My experience is a sports fan first, playing sports as a child/teen, watching sports, bantering with other men in my family about players/teams etc. The "normal" US male cultural experiences that sports provide. Then I became a techie/geek in late teen years, teaching myself to code, coding as hobby, etc. What I found is it all has to do with time and where you want to spend it. To keep up to date on sports, it's a huge time investment. To learn to code and continue building stuff, it's typically a large time investment too. I couldn't do both. Really, I didn't want to do both. I felt more productive building things and while sports are entertaining, it's a large unproductive time sink. I have since tuned back into sports and balance the two a bit. I still think it's overly unproductive but I just try to watch the big games, or I tune in at post season, or just the games of the teams I support. I usually follow this pattern; MLB & NBA post season, NFL all games for my team & other post season sometimes. I also usually DVR them and avoid spoilers. Watching games in play by play format is a huge time savings.