Have Replays Ruined the Sport in Sports?

The pursuit of official certainty has bred an epistemological uncertainty. I no longer worry that a game will swing on a bad call, but I constantly worry that I will end up cheering for a fiction. The escapism of sports--an alternate world governed by its own arbitrary logic--dissipates, and I find myself switching my attention among the referee's calls, the replays and the TV's corrections...Relying on the referee still allows for a fantasy in which the call went your way. The machine's version of reality offers only the hopeless certainty that your team lost, fair and square.

From "Has the Replay Taken the Fun Out of Watching Sports?" by Jay Caspian Kang The New York Times Magazine, 2016; Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

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