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| ASSOCIATION FOOTBALL |
If there is such a thing as a "favorite sport," for me it is association football. It is the one I was raised in, as every good Italian is, and the one I have followed the most. This is in no small part because football is a faithful mirror of human life and, in some respects, the perfect game altogether.
I estimate having watched over 5,000 matches in my life, and my recent standard is about 250-300 a year. I closely follow the four main European leagues and all international club competitions (primarily the Champions League and the Europa League) and national tournaments (Euro and World Cup). In general, there is very little football that I find uninteresting, and if I don't watch more it's only because there's not enough time in the day.
Serie A ROMA Inter, Parma Lazio, Milan, Juve
Premier League CHELSEA Man. City, Liverpool Man Utd., Arsenal
La Liga BARCELONA Valencia Real Madrid
Bundesliga BAYERN MUNICH Wolfsburg, B. Dortmund Leverkusen
National ITALY Spain, Argentina Brazil, France
Favorite players (current)........ Totti, Messi, Lampard, Iniesta, De Rossi, Pirlo
Favorite players (classic)......... Maradona, Van Basten, Conti, Maldini, Gullit, Falcao, Preud'homme
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| AMERICAN FOOTBALL |
My first four years in the United States I purposely avoided watching American football. The whole thing seemed silly to me, and up to that point my only contact with the sport had been a few Super Bowls here and there. Then I enrolled at Virginia Tech for my M.A. and was swept up with the football mania. In the last three years I've probably watched as much football as (what they here call) "soccer." The college game is by far my favorite, though of course I watch the NFL too, especially the playoffs. While I am still adverse to many elements of football culture (the sexism, the overall lack of sportsmanship... the bands! OH GOD, the fucking bands...), overall I've become quite engrossed in the game and it constitutes a substantial part of my viewing time. Good thing it's only on weekends!
Professional (no allegiance) Vikings, Saints, Packers, Patriots, Panthers Steelers, Giants
I don't know enough about the sport yet to rationally judge which players are best. I like Brady, Rodgers, Brees, and Newton, but I'm not really sure why. lol
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| ATHLETICS |
If association football is my first love, athletics has to be the second. My father's love for it quickly rubbed off on me, even if only every four years, when my family watched track & field at the Olympics with near-religious devotion. Thanks to my father, to the books he bought me, and to the expert TV commentators, I learned much about the sports early on, and it never left me. Like most people, I favor track events over field ones, but one of the best parts of athletics is the all-around experience. There is no other sport or game when you watch different skill tests back to back, or even at the same time. This is especially awesome when you attend a meet in person and your eyes dart from side to side and take it all in. Now, thankfully, the Olympics are only one showcase for athletics. During the outdoor season, I closely follow the Diamond League meets; and the Athletics World Championships are often the highlights of the summers of odd years.
Current favorites Usain Bolt, Liu Xiang, Jessica Ennis, Felix Sanchez, Yohan Blake, Shelly-Ann Fraser
Classic favorites Carl Lewis, Marie-Jose Perec, Stefka Kostadinova, Sergei Bubka, Ian Zelezny
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| SWIMMING & DIVING |
Aquatics and athletics always go together for me. For one, swimming does in the water what track does on land: both are the only simulations of natural human behavior. Also, their relative World Championships are always held in the same summers (odd years), about a month apart from each other, so it's natural to enjoy them together. And of course they are always the two most followed disciplines at every Olympic Games. My love for swimming is relatively recent, dating to the late 1990s when the Italian swimmers first rose to international fame. This isn't a provincial preference on my part, though: rather, it explains why before that time swimming was rarely broadcast in the country where I lived. Only once it was given relative TV prominence could I truly appreciate it, and now I can't do without it. Aquatics world championships also include diving and water polo, which I also love and for much the same reasons. Really the only aquatic discipline that I won't watch is synchronized swimming, which still looks and feels too ridiculous to me.
Athletes: Federica Pellegrini, Rebecca Soni, Dana Vollmer, Filippo Magnini, Cesar Cielo, Lazslo Cseh, Michael Phelps, Chen Ruolin, Tania Cagnotto, Sun Yang, Ranomi Kromowidjojo
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| TENNIS |
I have a lengthy love-hate-love relationship with tennis. A problem I have with it that I don't have with most other sports is that I often can't watch an entire match, especially on the men's side. While I love both tennis' main technical skills and its tactical intricacies, matches are still just a bit too long for me. If all matches were played to the best of three sets, I would be a little happier; best of two with a super tiebreak, as in doubles, would be even better. The problem is that unlike in team sports, it makes little sense for the tennis skill to be tested over such a lengthy repetition of the same format; this is also my main problem with baseball, which I feel should be played over 3 or 5 innings.
With that said, whenever tennis is on I watch it eagerly none the less, even if more in the background and less attentively than I do other sports. It is also one of the few sports that I've played competitively as a kid, and I have very fond (if exhausting!) memories of it. I especially like the women's game, which is less physical and more likely to reward tactics and mental endurance than the ball-bursting (no pun meant) display of strength in the men's game. Of course, I watch all the four Majors (religiously, I might add) and most of the Masters' series, especially Paris, Rome, and Indian Wells.
Favorite men Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray, David Ferrer, Juan Martin Del Potro
Favorite women Kim Clijsters, Caroline Wozniacki, Sara Errani, Flavia Pennetta, Li Na, Marion Bartoli
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| ROAD CYCLING |
Men's professional road cycling is my "new" favorite sport. To some extent I always followed it, and my father took me to watch several Giro d'Italia stage finishes when I was little, but it wasn't until the late 2000s that I really started getting into it. In the last few years, then, I developed an appreciation for the more technical and tactical aspects of the sport, thanks in no small part to the expertise of the very talented Italian TV commentators. And for me, the more you know about something, the more I enjoy it--ignorance isn't bliss! In cycling, I follow mostly the three-week summer Grand Tours: Giro d'Italia (June), Tour de France (July), and Vuelta a Espana (August). I relatively ignore the UCI World Tour events, save for the world championships, and only lately have I started watching the great spring classics, such as Milan-San Remo, the Tour of Flanders, and the Paris-Roubaix. My love for this wonderful sport -- which is seemingly one for rugged individualists, but which is actually much more of a team effort -- grows more with every season and I am really glad that it does!
That's it! I watch a lot more sports than this, of course, most notably volleyball, basketball, Formula 1 racing, golf, and (in the winter) alpine skiing. But these were my favorites and those that I have the most to say about. :-)
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