Go Team!

A Cynic’s Guide to Sports Fandom

Let’s talk Sports!!!! 

Rah Rah, Sports Team, Rah!!!

I’ve been ruminating on how my relationship with sports as a spectator has changed over the years. I’m not sure how typical I am or whether my behavior is part of a larger trend. But the sports fan I am now is so very very different than the sports fan I once was. 

To set the stage, I think I was a pretty typical kid when it came to fandom. I followed sports quite closely in part as a way to fit in with my peer group and in part as a way to bond with my father. I was an active, if not spectacular, athlete in my small circles, playing pick up football in the park across the street and a variety of sports during recess and PE at school.

Walking in the Footsteps of Giants

My friend Tim and I would enact long touchdown drives across the playground in which I was Joe Montana and he was Freddie Solomon in which we sliced and diced our imaginary opponents with text book West Coast Offense timing patterns. In my memory, we were really good - though it was more likely that we were better at fantasizing than we were at skill mastery (ala Calvin and Hobbes). When it rained, my brother and I would go to the park and do goal line running plays where we would leap over an imaginary scrum of linemen and slide through the muck and mud, scoring game winning TDs. When we returned home our mother would force us to hose off in the side alley and come into the house directly through the basement door into the laundry room where we were ordered to strip out of mud-caked clothes. Good times and all predicated on an idolization of athletes as somewhat mythic heroes we kiddos aspired to be.

Fall Genuflection

On Sundays, during the fall, my family didn’t attend church; we attended the chapel of Bill Walsh which was beamed into our TV room. We did the weekly grocery shopping in the morning at Petrini’s (RIP) and purchased deli sandwiches (I always got pastrami on a sourdough roll) which we then dutifully ate in front of our 19” TV while watching the Niner game. This was as close to religious ritual as our family came. Watching Bill Walsh’s 1980s Niners was a sacrosanct event and I worshiped not only the stars like Montana and Clark, but special teamsters like Bill Ring. I had an affinity for him because he was stocky and blond just as I was stocky and blond. My brother’s favorite player was tight end Russ Francis. Ronnie Lott and Hacksaw Reynolds and Fred Dean were also adored with a deep fervor. I could probably name more players on those teams than on the current one.

Football had supremacy in our house largely because my father was a particular fan of the sport. It certainly didn’t hurt that the Niners were the only Bay Area team that consistently fielded a decent team. The Giants and Warriors were perpetually trying to build a contender and never quite getting there. The Niners, on the other hand, were the team of the decade, a dynasty worthy of adoration.

Access and Expense

For any youngsters in my readership, it’s important to remember that this was before cable television existed. There was not a perpetual torrent of sports available for consumption. Highlight packages didn’t exist. NBA playoff games at the time were even aired on tape delay. Reading the sports section in the daily paper was a must and the section was much bickered over between my brother, my father, my mother, and I. You read the paper and watched the games. That was how you followed a team.

It should also be noted that the only sporting events I attended were Giants’ baseball games at Candlestick and, for a few years, Stanford football games in Palo Alto. Niner’s tickets were hard to come by and way too expensive. The Warriors played all the way over in Oakland usually at night. (I do remember attending a Warriors game in the late 70s and sitting in the nosebleeds and visibly seeing the cloud of weed smoke that coalesced just under the roof rafters – not exactly the family friendly affair NBA games are these days. We mostly only went to baseball because tickets were so cheap. In high school, I recall going to a Giants double header and sitting in the bleachers for $2.50. 

Changing Terms of Service

In high school, I realized my dream of athletic superstardom was not to be. I remained a dogged athlete but lacked the explosion and coordination to truly separate me from my peers. Good enough to play regularly, not good enough to dominate.

In college on the East Coast, my affiliation with Bay Area teams became more about tribal pride. My teams represented my home and, thus, they represented me. But I also learned how easy it was to take on my friends’ teams as a way to bond. That’s how I became an Alabama University (ROLL TIDE!) football fan, much to my father’s disbelief. Having a good friend from Mobile made it quite easy to jump on the bandwagon (though at the time, the team was not the juggernaut of former or future days). Afterall, fandom is largely about community so liking more teams was simply a way to access more connection to more people.

Sports fandom is a form of identity – whether as pride of place or fantasies of greatness, sports provides a way to affiliate with a group and to bond with people. But the identification isn’t as complicated as race, sexual orientation or ethnicity. You can basically buy a hat or jersey and be accepted into the group, no questions asked. 

Cable Television

Fast forward to a world of cable television and my beer league soccer exploits, and the European Football leagues became accessible. I was initially drawn to Arsenal of the Premier League because I enjoyed their aesthetic of fluid passing movements in triangles and give and goes. Then I stumbled upon Barcelona Futbol Club, the birthplace of tiki-taka and Johan Cruyff’s vision of Total Football. I became a fan the year before a 17 year old Argentinian name Lionel Messi would join the senior team. Just as I lucked into watching Joe Montana in my youth, I lucked into following the entire European career of perhaps the greatest soccer player ever to live.

My take-away from my Barcelona fandom was a sudden appreciation of greatness. I’d stumbled into greatness with the 49ers of my youth and did the same with Messi’s Barcelona. Watching athletes who are sublimely gifted is as close as we get to the stories of demigods in myth like Hercules and Achilles. They make magic happen. Following Messi was similar to following Joe Montana (or Steph Curry). Athletes who seemed capable of nearly any feat, forgers of the miraculous on a regular basis. You watched them in part because you expected them to produce the impossible and time and time again they actually did.

Entertainment, Not Identity

At the same time, I was now rooting for a team in a city and a country that I’ve still never visited. No longer was my identity involved. I was a pure spectator. A consumer of sport. And that transition, or more accurately, my recognition of that transition has changed everything. I’m now very much a bandwagoner. I no longer consider it a duty to support my teams. Rather, I’ve understood that sport is merely a form of entertainment that I consume. So if the product isn’t good, if it lacks sublimity or transcendence, I’m not going to give it my time.

I still have moments of the fanatical devotion I felt as a kid. I still feel the pain of disappointment when my teams fail, but I do it with a bit more distance, a bit more recognition that it doesn’t really matter. It’s fun to care about sport, but the second it stops being fun is the second I have to step away and remind myself that fandom is a form of make believe, a magic trick in which the actions of people far removed from my “real” life matter to my life. And holding that connection as loosely as possible makes it bearable. Santa Claus isn’t real, but he’s fun to believe in. My identification with sports teams is the same. A fun fiction that remains fun only if I remember that it’s all a fiction.

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Internet of the day

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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Good

– Peeps: I’m truly blessed by the company I keep. I think I’ve developed into a good judge of character over these many years of getting punched in the nose by disappointment. And the people in my life, the people who have remained in my life, are good people. Curious, ethical, smart, and able to laugh and cry when needed. Even the people with whom my regular connections have become more tenuous over time are lovely one and all. Just a lucky dude to have been allowed to love so many worthy human beings. 

The Bad:

– Toxic Masculinity: I watched the movie The Iron Claw this weekend. It’s about the Von Erichs, a family of wrestlers from Texas who were popular in the late 70s and into the 80s. The family consisted of six brothers driven by a task master of a father who was a former wrestler himself and resented that he’d never been given a title shot. His boys did achieve the dream of bringing home a heavy weight championship belt, but in the process one died in childhood (he drowned in a puddle), another died of a burst intestine potentially connected to steroid abuse and three others died by suicide with suicide notes acknowledging their failure to live up to their family’s expectations. Patriarchy and the idealization of strength (both physical and emotional) are bad for men. They make us less human, less fully realized as emotionally complex beings who crave love and community and belonging and the ability to ask for help. The Von Erichs are a particularly overt story of how uber masculinity can destroy lives. If you are raising sons, please let them learn to ask for help when help is needed. You can raise a kid with grit without raising them to never acknowledge weakness. Weakness is not a sin. It is human. 

The Ugly:

– Voter Delusions: There’s a YouTube channel called “The Good Liars” that consists mostly of two pretty smart dudes interviewing people outside Trump rallies (and other congregations of the lunatic fringe). What’s gobsmacking about it are 1) the inane theories espoused by the Trumpists and 2) their inability to grasp their own cognitive dissonance. The best example is probably the belief that Trump is our actual current president and Biden is a fake puppet propped up by the deep state or other nefarious forces. But then when asked if that means that the border crisis and inflation are actually Trump’s fault, these same conspiracy believers blame those things on Biden. Anyway, if you want a little taste of the state of our vox populi, have at it. It’s a special kind of depressing…you’ve been warned.

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Finally