Sport in the US

There are many sports played and watched in the US, but not all are played and watched equally. The three biggest in the US are "-ball" sports: football, baseball, and basketball. These three sports have the largest fanbases, most advertising, highest salaries, and greatest media attention, and, accordingly, bring in the most amount of money. Like most other sports, these three are very similar in spirit. They value winning and fierce competition, they value rivalry and story lines, and they value big personalities.
On game day there is excitement and suspense. Almost as valued as the games themselves are the pregame rituals and parties fans hold. Tailgating, barbecuing, hot wings, burgers and beer. Baggo, touch football, whiffle ball, various sport video games, twenty one. Whether they are at home or at their stadium's parking lot or a bar nearby, everybody likes to prepare for the game in some way. Almost as if the game is ceremonial and the rituals are sacramental preparations, fans treat game day like the sabbath of their religion with their team's victory just a cherry on top. The value of tradition can be reinforced through game day rituals and neighbors with little to talk about can find common fround in their local teams.
In the US, different people measure success in different ways. Many people say a successful athlete is one who makes a lot of money. True, an athlete's sport is their profession and if salary depends on performance than how much money they make should be a good way to measure success. Another measure of success in the US is championship wins. Earning the title of the best in a season is what every player and team strives for each year--it's about those precious metals. Even another way to to measure success is purely by stats. People want to set records and break them, they want to have the highest amount of one stat, or the highest average of all stats. But all these measures can are loosely related in that a successful athlete will usually excel in all those measures. How much a player os paid depends on success, or expected success, which is asserted from how well they've previously done (or their stats).
But what all these measures ultimately depend on is whether or not the player is actually skilled. An extremely skilled player can "bust" and never achieve success, but rarely does an unskilled player achieve greatness. Many people use those measures of success to decide whether a player is good or not without looking at the actual play of the athlete, and that can be unjust to those who despite their great skill never won the big game.