If you want to see how strange we are as a society, look no further than just how seriously we take our sports. The Super Bowl has become near a national holiday in the United States and baseball season is still looked forward to like a kid eying December 25th.

Stranger yet is just how seriously we take some sports even though nobody actually bothers to watch their regular season or standard events. There are some niche pockets of America that will follow a certain team or will enjoy a sport more than others. However, as far as the mainstream is concerned, the following sporting events draw all eyes when they occur, but it seems that everything else that happens in those sports draw nothing but cricket chirps.

IndyCar Racing

The Indy 500 is the oldest, most prestigious automobile race in the country, and some might even argue on Earth. It draws an absurdly large crowd of 250,000 fans on average every year (that's equal to about four or five Super Bowl attendances.) The 500 is so well known in American society that its name is synonymous with auto racing.

Yet, I doubt anybody could name more than two or three winners of the race in the last decade. That is to say nothing of just drivers in the race or the IndyCar series itself. That's another thing: even though a quarter of a million people show up in Speedway, Indiana every Memorial Day weekend, a good portion of those likely have no clue what it actually is that they are watching.

The cars are erroneously referred to as Formula 1 race cars, but that's not quite true. While Formula 1 has been involved with a handful of Indies over the years, the last time an Indy 500 meant anything in F1 standings was the 1960s. Meanwhile, NASCAR draws millions of viewers on network television and even some prime time slots throughout the year. On the flip side, IndyCar racing struggles to find an audience when it gets a rare network television appearance, and little publicity for its cable television spots.

It just boggles the mind that what is one of the biggest sporting events of the year can then, in turn, draw such a small circle of fans the remainder of the year.

The Olympics

Every four years (or two if you count the Winter Olympics) networks clear their schedules to air the Olympic games or to avoid competing with them. It's obvious why this happens: people will want to tune in to watch history unfold as some of the great moments written in humanity have occurred during the Olympic Games. The most popular sports out of the Olympics are typically gymnastics, track and field, and swimming. Ironically, sports like baseball and basketball, which are some of the more popular sports normally, rarely find an audience during the Olympics.

Now, of those mentioned above, almost none get regular air time on television. I have seen a handful of gymnastics events broadcast on major networks. Those are, however, typically only an hour or two long and stuck on Saturday nights. Not exactly great real estate. I don't think I've ever seen track and field or swimming get more than a random time slot on some weekend afternoon.

Names like Carl Lewis, Kerri Strug, and Michael Phelps are known far and wide these days. However, there are hundreds of others in their same sports who are likely just as good but, unless they make it to the Olympics and win gold, will never ever be seen outside of 10% of the American sports audience. It is an unusual situation in which the sport itself doesn't seem to matter, only the hype placed upon it by the media and the fact that it is being held under the banner of the Olympics.

Boxing

Evander Holyfield, Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, Rocky Marciano--these are all house hold names from the world of boxing. They all have one thing in common: they were all heavyweight champion of the world. Now, there have been a few world famous lighterweight champions such as Oscar de la Hoya and Sugar Ray Leonard. However, these are fewer and further between than the number of heavyweight boxers that the American public can readily name off the top of their heads. Some, like Marciano and Ali, are generations gone by that are still widely known even to young kids.

Outside of the heavyweights and the major box office draws, the remainder of boxers in the Western hemisphere might as well be figments of our imagination. If a match up doesn't air on pay-per-view, then it apparently never happens. In fact, sometimes pay-per-view doesn't even mean anything. There are typically three or four undercard bouts on every pay-per-view boxing card. Yet, those poor guys only fight in front of a few hundred fans since most "boxing fans" don't show up until it's time for the main event fight. That means most people in the country that watch boxing only see a handful of fights per year (even when they order the events on pay TV) when there are literally thousands of matches every year.

That's akin to saying that you follow football but in reality the only games you watch are the Super Bowl and a couple of Sunday night games when "two big teams" are playing.

Horse Racing

The Kentucky Derby draws over 100,000 fans annually, brings out major celebrities, and gets covered by all of the major news outlets. The Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes, which make up the other two legs of the horse racing triple crown, garner a bit of attention themselves if the Derby winner looks like he or she could win those making history as one of the few horses to win all three.

Much like Indy racing's Indy 500, however, this seems to be a phenomenon that is exclusive to the event itself rather than the sport as a whole. In fact, horse racing is typically maligned in mainstream from the gambling that takes place, to some aspects of a criminal element, and in recent years even the idea that the horses are abused.

Not only are there hundreds of other horse races every year outside of the big three, but there are actually numerous races prior to the Kentucky Derby itself. A full afternoon of horse racing takes place before any of the Derby competitors ever head for the track. A lot of people don't even realize that, and some often see one of these races and mistake it for the Derby because they get such little attention and they can't tell the difference between one horse race and another.

The only real reason that the Derby draws such a crowd is that it is so old. It sounds strange, but it is over a century and going strong for the Derby, and anything that prestigious typically begins looking more and more like something of clout to society's upper crust (even if that upper crust has never seen a horse race before attending their first Kentucky Derby). And of course anything that is associated with celebrities and high society also draws interest from the mainstream. At the end of the day, the Kentucky Derby has less to do with the horses and more to do with everything else but the horses.

Tennis

This one is one of the most perplexing on the list. Wimbledon is one of the best known, if not the best known tennis tournament of the year, with the winners at Wimbledon being crowned the defacto world champion of tennis by the mainstream media and society as a whole. The event takes up large chunk of television time every July, and the networks even host a recap show late at night to get everyone up to speed on what they might have missed during the day.

All of this for a sport that most people don't even understand the scoring system to. Now, granted, there have been some major tennis stars over the years, but in the last twenty years or so, tennis stardom seems to have come just as easily from sex appeal as on court performance. Anna Kournikova never gained as much success as the Williams sisters, but she is just as well-known, if not more so, by the mainstream public because of her good looks.

Golf

Tiger Woods, Arnold Palmer, Phil Mickelson, and Jack Nicklaus are names that every sports fan know. Major tournaments on the PGA tour are given huge television contracts, and in recent years cable television has got in on the action. In fact, some of the most memorable plays in sports can be attributed to events that happened on a golf course somewhere.

All that being said, has anyone reading ever once met a legitimate fan of golf? By that I mean, a person that will follow golf like most people keep up with football, baseball, or basketball. I don't mean they were flipping through the channels and happened on the final few holes of the Masters tournament. I mean they will watch every stinkin' PGA tournament that gets put on the air.

If that person exists, they likely aren't in a circle of friends that is reading this article right now. While Woods, Palmer, Mickelson, and Nicklaus are household names to those that follow sports (and even many who don't), the truth is that they have gained much of their fame through legend and legacy rather than people actually tracking their career.

Highlights that get aired after the fact and in years to come seem to fuel these legends and build onto their legacy. Yet, that's all that they have to work with since most people outside of a select few will never have seen any of those men or any legends of golf, yet to come play a full tournament or even the final round of a tournament. It is more a curiosity than a sport. People celebrate the hole in one like they would a home run or a three point shot, yet, unlike the sports of baseball and basketball, after the hole in one the viewer is just as apt to keep flipping the channels rather than finish watching the golf tournament.

We are a strange society when it comes to sports. We will get excited over the Indy 500, the Masters, Wimbledon, and the next big fight on pay-per-view. We will flip over into the sports section to see who took the checkered flag and click on the golf link to see who won the green jacket. Our minds will be made up of trivial bytes of information as it pertains to those who have made it big in the sports listed above, and in many of our hearts we will firmly believe that we have been fans of their careers simply because we read the headlines they made.

The truth is that we as a society only care when the mainstream media cares. If you need proof of that, watch how fast the horse racing triple crown loses its luster in the weeks ahead if the Derby winner should fail to clinch the next race. Without the triple crown to bolster the drama, the mainstream media will stop caring and in turn, so will the mainstream of society.