Should I Be a Sports Fan?
I spent most of my childhood as a dedicated sports fan. Fascinated with records and statistical leaders in all three major sports, I spent many hours pacing in front of the TV watching my favorite teams battle in big games. My Dad and I collected sports memorabilia together, and we travelled together to watch professional sports. No one in our family followed any teams religiously, and no one told me who I should like or cheer for, so my attachments came about naturally. Derek Jeter, Allen Iverson and Peyton Manning became my heroes, and I followed their careers with great fervor from late elementary school through high school. I tried to emulate their defining qualities in my own games - Jeter’s stoic on-field demeanor and consistency regardless of the circumstance, Iverson’s captivating style and unrelenting competitive drive, and Manning’s mastery over the strategic aspects of football. I could never apply my heroes’ qualities as successfully they did, but the high bar they set gave me something to aim for in both games and life.
My three heroes’ retirements coincided with my early struggles as a college athlete. Watching sports reminded me of my difficulties on the court, and I no longer felt any true connection to any team or player. There were times when I thought I’d never be a sports fan again. But somehow the NBA playoffs kept me passively engaged. I wanted to know how Lebron’s legacy would unfold, and, while I admired the way the Golden State Warriors played the game, I often found myself annoyed with their on-court demeanor.
After three years of college basketball that ranged from mediocre to miserable, I recovered as a senior to enjoy the most satisfying season of my life. With my own relationship with basketball repaired, I began to watch more games. After the Trail Blazers beat the Clippers in the first round of the 2016 playoffs, they came up against the Warriors, and after two hard-fought losses, Damian Lillard and the Blazers took down the defending champs at home - a game in which Lillard scored 40 points, including 8 three-pointers.
As a loyal Oregonian I admired Lillard and the Blazers, and this series sparked more interest and excitement than I’d felt in years. Suddenly, the next Blazers game seemed very important. But I watched them lose the next two games, both undecided until the final minutes. I remained impressed with Lillard and McCollum, and I admired the unity displayed by the team. I hadn’t decided to become passionately engaged with this Blazers team, it just happened.
With Lillard and McCollum as my new athletic heroes, Steph Curry and Draymond Green became the perfect villains necessary for a true commitment as a sports fan. In the next series I cheered for Westbrook and Durant to knock Golden State out, only to see the Warriors come back from a 3-1 deficit to reach the NBA Finals against the Cleveland Cavaliers. After the Cavaliers fell behind 3 games to 1, Kyrie Irving and Lebron James led them to two impressive wins - and, to my delight, Green drew a suspension due to his technical fouls. In an unforgettable game 7 the Cavs won their first championship in over four decades. At game’s end my mom and my best friend and I were off the couch cheering and celebrating.
I was truly a basketball fan again.
Three full seasons have passed since the 2016 playoffs, and I estimate that I’ve watched about 180 Trail Blazers games in that span. Each game lasts approximately 2 hours and 35 minutes, so over the previous 33 months, about 465 hours (almost 20 full days) have been dedicated to watching “my team.” I also watch many NBA playoff games with interest, and I faithfully watch my former college team, the Regis University Rangers. Because my commitment to watching basketball is so time consuming, I can't justify following baseball, football, or any other Division I college sports, except for occasional playoff and tournament games.
After watching them get swept out of the first round by Golden State the following year, the Trail Blazers were projected to be somewhere near the 8th to 10th best team in a stacked western conference in the 2017-2018 season. Against all odds, they earned the 3rd seed and hoped to make a deep playoff run, but lost four straight first round games to the 6th seeded New Orleans Pelicans. Seeing my favorite team collapse, and my athletic heroes, Lillard and McCollum, get dragged through the mud in the media, was devastating. I found myself engaged in petty arguments with people on Twitter who trashed both the team and its stars. In the days following the Blazers’ collapse I had misgivings. Was being a sports fan really worth the time and aggravation? It seemed that each Blazers win improved my mood by about 25%, but each loss diminished it by 50%. Was I wasting my time watching these games, and making myself miserable in the process?
Pathetic Fans
During my hiatus from following sports I began to understand how fandom is perceived by those who have never cared about athletic competition. Sitting in a bar watching a college basketball tournament game with my friends, everyone but me was mesmerized by the TV screens, lost in the drama, intrigue, and presumed importance of the spectacle. What I saw on television was ten young men I didn't know or care about playing a game that had absolutely nothing to do with my life. Internally, I had negative thoughts about grown men slowly adding to their wastlines with beer as they watched the younger men compete. These were fans who could probably explain the infield fly rule, the clear path foul, and make a strong argument as to whether or not there should be a designated hitter in baseball, but might not have been able to name the three branches of government, or the decade in which World War II was fought. All of us, I thought, could have easily found more valuable uses for our free time.
A Dear Abby letter (June 17, 2019) deals with a related facet of sports fan behavior. The theme is stated clearly in the writer’s first paragraph: “My boyfriend and I are both 34 and have been dating for eight years. I love him, but I’m tired of him being so selfish and self-centered. His free time revolves around hockey games on the ice and on TV, baseball on the field and on TV and football season TV. Basically, his butt is glued to the couch.” Abby’s reasonable advice: “You should have moved out and moved on years ago.”
It seems that many men half-heartedly drudge through life looking forward to the next sporting event and some cold beer, their sense of adventure outsourced to others. Some of them advertise their identities as sports fans by tattooing themselves with other men’s names or faces.
Abhorrent Fans
Even as a child, when I felt no obligation whatsoever to justify a commitment to sports, there were moments when I saw unhealthy fanhood for what it was. In 7th grade my Dad and I flew to San Diego to watch my favorite football team, the Indianapolis Colts, play the San Diego Chargers. We went to the game with my Dad’s best friend and his wife, and another friend from work, whom I’ll call John. Spirits were high as we made our way to the game, and John was pleasant company, reserved and conversational, asking me questions about my own athletic prospects.
But then, as the game progressed, John made a gradual, relentless transformation from reasonable adult to rowdy sports fan to utter asshole. By the fourth quarter his cheeks had turned bright red and I could smell the alcohol on his breath. He drunkenly stumbled and swayed, screamed at the referees all the way from our second deck seats, and badgered fellow Chargers fans in the area for not making enough noise. On his way out of the stadium after a Chargers victory he did his best to insult anyone he saw wearing Colts gear. My Dad and his friend were embarrassed, and finally had to intervene when John tried to start a fistfight with a Colts fan. Even as a 7th grader I understood that this was repulsive behavior for a presumably respectable middle-aged adult.
Perhaps John’s behavior could be explained as an aberration caused by excess alcohol, but countless similar bad acts are committed by sports fans everywhere. For one example, a few years later I sat behind the endzone at an Oregon Ducks football game against Washington State. A hard and legal hit resulted in a Washington State receiver lying motionless on the field. After a long visit from the training staff there was a delay in lifting the injured player onto a stretcher. It was a brutally hot day in Eugene, and our section had no cover from the sun. When I felt my own mood shift from that of concern for the injured player to impatience and annoyance with the heat, I tried to keep my selfish attitude at bay. Suddenly, from about 15 rows above me, I heard, “Scoop that pussy off the field and get on with the game!!!,” followed by bouts of laughter. The fan who had yelled was a pudgy young man holding a beer and wearing a yellow tank top and sunglasses, looking satisfied with his debut as a stand-up comic. Thankfully, I heard two nearby fans say, “What an asshole”, and, “Fuck that guy.”
Violent Fans
In Among the Thugs, author Bill Buford describes his experiences covering soccer hooligans in Europe. He’d read stories of horrific violence committed by soccer fans against opposing fans, and, to assure himself that the stories were true, he wanted to see for himself. To get a true perspective he felt he had to integrate himself with the guilty parties, so he attended games and sought out people whom he thought fit the profile of sport hooligan. Burford had never cared greatly about sports before, and, to his own surprise, spending time at stadiums gradually turned him into a soccer fan:
“...while I couldn't say that I had developed a rapport with any one of ‘them’ (the hooligans) yet, I did find that I was developing a taste for the game. I had figured out how to stand on the terraces and watch the play on the pitch--an achievement of sorts. In fact I was also starting to enjoy the conditions of the terraces themselves. This, I admit, surprised me. This, it would seem, was neither natural nor logical. It was, I see now on reflection, not unlike alcohol or tobacco: disgusting, at first; pleasurable, with effort; addictive, over time. And perhaps, in the end, a little self-destroying.”
At first, the men he came to know seemed like a group pathologically committed to their team, but with an obsession that was only damaging to themselves, and perhaps their loved ones (if they had any, other than their fellow “lads”). Though they were apparently wasting their lives and ruining their health following soccer, they seemed like decent, somewhat likeable people otherwise. The hooligans’ common theme was that they hated their jobs, and that their soccer tribe had become their sense of purpose and belonging. Many of them made an apt comparison to religion, which for millennia has offered belonging and purpose to people, but has also produced horrifying levels of “us versus them” tribal violence. (And these fanatical soccer fans weren’t all poor and disenfranchised. Some were quite well off, and dedicated their free time and earnings to purchasing lager, travel arrangements, and soccer tickets.)
Because of previous incidences of violence, Manchester United supporters were banned from traveling to watch the 1984 Winners Cup semi-final game against Juventus in Turin, Italy. But a network of supporters worked out an intricate system of making it to the game regardless. Utilizing planes, trains and buses organized by their leaders, hundreds of them traveled to Turin and found space in the stadium.
Hours before gametime, citizens of Turin watched busloads of drunken Englishmen poor into their public squares. They urinated in fountains and on tables in restaurants, stole food and alcohol from shops, and abused waitresses. It sounds awful enough, but this boorish behavior was minor compared to what happened after Manchester’s 2-1 disqualifying loss, during which Italian fans hurled beer bottles at Manchester fans, injuring many of them.
“Going off” is the term used by wild soccer fans when they become evil thugs and move with focused aggression through a city, smashing car windows, shop windows, and people. In Turin, Manchester fans ganged up on Italian teenagers, beating them senseless. Buford watched a nervous Itlalian man attempt to get his wife and children safely into a car, but he was grabbed by a gang and beaten with a metal rod while his family watched.
After terrorizing the city, thugs congregated in a local bar, drank more beer, and celebrated. Buford describes the bar scene that followed the violent attacks. “There was little talk of the match and no evident regret that the team would not be playing in the final - the fortunes of Manchester United Football Club had been obscured by the larger concerns of the evening and how the Italians had ‘shat themselves.’ There was a sense of closure to the evening, an end-of-a-good-day’s work atmosphere.”
Throughout his book, Buford interacts with supporters from various European soccer teams, and finds that the group from Manchester described above is the standard, not an unhealthy exception. Sects of sports fans often have a subset of extremists who use their fan-hood to justify horrific behavior.
Are Sports to Blame?
This behavior begs the question: are sports responsible for amplifying tribal tendencies? In the days following the terrorism in Italy, one fan spoke to Buford about what had happened:
“He sneered. It was a wonderful sneer--arrogant, composed, full of venom. ‘So what do you think it is that makes us tick?’ he asked. ‘If we,’ he said, not waiting for my answer, ‘did not do it here at football matches then we’d simply end up doing it on Saturday night at the pub. It’s what’s in us, innit?’ He had an intense, but rather practiced, look of contempt.
‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘What is it that’s in us?’
‘The violence,’ he said. ‘We’ve all got it in us. It just needs a cause. It needs an acceptable way of coming out. And it doesn’t matter what it is. But something. It’s almost an excuse. But it’s got to come out. Everyone’s got it in them.’”
It’s difficult to know whether the explicit nature of sports, which draws on the dynamic of my country/city/university vs. yours, gives people a uniquely problematic excuse to behave in such a way, or if the hooligan above is right, that if not for Manchester United, this group of thugs would find another excuse to wreak their havoc on civilized society. There are plenty of other tribes to join outside of sports - a religion, or a political ideology, for instance. In fact, later in the book, Buford details how extreme support for soccer teams often overlaps with other tribal outlets. He describes being invted by soccer supporters to a birthday party, which turned out to also be a white power party where skinheads with swastika tattoos danced to distorted metal music. One of the soccer thugs/fascists at the party had been a police officer before he quit to become a radical Marxist, only to give that up to become a white nationalist. This was obviously a man who found meaning in belonging to an extreme group passionate about a radical cause, regardless of what cause it might be.
Most of us have experienced how intoxicating the “us vs. them” dynamic can be. There’s something captivating and exciting, and seemingly meaningful, about belonging to a group that has a clearly defined enemy to conquer. But this tribal impulse is at the root of a great deal of the world’s suffering. Should the tendency be unacceptable, even in the context of sports?
Historian-author Yuval Noah Harari points out that while tribalism that is sometimes associated with sport is troubling, there is a beautiful, often overlooked dynamic at play. He observes that people from different countries who hold opposing cultural, political and religious ideologies, which tend to lead to conflict, usually engage and cooperate effortlessly in sport. When a communist dictatorship faces a liberal democracy in the world cup, and even if the countries speak different languages, both will likely respect the rules, and fans from both countries will acknowledge the winner when the game ends. While there is clearly a subset of fans who take their sports teams far too seriously, peaceful cooperation between rival nations is a rare and fortunate dynamic in human history.
I remember a vacation in Baja, Mexico with my grandparents when I was a young boy. At the beach a group of Mexican boys were playing baseball. I didn’t speak Spanish, and they didn’t speak English, but because we all knew the rules, I was able to enjoy the game of baseball with them for hours.
The Difference Between Playing and Watching Sports
One Manchester United Supporter describes his experience in Italy:
“You remember the moment we entered the ground? Everybody started throwing things at us--bottles, cans, stones, everything. I’ve got a scar on my forehead from where some Italian stabbed me with a flagpole. There were only two hundred of us. It was us against them, and we had no idea what was going to happen. There were so many different feelings. Fear, anger, excitement. I’ve never felt anything like it. We all felt it and everyone knows that we have been through something important--something solid. We’ll never split up. We’ll be mates for life.”
This quote grabbed my attention because it resembles my own experience playing in high stakes sporting events. The pressure and intensity of a big game, the prospect of victory, the fear of defeat, and the motivation to “hold my own” for the sake of my brothers produced powerful emotions. Belonging to a tribe inevitably produces deep and lasting friendships. I still view some of my best friends as being, first and foremost, great competitors on the field and court. The Italian and Manchester United soccer players felt this same sense of comradery before going to battle in the stadium. But they had a field, ball, nets, referees, rules, and a history of sports etiquette to constrain their impulses. Meanwhile, their fans experienced exactly the same emotions but with nothing to constrain them. Instead of trying to score goals and stop their opponents from scoring, they heaved beer bottles and jabbed flag poles at each other. Sports provide the architecture wherein competition, and even tribal behavior, can be controlled. Fans of sports have no such architecture. They experience the same emotions as competitive athletes, but the only means they have to defend their “tribe” is to hurl insults at opposing fans and players, or, far worse, resort to senseless violence.
I know how difficult it is to act rationally as a sports fan. I often feel the urge to channel my passion for a team in unhealthy directions: insulting opposing fans and players, yelling at officials. In contrast, when I played sports, this energy was channelled toward helping my team get the next defensive stop, or score the next basket.
In Defense of Fanhood
It should be clear that sports fans have a responsibility to control themselves, and that they should encourage fans within their own “tribe” to act responsibly. Even those of us who are never likely to act violently when watching sports often develop unhealthy attitudes toward an opposing team’s players and fans. I watched Steph Curry hit his fourth three pointer of the 3rd quarter to erase what had been a substantial Blazers lead. Then, when Curry broke into an unrestrained juvenile celebration, hateful thoughts about him and his fans bounced around in my mind. Dramond Green’s on-court, remarkably hostile scowls offend me even more than Curry’s behavior does.
No other activity in my life produces as much un-mindfulness and irrationality as watching my team in a big game. I sit in front of a TV, my mood completely at the mercy of something I have absolutely no control over, and that has no direct relationship to my life and well-being. It’s something like playing blackjack or roulette - enjoyable and entertaining on occasion, but not an activity for fostering or sustaining well being.
***
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In Praise of Athletic Beauty gave me a persuasive justification for being a dedicated sports fan, and also presented an explanation that helped me understand myself, and others. Gumbrecht defines a sports fan this way:
“And yet he does not know (and perhaps he doesn’t need to know) why watching sports irresistibly captures the attention and imagination of so many people like himself. It is a fascination in the true sense of the word—a phenomenon that manages to paralyze the eyes, something that endlessly attracts, without implying any explanation for its attraction.”
Gumbrecht explains that the beauty of sports is a combination of competition, striving for excellence, and pushing one’s limits, and that the two latter qualities are more integral to a connection to sports than raw and simple competition. He writes, “If I were to praise competition rather than excellence, I would confirm the vision of sports that has given them a bad reputation among so many intellectuals. This is an image of athletes and their fans as a bunch of nail-biting, anxiety-driven neurotics, addicted to competitiveness spawned of capitalism and warped by stress that such competitiveness is supposed to produce. Striving for excellence and testing one’s limits, however, cut right through all these negative associations, and project a much nobler--or at least a much less condescending--vision of sports.”
Gumbrecht clarifies feelings that I had but didn’t know how to express:
“The chance to win and the risk of losing produce narrative, epic, and drama. And while the intense desire to enjoy victory certainly motivates athletes to enter a competition and spectators to root for them, I believe that the motivation of winning has been overrated, above all in comparison with the impact that the dramatic dimension has on the way we see and remember athletic events.”
The “dramatic dimension” during a time-out with two minutes left in a close basketball game, or after a pitching change in the 11th inning, when the outcome hangs in the balance, is where sports become most compelling. If all that mattered was winning, or dominating an opponent, fans would be much more impacted than they are now by the games in which their teams trounce lesser opponents. But in reality games that both athletes and fans remember and cherish are close contests when two talented teams push each other to new heights, and when the outcome of the competition remains in doubt until near the end. The desire to win and the resistance to losing are the elements that produce the beauty that sports fans admire and enjoy most.
If all fans cared about was winning, or dominating, there would be a different reaction when a star player is holding a knee, clearly in pain after an injury. Most of the fans, players, and coaches of the opposing team, who were previously certain that their only concern was winning, feel an odd sense of emptiness and disappointment over the fact that the other team’s best player might not be able to finish the game. If winning was everything, the opposition’s loss of their star would be cause for them to rejoice, if silently. Their problem, though, is that now their team is supposed to win. Beating a team with their “hero” in the lineup would have been satisfying, but competing against a depleted team will produce either a fairly meaningless victory, or an embarrassing loss.
A clear example of this was the first matchup between North Carolina and Duke in the 2018-2019 season. Both teams were highly ranked, and the rivalry game drew massive media attention, with Barack Obama sitting courtside. In the first minute, Duke’s Zion Williamson, arguably the best college players in the country, sprained his knee and left the game. The drama that had built in anticipation evaporated. Dylan, my former teammate and best college friend, is a loyal North Carolina fan who can’t stand Duke, and was bitter when Zion chose to play there instead of for his favorite team. When I texted him to ask what his reaction was to Zion’s injury, this was his response:
“My first reaction was I hoped he didn’t tear his acl. My next thought was that even if North Carolina won it wouldn’t mean much. It was a huge letdown after all the hype before the game.”
Unfortunately some fans are glad to see opposing players hurt. This was evident during the 2019 NBA finals when Toronto fans cheered after Durant went down with his acl injury. But these cheers were met with disgust from a majority of spectators, and from the Toronto players as well.
***
The principal aim of Gumbrecht’s book is to praise the beauty in athletics:
“In addition to being complex, embodied, and surprising, a beautiful play is also a temporalized form. This means that the play begins to vanish from the very moment it begins to emerge. As soon as the quarterback throws the ball in the receiver’s direction, intuitively knowing at the moment of release where the receiver will be a second or two later, the play, including all the complex routes that several players have to perform to make the play possible, will begin to disappear. No photograph can ever capture the beauty of this temporalized reality.”
Furthermore, he details the constant and addictive battle between order and chaos that’s present in so many sports. In basketball the offense is trying to cultivate an order of crisp passes and well timed cuts that lead to open space from which to shoot and score. An offense that is working synergistically can be legitimately described as beautiful. In contrast, the defense is trying to initiate chaos. Their aim is to destroy the order being cultivated by the offense, to disrupt the flow by deflecting passes, blocking shots, and forcing difficult shots at the basket. This struggle between chaos and order, whether or not explicitly known and articulated to the athlete or spectator, is a primary driver of the fascination with sports.
Another aspect of watching sports that Gumbrecht examines is his genuine appreciation for the beauty and inspiration that athletes generate. I’ve criticized fans whose lives revolve around cheering on athletes and, in the process, have essentially turned themselves into groupies. But it’s possible to draw inspiration from athletes, and to admire their talents, while maintaining a rational purpose in life.
The very best athletes tend to embody a heroic archetype. They give us ideals to strive for, in the structure of their bodies, their work ethic, their tolerance for pain and exhaustion, and, most importantly, in the way they perform under intense pressure. I don’t watch the Avengers, and I’ve never been interested in superhero films. For sports fans, athletes are our superheroes. And unlike a superhero film, there’s no guarantee that turning on a game will produce the thrill and intrigue that we love as fans, and remember vividly as athletes, or that our hero will emerge victorious. Therefore the randomness and elements of chance that align two evenly matched teams make these rare events all the more special. The contests in which the winner is undecided until the very end allow athletes and their teams to push themselves beyond their previously defined limits of performance. There’s no other form of art or entertainment that makes me leap off the couch and pump my fist, or collapse from the couch in despair.
Gumbrecht again:
“All that it takes to become addicted to sports is a distance between the athlete and the beholder—a distance large enough for a beholder to believe that his heroes inhabit a different world.”
I can relate. When I’m lost in the drama of a big game, there are genuine heroes and villains alive in my mind - and the villains are as important as the heroes to the experience of being a fan. Growing up, David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez were the villians who faced my heroes, Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada. It was my hero, Peyton Manning, battling villain Tom Brady. Now it’s Steph Curry and Draymon Green who face my heroes, Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum. But when the season ends, and the mystique and drama are settled, I return to viewing both my heroes and my villains as people just like me, and I wish them all the best. Many of the players I temporarily despise are people I respect and feel thankful for when I’m not lost in the “dramatic dimension” described above.
Is it Worth It?
In 2018 Peter Dolton and George MacKerron published a study called Is Football a Matter of Life and Death -- Or is it More Important than That? They analyzed the happiness of sports fans using data from the Mappiness App - data collected by asking users a few simple questions: “Who are you with?”, “What are you doing?” and “How are you feeling?” The researchers tracked data recorded from the users attending European football matches and those who were watching on TV, and then compared the happiness scores of football fans before, during and after games with their baseline, or average, happiness. The study shows that football fans are slightly happier than average before a game starts, and happier still if their team wins, but that their diminished happiness after a loss is far worse than their gains are after a victory. Here is the author’s conclusion:
“It would appear from our results that football fans are irrational. If we aggregate the effects of football match outcomes over the hours after a match we see that the aggregate outcome is most likely to be overwhelmingly negative. This is because the negative consequences of losing on happiness are around four times higher than the positive consequences of winning.”
Psychologist David Pizarro and Philosopher Tammler Sommers host a podcast called Very Bad Wizards. In an episode titled Sore Losers (Do Sports Make us Unhappy?), they analyse the study above. Sommers outlines various ways in which the study fails to capture what it means to be a sports fan - most importantly that the value in being a fan isn’t realized exclusively through a boost in happiness during a game and after it ends. He points out that his relationship to sports is the primary driver that keeps him in touch with childhood friends and family members. He believes that being a sports fan is about where you’re from, and that following sports involves much more than the happiness achieved in the moments after a game.
I understand this. My friend Taylor and I were huge Blazers fans growing up. We remember how painful it was as seven-year-olds to see our heroes, Scottie Pippen and Rasheed Wallace, cave in against Shaq, Kobe and the Lakers during the 4th quarter of game 7 of the Western Conference Finals in 2000. Taylor has remained loyal to the Blazers since childhood, and my biggest joy in becoming a Blazers fan again is the reason it gives me to keep in constant contact with my old friend. We text each other almost daily about the Blazers and the NBA at large, and our seriousness about it all is hilarious. Once, at a bar in our hometown, I was talking and laughing with a group of friends. The background bar noise was constant and meaningless until I heard Taylor’s voice yelling defensively at someone making fun of Myers Leonard, drowning out everybody in the place: “Myers Leonard is cooler than Travis Scott!” Once again, my old friend had me laughing hard.
The movie “Silver Linings Playbook” illustrates the importance that following sports can play in a family. Robert De Niro’s character, Jack Weaver, is a Philadelphia Eagles fan to an unhealthy degree. He places large bets on them every week, and centers his life around their success (Having previously been banned from the stadium for fighting, he had to watch the games on TV). He is hilariously superstitious, and thinks that watching the game with his son Pat will improve their chances of winning. Pat, played by Bradley Cooper, suffers from bi-polar disorder, and doesn’t care about the Eagles nearly as much as his brother or his dad, but he plays along with the situation so as not to break with family culture. In the scene below, Jack tells his son that his desire to watch the game with him is about much more than football.
I don’t think the study cited above proves that because losses affect them more than wins, sports fans are irrational for continuing to follow their teams. It’s clear that there’s more to being a sports fan than data can capture. But the study does remind me that I shouldn’t allow wins and losses to overly affect me, or bleed into other areas of my life, or develop unhealthy states of mind. I allow myself to get fully engaged in games I watch, but I try hard to forget the result and move on with my life soon after the game ends.
***
In a blog post, writer and comedian Stephan Fry included “An open letter to all who despise sport and most especially football.” He explained his relationship with sports and the fun he has cheering for his team. Though Fry had grown up hating sports, and viewing fans as negatively as most intellectuals do, later in his life he became a fan himself. He writes:
“The years passed and I found myself, much to my amazement, falling in love with all sports: most especially, it is true the sports that rude unthinking people will call ‘boring’ in a crass way is perhaps excusable in a 14 year old, but is boorish and repellant coming from adults who should know better…. If you have always found yourself immune to the national obsession with Association Football, I can quite understand it. But all I would say is that, for all that is wrong with it, there can be no keener pleasure than belonging, adhering, following and obsessing with one club: scrabbling for the latest news, checking with terror the tables to see how far they are from relegation and despair.”
Although the Blazers haven’t won a championship in our lifetime, Taylor and I don’t regret being fans year after year. It can even be argued that there’s something especially fulfilling about being connected to a perennial underdog. Fry’s description of cheering for Norwich Football captured the circumstance perfectly:
“Norwich is a pigmy compared to these enormous, illustrious and opulent institutions. That is what makes being a fan such a pleasure. We don’t expect to win every match – when we do we jump up and down with joy and when we lose we smile ruefully as we expected nothing more.”
While fans of powerhouses in big markets yawn their way through regular season and early playoff rounds, Blazers fans remain entranced by the importance of each regular season game and it’s playoff seeding implications. Our best players, McCollum and Lillard, both came from mid-major colleges and rarely receive the national attention they deserve. All of this somehow makes cheering for them special.
Entering the 2019 season, most experts figured the Blazers to be a playoff bubble team in a powerful western conference, but again the team exceeded expectations in the regular season and Blazers fans began to feel as if this could be the special year we’d been waiting for. Then, in an overtime game against the Nets with a few weeks left in the season, Jusif Nurkic, a fan favorite who was enjoying the best year of his career, fractured his leg coming down after a rebound attempt. The injury made me physically ill and I had trouble falling asleep after the game. Nurkic is my Oma’s (Grandma’s) favorite player, and she couldn't sleep that night either. Mourning the injury, my family and friends collectively lost most of our hopes for any kind of playoff run.
But the Blazers, despite another injury to McCollum, played well enough to secure the 3rd seed and a match-up with the Oklahoma City Thunder. Although the Blazers were the higher seed, the injuries made them betting underdogs in Vegas. Below are the picks analysts made before the series started:
In the days leading up to the series I was anxious. After their playoff collapse the year prior, another bad series might mean breaking up CJ and Dame - an outcome I dreaded. But behind the excellence of Lillard and McCollum, and solid play from the role players as well, the Blazers won 3 of the first 4 games. This set up a game 5 in Portland. Even though we were up 3-1, I still felt unsettled about the series. If we lost game 5 we’d have to travel back to OKC to play a tough game 6, and the pressure would mount. With prior failures in mind, I was conditioned to believe that we could somehow manage to lose the series.
Because the series featured lots of trash talk, led by Russell Westbrook, it had become more than a battle between teams - it was a faceoff between two star point guards. In game 5 the Blazers got off to a slow start, but kept in the game because of an offensive explosion from Lillard. We stormed ahead in the 3rd quarter before going ice cold and falling behind by 14 points with about 7 minutes left in the game. I texted with Taylor, my Opa (Grandpa), my Dad, my Mom, my Brother, and my friend Steve, complaining about poor shot selection and bad transition defense. Just when things seemed hopeless, Jusif Nurkic, with a healing fractured leg, showed up on the bench for the first time since his injury. When his face appeared on the jumbotron the Portland crowd exploded. My spirit lifted, and suddenly I felt hopeful that we could pull off a comeback. The Blazers felt it too, and stormed back to cut the lead to 2 with 38 seconds on the clock..
Coming out of a timeout, Lillard took the ball the length of the floor and scored an acrobatic layup to tie the game, and he did it quickly enough to assure another Blazers possession. Westbrook missed a wild layup over Aminu, and the Blazers secured the rebound, setting up the shot below:
Sitting alone in my room, I had the surreal experience of not believing what I knew I’d seen. It felt like the trite ending of a simpleminded inspirational movie when, in the final second, Lillard hit a 37-foot three pointer - his 50th point - to end the series. I sat with my hands on my head and my mouth wide open, frozen, taking in the pandemonium at the Moda Center. Immediately my phone blew up with texts and calls, but I stayed transfixed on the screen. When the camera panned to Lillard embracing his brother sitting courtside, and then to Nurkic, I felt tears well up in my eyes. For about 30 seconds I felt as if I was on acid. My Opa texted me, “Now I believe in God.”
When I finally regained my bearings I looked at my phone and saw that Taylor was calling, and we celebrated over the phone. After the call I remembered all my misgivings about following a team, and I thought to myself, “Of course I should be a sports fan”.
Sources
Sore Losers (Does Sports Make Us Unhappy?) - The Very Bad Wizards Podcast
In Praise of Athletic Beauty - Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Is Football a Matter of Life or Death - Or is it more Important than that?
Dear Abby: Sports fan’s mania leaves little time for relationship