(03-27-2020 02:29 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(03-26-2020 11:44 PM)BruceMcF Wrote:  

(03-26-2020 09:23 PM)_C2_ Wrote:  

(03-24-2020 04:07 PM)Erictelevision Wrote:  My favorite obscure Summer Olympic sport is handball.

It could be a major sport in an alternate universe. Lots of scoring, contact and easy as well as inexpensive to play. Similar to hockey, basketball and soccer as well.

Isn't that alternate universe known as Europe? There are professional handball players, professional handball leagues, with champions and (based on league strength) sometimes additional highly placed clubs going into the EHF Champions League and EHF Cup Winner's Cup. It's biggest in Germany. Spain, Hungary and France, according to the EFH coefficient ranking, and then there's steep drop down in the results of clubs in European play.

Well ... probably not. It's viable in those countries but I guess it's not a major sport in those countries.

"How niche is niche" is one of those "how long is a short piece of string" questions. Handball is like a third tier sport in the countries where it's popular at all. It's like Rugby League in the UK or France, where it has enough pockets of popularity for ticket sales to pay some players to be professional players and to pay to get it on TV, but not for the best players to get a massive paycheck.

Yes, that's true.

For instance, I personally wouldn't call volleyball a "non-mainstream sport". It may not support a significantly lucrative pro sports league here in the US, but it's a very widely played sport (as pretty much every high school and college is going to have a women's volleyball team at a minimum and it's a staple of recreational leagues everywhere), the college level is actually fairly popular (e.g. BTN actually noted this past year that women's volleyball draws their highest TV ratings outside of football and men's basketball), and it's one of the largest draws for the Olympics.

I'd say the same thing for sports like gymnastics, ice skating and swimming. We may not really watch those sports week-to-week in the same way as football/basketball/baseball, but they're pretty ingrained in our sports culture here and they're certainly not niche sports in terms of participation. No one is going to talk to someone that played high school volleyball (like I did) and say, "Wow! That's a really unusual niche sport!"

Handball, on the other hand, is a great example. How many people do you know have played handball at all beyond a high school P.E. class unit, much less at a high level? As you've noted, handball is still a lower tier sport even in places where it's relatively more popular than the U.S.

To that end, I'd agree that handball is actually a pretty good sport to watch. I've always enjoyed it during the Olympics.

Sumo wrestling is a good one, too (although it's legitimately a top tier sport in places like Japan).

Regardless, it's a tough time as a sports fan since I really do legitimately watch pretty much every "mainstream" sport pretty intensely and this stretch where we go from the NCAA Tournament to the Masters and the start of the MLB season to the NBA and NHL playoffs to the Kentucky Derby and French Open to the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Final is probably my favorite stretch of sports of the year besides maybe the September/October/November period when football starts, the MLB postseason is on, and we start up the basketball and hockey seasons.

Still, it's all a bit irrelevant compared to some of my friends that have lost their jobs with the stalled economy and how I have other friends that are doctors and other health care workers coming face-to-face with this horrible pandemic and putting their own lives on the line. So, I'm grateful that so far that my family and I are safe during this lockdown.

For the purpose of this discussion, I was thinking of the term "mainstream" as an indicator of how interested the casual sports fan might be in a certain competition.

The sort of idea where people get around the water cooler and ask; "Hey, did you watch the game last night? So and so was on fire. I wonder who's going to win the title this year?"

That conversation changes depending on what country you're in, but the casual sports fan is probably interested in whatever is prominently on TV or making a ton of money so as to undergird an existence that catches a lot of attention.

Perhaps that's a clearer definition than what I offered earlier. With that said, we all seem to catch a sport every now and then that entertains us, but doesn't seem to engage the general population. I thought it might be a nice conversation in lieu of a lack of real sports news.