Maxflier

I'm talking about coverage on major networks like ESPN, ABC etc. You know where you can watch the race in HD as opposed to the shit feed that TVG has.

jfoobar

Do you have the channel Universal Sports? They show a ton of cycling. I get it for free without the sports package on my cable plan.

kenbuzz

Lacrosse

And until this week - Bengals football.

Bill Needle

Calcio in Costume (Calcio Storico, Calcio Fiorentino)

Quack

Luge, Bobsled, Skeleton and Curling.

kahuna

I never knew ESPN use to air Sumo before. Ages ago use to watch on our local channel when some local Hawaiians got into the sport.
Now I watch it on NHK World channel on Roku.They repeat the highlight show (1/2 hour) each day about 4 or 5 times, when there is a tournament. The sport is down to
one Yokuzuna (Grand Champion).

B5Erik

Lacrosse for me. That is one hell of a fun sport to watch. The 2016 NCAA men's championship game (won by North Carolina) is still one of the greatest games in any sport that I've ever seen on TV.

LurkerDan

12+ years later, and my answer is the same.

eXcentris

Table tennis. They don't even show the Olympic finals...

Paff

Yeah, agree on the high speed winter sports.

But I'll throw in a sport that isn't on TV at all, roller derby. Just for transparency, I'm a roller derby referee so I'm certainly not impartial here. But I've seen some high level games just as a spectator (I don't work those games, because there's a requirement that the officials must also be high level as well) that are really exciting. I mean, you're combining racing-type sports with something like football or rugby here. What's not to like? The goal of the sport is to pass people, except those people are allowed to knock the hell out of you to prevent you from doing it. That's good television!

davidh777

My answer is still indoor volleyball, and I’ll add WNBA, but honestly I could seek out and find more of this stuff if I had time to watch it.

andicus

jfoobar

My answer is also still indoor volleyball. Thankfully, ESPN U now comes free with my cable package so there is a lot more NCAA volleyball available. I also get the Olympic Channel which also shows some. I had neither channel 12 years ago when I started this thread.

Andicus, ESPN used to show quite a bit of pocket billiards (not much snooker though) in off hours but that seems to have dropped off to almost none in the past 10-15 years.

jfoobar

LOTS of skiing on the Olympic Channel every winter. They have coverage of almost every World Cup event it seems, often with replays.

davidh777

I randomly ran across a volleyball game of our local Washington Huskies last fall and I enjoyed watching it. I didn’t get around to watching any of their tournament games, though.

andicus

Our TSN (The Sports Network) used to show snooker, quite a bit, too, but likewise, I haven't seen it in years. I was pissed off when they pretty much dropped it, because they added a lot of pro wrestling around the same time. I wanted to argue that pro wrestling wasn't a sport, but figured I was on thin ice with snooker.

I do really miss it, though, as well as playing it, lately.

Paff

Snooker...that's the game without pockets, right?

jfoobar

Technically, you are correct, but only because the Brits call them "pots". Snooker is the game pictured above and is played on a 12-foot table rather than the normal 9-foot table used for 8-ball, 9-ball, straight pool, etc. It is rare to even see a snooker table in the U.S. Even when I played a lot of pool in high school and college, I think I only ever laid eyes on three snooker tables ever, and one was in Canada at once was the largest pool hall in the country (now closed).

The game on the table without pocket is called Carom or Carom Billiards.

PhantomStranger

Men's volleyball. You can occasionally find women's volleyball randomly airing on cable, but men's volleyball (both indoor and beach) gets very little coverage. When beach volleyball first started airing 15-20 years ago, it was mostly for the men's game. Very quickly however television coverage for it almost entirely switched to women's beach volleyball.

feenst

Oh, and that's a bad miss.

andicus

Yeah, it definitely seems more popular in Canada. Depending on the pool hall, you'll usually find at least a couple of snooker tables. Some cater more exclusively to snooker.

The university I went to had, IIRC, around 1/3 snooker tables. Looking back, I spent too much time there, when I should've been in class.

One of my bigger regrets for my current house is not having a large enough room for a 6x12 table.

Paff

Sort of the same thing, but I really don't like the TV coverage of figure skating outside the Olympics. I mean, yes, it does get shown a lot during the winter, but it's always "Holiday on Ice Spectacular" shit, where the retired (meaning older than age 16) champs do a few incredibly safe and boring routines with a handful of jumps. I do enjoy Olympic figure skating, as there's all the required elements, and you get higher scores based on the difficulty of the move and how late it is in the program (I.E., some major jump when you're 2 minutes into the program and running out of gas nets a better score than if you get it out of the way at the beginning). In other words, it's more of a....sport.