Considering the Pew Research Center Report on Americans' Interest in Sports: The Economic Divide

The Pew Research Center put out a report last week that discussed its finding that "Most Americans Don't Closely Follow Professional or College Sports."

I was not very surprised by the "big finding" highlighted by the item's title, or the observations that sports fans tend to be more often male than female, and older than younger. I was more surprised by the finding regarding sports and affluence--that people with higher incomes are more likely to follow sports than people with lower incomes--though perhaps I should not have been. After all, age and maleness both correlate with higher incomes.

Still, I think there is more to it than that.

Consider who is more likely to be into sports. Is it likely to be those who just watch them on TV, or those who attend events in person--which means paying the price of a ticket? Those who just watch sports, or those who play a sport--as with the golfer or tennis player? And who is more likely to be into college sports specifically? Those who have never bveen to college, or those who are alumni of colleges, especially big-name colleges with major athletic programs who have found it worthwhile to retain links to their alma maters? It seems to me that the person who goes to events in person, who plays sports, who has the college connection, is more likely to be a sports fan--and the disposable income and time required to go to games or play sports in adulthood, the kind of background and income that tends to go with having attended a well-known college, correlates with more rather than less affluence.

Thus does it go with the sociality to which all this points. People go to sporting events together, with the experience about enjoying something with others as much as the intrinsic entertainment value of watching the sport itself. People are probably more likely to follow sports if other people they know and interact with (or want to) also follow sports--whether for personal reasons, or business, which is one reason why they stick close to their alma maters (and vice-versa).

All this makes it worth remembering that much as pop culture flogs the image of the rich isolated by their wealth, leaving them worse off than less affluent people who "at least have each other," the reality is that social isolation is probably more a problem of the poor than the rich, making this factor more rather than less significant. Indeed, it may even be that people being habituated to solitary entertainment, especially the kind where people are supposed to be absorbed in the entertainment (like video games, like film and TV intended to be "intense" experiences as is today more the case in the past) may leave them less able to enjoy the kind of entertainment one takes in the attitude of "someone who smokes and watches" as Bertolt Brecht once put it--such as sporting events happen to be--and which seems more likely to be characteristic of the kid who played video games than the kid whose father took them to such events growing up, in which that issue of affluence factors yet again (given whose parents had the chance to take them to games growing up, and send them to that college with the famous team).

The result is that here, as in so much else of life, class matters--and the conventional wisdom (per usual these days) gets the reality all wrong.