Pop Culture Isolation / Sports

• The Ultimate Fighting Championship, AKA The UFC has dealt with this problem for a while, mainly due to the sport's previous violent image and detractors being unable (or unwilling) to get past it. Around the late 90's, the UFC repackaged the sport as "Mixed Martial Arts" in an attempt to be taken seriously. It took a reality television show to gain wide acceptance. UFC has outsold boxing quite handily ever since '06, with '07 being the exception. Most of the sports broadcasting community to this day refuses to accept it as a legit sport. Some even went as far as to accuse it of being a poor (white) person's version of boxing, due to the UFC's heavy young white male demographics compared to boxing. Today, while most people couldn't tell you the names of the champions in each weight class, they could at least tell you what the sport is. And with the UFC's broadcasting deal with Fox, the days of the UFC being considered a niche sport are most likely over.
  • There is one major aversion: Ronda Rousey. Although she was very well-known in UFC circles ever since her debut in 2013, her 2015 match with Bethe Correia truly broke her into the mainstream as no UFC star has done before. Her shocking loss to Holly Holm a month later made the latter almost as widely known as Rousey to the mainstream...but it did not last and she faded right back into obscurity.
  • As of late, Conor McGregor is becoming more widely known.
• Among American college sports, the HBCU^note historically Black colleges and universities schools, particularly the two Division I HBCU conferences: the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) and the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC). Their fanbases and traditions are every bit as entrenched as at larger, better-known schools. In football, there are several "classics" where two of the schools meet at a large neutral site stadium in a big city, with a huge of amount of hoopla and festivities leading up to the game. Each year a football team from a SWAC school meets a team from the MEAC in Indianapolis for the Circle City Classic. It draws more people to Central Indiana than any annual event besides the Indy 500, yet it's almost completely unknown to non-African-Americans outside of the area.
  • College sports fans know about the big-name rivalries (Michigan/Ohio State, Alabama/Auburn, UCLA/USC, etc.) and most of the other top level ones as well. Some of the rivalries in the lower-profile Division I conferences have gotten attention too (Harvard/Yale, Lafayette/Lehigh, North Dakota/North Dakota State, Grambling/Southern). But there are some Division II and III rivalries that are every bit as tradition-filled and intense as the famous rivalries, with packed houses at games and some Wacky Fratboy Hijinks involving the game trophies, but unless you live in the region where the schools are located, you likely have no clue they exist. The most notable ones are probably Amherst/Williams (western Massachusetts), DePauw/Wabash (west central Indiana), Cortland/Ithaca (upstate New York), Hampden-Sydney/Randolph-Macon (Virginia), Henderson State/Ouachita Baptist (located across the street from one another in Arkadelphia, Arkansas) and the triple-rivalry of Bates, Bowdoin and Colby (Maine).
  • With the exceptions of Ivy League schools and certain other prestigious colleges like MIT and Stanford, most national universities are known almost exclusively for their football and/or men's basketball teams. Some for both (e.g., Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan State), some mainly for football (Alabama, Notre Dame, Penn State), some mainly for basketball (Duke, Kentucky, Gonzaga) and some mainly for women's basketball (namely UConn and Tennessee). The most publicity an Ivy League-esque institution's sports has gotten lately has been, for all the wrong reasons, Stanford's swimming program.
• Soccer – compared to the rest of the world, the mainstream American middle class does not follow soccer. The US has yet to have its own football equivalent to Michael Jordan and Babe Ruth. It's popular enough for even local OTA channels to air games on local channel including even games across Latin America and Europe on English language channel. ESPN has some days devoted completely to soccer and Fox Sports even had its own soccer channel for a few years. However, unless it's World Cup time, non-fans are unlikely to hear anything about soccer in America unless they very closely follow sports journalism—and broadcasts of foreign "football" matches (especially those of the English Premier League due to the lack of a language barrier) regularly get better ratings in America than MLS matches do.
• Just like soccer, Ice Hockey has a huge following in the US (it is the 4th most popular sport after all), but mainstream coverage is sorely lacking.
  • Again like soccer, it's a Cyclic Trope. Wayne Gretzky and The Mighty Ducks helped it out in the late 80s-early 90s but by the 2000s it faded out again, primarily due to the fumbling of the NHL's TV rights and having the league dropped from ESPN who now actively tries make its viewers believe the sport doesn't exist outside of the NCAA Division I championship^note so much that their 2011 in memoriam special didn't feature a single hockey player, not even the Russian team killed tragically in a plane crash the previous fall. Nowadays popularity is resurging again on the heels of new generation superstars like Alex Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby, Jonathan Toews, Connor McDavid, and Auston Matthews, while the merger of Comcast and NBC-Universal saw the not-well-known Versus (the league's cable partner) become the NBC Sports Network, bringing a more recognizable brand and greater exposure. Unfortunately, NBCSN is still a distant 2nd to ESPN who now has more reason to put the sport down now that it's cozy with their only real competition.
    • Starting with the 2021-22 season the TV rights are now held by ESPN and Turner Sports, with ESPN mainly using NHL games to push their streaming service ESPN+. So if nothing else you'll hear a lot more about hockey on Sports Center.
  • Ironically, ESPN was originally founded to broadcast Hartford Whalers games. Fans of the Carolina Hurricanes joke that it was the move and name change that ticked off ESPN about hockey.
  • The near-constant contract disputes and lockouts (to the point the fans joke about how often their seasons are at risk of cancellation) don't help.
  • Speaking of NCAA D-I hockey, a number of its traditional power teams are either from lesser-light D-I schools where hockey is considered the flagship sport (University of Denver—tied with Michigan for the most national championships, North Dakota, Cornell, Bowling Green, New England schools like Maine, New Hampshire and Boston University) or Division II or III schools that the NCAA allows to compete at the D-I level in hockey (Colorado College, Minnesota-Duluth, Lake Superior State, Michigan Tech, Northern Michigan, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Union College of New York, Clarkson, St. Cloud State, Minnesota State-Mankato), all of which might make a casual fan of college football or basketball say "who?" if they happen to see a college hockey game.
• Karuta – virtually unknown and unplayed outside Japan due to its requirement of players to be well-versed in Japanese and Japanese poetry.
• Lacrosse, in a similar vein. Oldest sport in the United States, older than the country itself, but played, almost exclusively from North Carolina to New York. It's expanding rapidly, though, heralded as the fastest-growing sport in the nation. It's still almost exclusively played by white, upper-middle-class boys.
  • Archer has helped awareness, and the writers seem to actually know what they're talking about, usually.
• Team handball is sort of a big deal in certain parts of Europe, but pretty much nobody ever gets to see it outside the Summer Olympics. When they do see it, however, they're impressed. The Sports Guy called it "a loony cross between hockey, basketball, lacrosse and Vince Vaughn's Dodgeball movie, only if it was created for people with ADD" and called for it to be brought to the US with a few minor tweaks.
  • Even in countries where it has some popularity, handball isn't that big a deal. For instance, in Brazil, it's the most played sport in physical education class, and the women's national team won the 2013 world championship - but the Brazilian tournament suffers from lack of exposure and financing.
    • Handball is huge in the Nordic countries, parts of the Balkans, Northern Germany, Spain, and France. True the halls only get 20,000 people or so, but that's what they often get for regular league games and those people are loud. Brazil is still on the periphery of the sport (though catching up fast).
• Until the late nineteenth century, sports were generally for the wealthy. Once athletic contests began to appeal to middle-class and working-class people, many of the more elitist sports (polo, regattas, fencing, etc.) fell into obscurity or semi-obscurity, because the middle and lower classes couldn't afford the necessary equipment (horses, boats, etc).
• Cricket: Some estimates put it as the second-most popular sport in the world after soccer (mainly due to its popularity on the Indian subcontinent), but it has never really caught on outside of the British Empire (with the possible exceptions of the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates). In the USA, it barely rates a mention today, despite the fact that it was popular until around the time of the Civil War, and in fact, the first international cricket match was played between the USA and Canada in 1844. Anecdotal evidence even suggests that George Washington himself was a cricket enthusiast!
• As the name suggests, Australian Rules Football is mostly only popular in Australia, and has a fervent following there: the Grand Final (the Australian Football League's title game) regularly draws crowds in excess of 100,000. But did you know that it's still only considered a regional game there? In the eastern states of New South Wales and Queensland (the first and third most populous, respectively), where Rugby League is the dominant football code, it struggles to find a following, even with two teams based in each of those states in the AFL.
  • As for rugby league, it's really only dominant in Oceania, northern England, and the respective French and Spanish sides of the Pyrenees Mountains. Elsewhere, people don't even know there's more than one type of rugby.
• Red Bull Crashed Ice, otherwise known as downhill ice cross, is very popular among Canadian extreme sports fans but unknown to most of the world.
• Welsh Rugby Union referee Nigel Owens experienced this when travelling to the US. Going through airport security, he stated he was visiting for his work as a rugby referee, at which point the security personnel asked: "What's rugby?".
• In the UK, any racket sport except tennis isn't generally noticed unless it's an Olympic sport in an Olympic year where the Brits might have a medal chance. Squash, badminton and "real" tennis (the tennis you see at Wimbledon etc. is technically "lawn" tennis) barely get a mention.
• How many swimmers can Americans not into the sport name? Chances are, they'll only know Michael Phelps and nobody else. Ryan Lochte, Missy Franklin, and Katie Ledecky are also fairly well known, although far from Phelps' level of recognition (although Lochte's out-of-water behavior in Rio got him plenty of negative notoriety). Names like Dara Torres, Aaron Peirsol, Natalie Coughlin, Jenny Thompson, Amy Van Dyken, Mark Spitz, or Matt Biondi are virtually unknown except to the most hardcore fans of swimming and/or the Olympics. '20s star Johnny Weissmuller is also well-known, but that's for playing Tarzan in the movies rather than his athletic career. If they can name anyone else, it would probably be former Stanford University athlete Brock Turner, although for all the wrong reasons.
• Well-known gymnasts?^note At least before gymnastics started making headlines for all the wrong reasons? Nadia Comăneci, Mary Lou Retton, Simone Biles, and that's it. Gabby Douglas is mainly known for being the sport's first major black star^note which she actually isn't; Dianne Durham, Betty Okino, and Dominique Dawes were gymnastics legends in the '80s and '90s, but this is the pop-culture perception of Douglas anyway, but otherwise is nowhere near as big as Biles is, and if McKayla Maroney is known for anything, it's the being the subject of the "McKayla is not impressed" meme and not her actual career.. Maybe if you're lucky you'll get Carly Patterson, Shawn Johnson, and Nastia Liukin too. People will also remember 1996 had a great team but will be hard-pressed to name its actual members, with the possible exception of Kerri Strug (and she's mainly known for her apparent one-foot vault landing with a badly injured ankle^note she actually landed on both feet, but immediately picked up her injured foot; Morgan Freeman perpetuated the "on just one foot" legend in a popular Visa Go World commercial. And tough luck naming a single male gymnast unless you're a hardcore fan.
• Curling may have been founded in Scotland, but it's recognized as being biggest and most popular in Canada. There are an estimated 2 million curlers worldwide, but around 1.3 million of them are in Canada (there's 15,000 in the US, with 11 times the population). The major Canadian national championship tournaments (women and men) take place in major hockey arenas seating thousands of spectators, and when Canada hosts world events they're likewise in arenas with lots of spectators. World championships in other nations are sometimes lucky to have a few hundred people attending.
• While college football and college basketball have huge followings in the United States, college baseball is almost completely ignored, outside of the Men's College World Series getting some attention. The reason for this is simple... the NFL and NBA draft their players almost exclusively out of colleges, making the college versions of the sports essentially farm systems for the professional versions. On the other hand, most top MLB prospects are drafted out of high school and work their way up through different classes of the minor leagues. For the same reasons, the MLB draft tends to garner much less hype than the NFL and NBA drafts.
• Baseball has been a major sport for years in countries such as the United States, Canada, some Latin American countries, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and the Netherlands (mostly in the Dutch Caribbean territories, though it's also popular enough on the Dutch mainland that the city of Haarlem holds the Haarlem Baseball Week, an international invitation baseball tournament), but outside of those regions it's mostly a very minor sport.
• Field hockey is a wildly popular sport worldwide, often considered to be second only to soccer in worldwide popularity among team sports... and to say that its fanbase in the USA is similarly lacking would be a massive understatement—while soccer at least has professional leagues with niche fanbases for men and women alike, field hockey is *only* played at the amateur level (high school/college, with occasional appearances for the Olympic Games) and is viewed as an Always Female sport notable to men only because the players wear skirts rather than shorts like most women's sports.
• Unlike the popularity of college sports in the neighboring US, university sports in Canada garner little interest outside of the schools themselves, meaning that many Canadians aren't aware of some amazing dynasties that have attracted ravenous localized fanbases, like Université Laval in football (10 titles since 1999; their home games usually draw in over 10,000 fans), Carleton University in men's basketball (16 titles since 2003; their 2015 game against crosstown rival University of Ottawa attracted 10,780 fans, the largest crowd to ever see a Canadian university basketball game) and University of Alberta in men's hockey (16 total titles).

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