The Rise of Spectacle Hobbies

Somewhere along the way, our hobbies stopped feeling like ours.

Baseball became a spreadsheet. Golf became a broadcast package. Fitness became a wearable‑verified optimization loop. Even martial arts, once wrapped in mystique and ritual, became another Instagram skill stack. We have more access, more data, more programming -- and less sense of presence inside the thing itself.

What's emerging in response isn't simply "more exciting content." It's a wave of spectacle hobbies: formats that deliberately exaggerate, theatricalize, and mythologize traditional activities in order to restore the feeling of being inside a story.

Savannah Bananas baseball. TGL's simulator‑lit arena golf. Power Slap's face‑to‑face combat. Run‑It‑Straight's pure collision sport. Sword yoga classes where women lunge, squat, and sculpt with a semi‑flexible 30‑inch blade named Golden Hour.

Individually, they look like gimmicks. Collectively, they reveal a cultural correction.

We are trying to feel like protagonists again.

Take Savannah Bananas. Traditional baseball suffers from the same problem as many legacy institutions: reverence without vitality. The rules are sacred, the pacing is slow, and the statistical overlays have made the game more precise than ever -- and more inert. The Bananas didn't fix baseball by tightening its fundamentals. They turned it into vaudeville. Dancing players. Mid‑inning theatrics. Controlled chaos.

Purists recoil. Fans show up in droves.

The numbers tell the story. In 2025, the Bananas sold 2.2 million tickets across 113 games -- enough to rank 20th in MLB attendance, ahead of teams like the Cincinnati Reds and Baltimore Orioles. Their merchandise operation generated over $50 million in revenue, outpacing most MLB franchises. They maintain a 91% ticket redemption rate, matching A‑list concert performance in an era when traditional sports struggle with no‑shows.

The Bananas' success is not about athletic superiority. It's about narrative density. Every inning contains spectacle. Every moment invites participation. The audience isn't watching a system optimize itself; they're watching characters perform.

TGL, the PGA‑backed indoor golf league co‑founded by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, operates on a similar principle. Traditional golf broadcasts are meditative, sprawling, and increasingly disconnected from younger viewers raised on compressed attention loops. Recent data shows younger sports fans are turning away from live sports, with Gen Z 21% more likely to play games on mobile devices while watching and 20% more likely to use social media simultaneously.

TGL shrinks the game into an arena, overlays it with screens and shot clocks, and packages it like prime‑time esports. The league drew a peak audience of 1 million viewers for its debut, proving there's appetite for reimagined formats. Golf's difficulty remains intact. Its presentation changes entirely.

It isn't trying to preserve the sanctity of the sport. It's trying to make the experience legible and emotionally legible within contemporary media habits.

Power Slap pushes this logic to its extreme. Dana White's latest venture strips combat down to its most primal element: two competitors standing face‑to‑face, taking turns delivering open‑handed strikes. No grappling. No movement. Pure kinetic theater.

Critics called it barbaric. The numbers suggest otherwise. Power Slap generated over $50 million in revenue in 2024, with White claiming the league has more sponsors than the UFC secured in its first decade. Individual events reportedly generate $2 million per show, and viewership has reached over 2 million views for major events.

The format works because it removes everything except consequence. No strategy. No technique. Just willpower and physics.

Meanwhile, Run‑It‑Straight has emerged as perhaps the most distilled example of spectacle sport. Originating in Australia and spreading globally through social media, the format is brutally simple: two participants, one ball, a straight‑line collision at full speed. Barstool Sports declared it "the sport of the future" precisely because it requires no equipment, no training, no barriers to entry -- just the willingness to run directly at another person.

The appeal is immediate and visceral. Unlike traditional sports that have accumulated decades of tactical complexity, Run‑It‑Straight offers pure kinetic drama. Every match lasts seconds. Every outcome is definitive. There are no draws, no technical decisions, no referee interpretations.

Yet the simplicity masks something more sophisticated: these formats are rebuilding meaning through constraint rather than expansion.

In each case, the innovation is less about athletic advancement and more about restoring friction, symbolism, and immediacy. These formats recognize something that hyper‑optimized mainstream hobbies often ignore: the emotional payoff of participation is not efficiency. It is meaning.

Sword yoga may be the clearest example because it removes competitive stakes entirely.

In a New York studio or via a $24.99 monthly subscription to WeaponUp, women hold a 1‑ to 1.5‑pound tai chi blade and move through lunges, squats, and balance drills. Founder Sabina Storberg, trained at Qufu Shaolin Kung Fu school in China before leaving a UNICEF role to launch her platform in 2024, frames the practice as a blend of grace and power. Participants talk about "main character energy," about feeling like dragons rather than princesses in towers.

The context matters. Women remain severely underrepresented in traditional martial arts spaces -- current estimates suggest only about 25% of US martial arts practitioners are female, despite the global martial arts market reaching 2.9 million practitioners. In formal swordsmanship tournaments, women's events comprise less than 10% of global competitions.

Strip away the headlines and you find a simple truth: sword yoga isn't just a workout. It's a symbolic technology.

Yoga on its own already promotes presence and mindfulness. Add a blade, and the body must concentrate more sharply. The prop demands intention. It requires awareness of extension, space, posture. Therapist Staci Sycoff notes that the added focus can deepen mindfulness and quiet racing thoughts. The sword becomes less weapon than amplifier.

But there's something else happening beneath the biomechanics. Storberg's framing is deliberate: strength without abandoning grace; martial imagery without forfeiting femininity. Participants speak about reclaiming confidence, about discovering capabilities they hadn't imagined for themselves. In a culture where power is often coded as masculine, the blade becomes a tool of aesthetic and psychological reframing.

It's not about learning to fight. It's about learning to inhabit a posture.

The same pattern surfaces across these spectacle hobbies. They are less concerned with perfecting the technical core of an activity and more concerned with re‑enchanting it. They add story where there was none. They add ritual where metrics dominated. They make the participant visible to themselves.

This shift is happening against a backdrop of broader fitness industry transformation. The boutique fitness market is experiencing significant growth, driven by Millennials and Gen Z demand for personalized, community‑driven wellness experiences. The U.S. fitness industry reached nearly 77 million gym memberships in 2025, yet the appetite for alternative formats continues to expand.

Optimization culture promised liberation through data. Wearables track heart rate variability. Apps count reps. Fantasy leagues quantify performance down to decimal points. The result has been undeniable gains in precision -- and a subtle erosion of myth.

A baseball game becomes a probability model. A golf swing becomes launch‑angle geometry. A yoga session becomes calorie burn.

Spectacle hobbies reject this flattening. They reintroduce theatrical excess and archetype. The Bananas' antics restore joy to a sport often defined by patience. TGL's arena lighting transforms solitary fairways into stagecraft. Power Slap reduces combat to its most elemental form. Run‑It‑Straight strips collision down to pure physics. Sword yoga wraps strength training in fantasy language.

Critics will argue that this is all surface -- entertainment layered over diluted substance. There is risk there. When everything becomes content, depth can evaporate. Spectacle can cannibalize craft.

Yet the speed with which these formats gain traction suggests they are responding to a real deficit.

Modern adulthood has narrowed the range of socially acceptable intensity. Play is commodified. Competition is professionalized. Even fitness is often performed in isolation, earbuds in, eyes on screens. The communal, slightly theatrical aspects of shared ritual have thinned.

Spectacle hobbies rebuild that layer.

They give people permission to exaggerate. To perform. To lean into archetypes without apology. A 25‑year‑old financial analyst in Hell's Kitchen can spend forty minutes wielding a sword and leave feeling stronger in her arms and more secure in her identity. A baseball fan can attend a Bananas game and experience something closer to a carnival than a seminar. A golf viewer can watch TGL and feel the pulse of an arena rather than the hush of a course.

The throughline is not novelty. It is narrative control.

When participants describe feeling like "badasses," "dragons," or the heroine of their own story, they are articulating a hunger for coherence in a world that often fragments attention and agency. These formats don't offer escape so much as intensification. They heighten the stakes of ordinary movement and restore a sense of occasion.

There is also a business logic underpinning this shift. Traditional sports and fitness models compete for time against infinite digital distraction. Attention must be earned, not assumed. Spectacle increases stickiness. It produces moments worth sharing. It transforms participation into identity signaling.

WeaponUp doesn't just sell workout sessions. It sells an aesthetic and psychological posture. Savannah Bananas doesn't just sell tickets. It sells experience density. Power Slap doesn't just sell combat. It sells distilled confrontation. TGL doesn't just sell golf. It sells a format engineered for modern broadcast.

In each case, the hobby becomes an event.

That evolution raises uncomfortable questions. Does everything need a theatrical overlay to survive? Are we incapable of sustaining slow, subtle forms of excellence without amplification? Can spectacle coexist with mastery, or does it inevitably erode it?

Those tensions will shape the next phase of this movement. Some formats will calcify into gimmicks. Others will integrate their theatrical elements into durable ecosystems.

What seems unlikely is a return to purely utilitarian participation.

The appetite for re‑mythologized hobbies reflects something deeper than boredom. It reflects fatigue with passive consumption. People want to move through experiences that feel heightened, embodied, and symbolically charged. They want their leisure to register as consequential, even if only for an hour.

A blade in a yoga studio, a baseball player mid‑dance, a golfer under arena lights, two competitors locked in face‑to‑face combat, two bodies colliding at full speed over a ball -- these images look like cultural curiosities. Viewed together, they resemble a collective adjustment.

We optimized everything. Now we are searching for intensity.

And the search is happening in the most ordinary places: the ballpark, the mat, the simulator, the studio floor -- wherever someone decides that doing the thing is no longer enough, and it needs to feel like something more.