Human interest draws new fans

As I was packing my bags to head back to campus a few weeks ago, my grandmother came in and said she had a couple of ideas for columns I could write this semester. I was a little skeptical, but it’s a granddaughter’s duty to listen. Plus, with Ivy football season many months away, I’m a little low on relevant material, so I was all ears.

I expected some nice ideas that I likely wouldn’t use, but what I didn’t expect to hear was my grandmother asking me if I’d heard of Tim Tebow. Apparently, she’d been following his story for weeks.

She was about as surprised as I was that she’d been consistently reading up on a starting quarterback in the NFL—pro football is not my grandmother’s usual cup of tea. Usually, reading my articles is the extent of her sports interest, and I’m pretty sure she’s more attracted to the byline than the headline. But she was interested in this.

What is it that can make people like my grandmother suddenly develop an interest in sports? Pretty much every single Spec sports columnist ever has tried to convince people to care about our sports teams. Reasons have ranged from moderately successful seasons to free beer. From school spirit to free T-shirts to, well, free beer. But, the truth is, you either have to have a secret desire to watch sports or really love free beer to be persuaded. As a group of alcohol and sports enthusiasts, we in the sports section just can’t seem to understand why those tactics fail.
I know now that if you’re not a sports person yet, there’s probably nothing about the actual games that is going to get you to go to one, and perks like free beer and T-shirts aren’t enough to overcome that aversion either. What got my grandmother hooked was something else: human interest.

Tim Tebow garnered a lot of media attention this season for both his late-game heroics and his widely known religious devotion. (I’ll let you guess which one my grandmother was paying more attention to.) Each week there would be a new Broncos game to report on, but there were also new explorations of Tebow himself—from his path to the NFL to his deep-seated beliefs. That’s really what attracted so much attention from an unconventional audience—not his come-from-behind wins.

So basically, we columnists have been getting it wrong all these years (sorry, guys). What my grandmother has taught me is this: Sports themselves are not going to get people interested in sports—at least not if they don’t already have a penchant for them. When I discussed this phenomenon with our columnist deputy, he compared it to the development of language skills. If you don’t fall in love with the game by a certain age, it’s not going to be the game that draws you in.

There’s a chance, though, that one day, an unlikely friend will say to you, “So you know that cute point guard on our basketball team? I hear he hangs out a lot at The Heights.” Or, “So you know that SEAS kid in my class whose hair is long enough to fit into a goofy-looking ponytail? Turns out he’s on the basketball team.” Or, you know, something that might actually interest you.

As my grandmother has taught us, anyone might develop a surprise interest in what’s going on with a starting NFL quarterback. Soon, they’d find themselves following his story in a national paper like the New York Times, or an even cooler one, like the Columbia Spectator. If my grandmother can find something in sports that catches her eye, everyone’s bound to end up name-dropping a famous athlete in casual conversation at one point or another.

Victoria Jones is a Barnard College senior majoring in French.