Da Bears

Different cities approach professional sports in very different ways. 

  Growing up in Buffalo, NY the Buffalo Bills and Buffalo Sabres were the equivalent of church.    It was something you experienced with your family over multiple generations.    And it made for a common convesational topic that could be shared by people accross those generations who otherwise had little in common.    And growing up in a depressed rust-belt city that frequently served as a punchline to jokes about weather .... having the pro sports teams installed a sense of pride to the community.   It was a message to the rest of the country that we still mattered.

By contrast, I currently live in Indianapolis where pro-sports is just something fun to do on the weekend...sorta in the same spirit as going to the movie theatre.    A week after the Colts won the Superbowl a few years ago it was already old news and nobody cared.     When the Bills lost the Superbowl in 1993 the locals were still doing cartwheels 6 months later.

I'll say this....its alot more fun to be a sports fan in a city with sports religion attitude.     

Oh my god,I remember that game!! lol.

"I've always been both amused and perplexed by how anyone could ever get that emotionally invested in a group of professional entertainers and millionaires who happen to play half of their games in a particular stadium in a particular city"

I don't understand how someone can spend all his time trolling the internet for anti-Republican stories & then post them on a gambling website.

Lol.  How funny.

Kevin doesn't "get it".

How stupid.

If you mean I don't think like you and the other Trumper crud on this site, I guess you're right. But if you mean I don't UNDERSTAND all of you, you're dead wrong. I know exactly what makes all of you tick. It's reprehensible, disgusting, and stupid, but also quite easy to understand: hate.

That's what I don't understand. How does having a professional sports team make a city something to have pride in? Is Buffalo a better city than Rochester or Erie because it has an NFL team and they don't? Oakland won't have an NFL team in a year. Should everybody move away? Burn down the city?

Likewise, there's so much talk here in Vegas about how having professional sports will somehow "legitimize" the city. I would be much more "prideful" if it had schools that performed in the top 25% or had top-notch medical care--either of which, I note, could be accomplished with a fraction of the money being poured into the new stadium.

Kevin, you are correct.  You don't understand.

Then explain to me, o wise one, how having an NFL team makes a city "better." I refer to net benefit--it's at least theoretically possible to buy a ticket and go see a game. But is that worth the cost? Vegas has a little more than 600,000 residents. The stadium has (so far!) cost $1.8 billion. That works out to $3,000 per resident!

And will the stadium increase tourism? Not appreciably--and that money will flow right into the pockets of millionaires and billionaires anyway. Anyway, like Vegas needs MORE people in town on a Sunday afternoon!