out in the same way that I would have to wonder how well a team moved the ball and scored in football back in 1971.

In a country of individualists, football is the ultimate team (collectivist) sport, with the accomplishments of almost all of its players (except maybe the quarterbacks, who perhaps not coincidentally, have lots of statistics) basically erased from history. It's even the most socialistic in the financial affairs of its teams with all sorts of revenue sharing schemes and salary caps to decrease the ability of teams to dominate over others and to provide a bottom floor of mediocrity to most cities with an NFL team (which some inspired owners have done their best to live under, I'm looking in your direction Al Davis). It seems really counter-intuitive to figure out how this happened. I assume it has something to do with the short seasons all on weekends and festival holidays (Thanksgiving) when most people have the time and energy to pursue recreational things and don't have to worry about games lasting 3 and 4 hours with minimal activity on the field in that time. But to me it constantly seems really strange that that is the all-American pastime. I recognize that baseball has, especially since football took its lead in the 70s, been mishandled and plagued by a variety of problems. It had a much bigger and more public problem with cocaine in the 70s and 80s than any sport (nobody cared about the NBA until it was mostly cleaned up). One of its biggest living historical stars has had a long and public battle concerning gambling on that game (Pete Rose). It has a longer season with many, many games, making it harder to invest the time and energy on any one game, and it has fewer teams who make the playoffs, making many cities lose interest in their teams much earlier. It has had more labour problems leading to strikes and lockouts with games missed. For a sample of how that works against fan interest, see the NBA sometime in the next two years. For some reason steroids has been a bigger deal in baseball than in football. Probably because of the fact that baseball has a history which was deemed to be under assault from chemical warfare, whereas football was undoubtedly "improved" by introducing said warfare with bigger and faster players. An All-Star game was left tied. A World Series was canceled. Its players are increasingly from Latin America rather than our inner cities, which I don't particularly care, but many Americans don't like "Mexicans", ie, anybody from south of the Rio Grande or the Caribbean. All of this is true and works against the narrative powers of a baseball team and its season. But at the core baseball is a team sport that recognizes individual achievements. I would think if anybody would look at the American way of life and attempt to summarize what Americans would strive for, that's pretty much it. We love to win things and come in first, and that's a lot easier if you work together for that collective goal. But we also want the fucking credit once its over. We ideally are a meritocracy with some collective abilities to get along.

If that's what you want, then that's not football. What football looks more like is the way Americans actually live in the modern age. We love to win things, but most of the time somebody else gets the fucking credit in our corporate infrastructure. For example the quarterback usually gets all the attention whether deserved or not. I think this is a silly way to structure my recreational attention (as though it was my normal attention). So I will put more of that attention on "European" games (soccer and hockey, I know Canada is not Europe, but Americans seem to think it is) and other games that are played around the world (tennis and basketball and baseball) and less attention on corporate soul-sucking life structured to look like a battlefield and complete with real life attrition rates.