Sports
While the South has had a number of Super Bowl winning National Football League teams (such as the Dallas Cowboys, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Miami Dolphins, and the New Orleans Saints) the region is noted for the intensity with which people follow high school football and college football teams, especially the Southeastern Conference and Big 12 and in Texas and Oklahoma where high school football, especially in smaller communities, is a dominating activity.
Baseball became popular in the South, with spring training in Florida from the 1920s, and Major League Baseball teams like the Atlanta Braves and Florida Marlins being recent World Series victors. Minor league baseball is also closely followed in the South (with the South being home to more minor league teams than any other region of the United States).
The South is also the birthplace of NASCAR auto racing; Shackleford says it flourishes there because "the violence and danger of the sport resonated with growing idealization of the traditional Southern culture." Other popular sports in the South include golf (which can be played almost year-round because of the South's mild climate), fishing, soccer (which is the fastest growing sport in the South), and the hunting of wild game such as deer, birds, and raccoons. The hot-weather Dallas Stars, Tampa Bay Lightning and Carolina Hurricanes were the 1998–1999, 2003–04 and 2005–06 National Hockey League champions. Atlanta was the host of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games.
Lately, other sports such as soccer, tennis, lacrosse (which was developed by southeastern native Americans), have grown considerably in the area.
The Masters golf tournament is held in Augusta, Georgia.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of The Southern United States
Famous quotes containing the word sports:
“There be some sports are painful, and their labor
Delight in them sets off. Some kinds of baseness
Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters
Point to rich ends.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green;
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain;”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774)
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)