To be a sports fan is to be irrational. It’s not a hobby one can master or improve upon. There’s no way to be a better fan. It means investing no small part of your personal happiness in the skill and execution of others. It means at best a one-in-thirty chance of being happy at the end of any given year (less so if you’re a fan of any team except the Dodgers).
Besides that, the actual selection of a team is also irrational. Any reasonable person would pick the best team because it gives them the highest odds of happiness. They would then switch to the new best team when time and inertia drained the previous best team of their success. But this is the logic of front-running children, who should be locked in little boxes until their cortexes finish baking. As sports fans, we don’t want to pick the winner. We want to pick our team and then we want our team to win, not on merit, but because they are ours.
Picking a team usually means one of a few options. Geographic proximity is the most sensible. This is the team closest to you, who you’re likeliest to just bump into on the front page of the newspaper, the local television channels, maybe when you’re walking downtown. The team that, in theory, is easiest to follow and who you should be inclined to root for, because your town doesn’t suck. Even if it does, you’re not going to let some moron from the next town over say that. America might be homogeneous, but the Starbucks and Price Chopper in your town are noble and just, while the Piggly Wiggly and the Starbucks in the next state over are poorly run and cater to rock-eating clods. So your town rules. It had better, you’re in it, and YOU don’t suck. As such, your team should also rule.
But maybe you’re a transplant and have no attachment to your city. You might even hate it, because it’s where your job is and your job is bad. You wish you were in the bucolic town of your childhood. So you keep cheering for the team of your childhood home, because they rule and they play in a place that when you were there was full of happiness and joy and the local Pizza Hut still had a buffet last you checked.
Rooting for the teams of our mothers and fathers is the kissing cousin of the childhood home town transplant fandom. Generational trauma comes in many forms, so if your dad is a fan of the Bears because his dad grew up in Chicago, then that’s that. Even if your dad never got any closer to Chicago than a layover in Detroit, his childhood memories involve happiness from a place he never lived in, a photocopy of a photocopy of joy. Now that’s your team. It’s irrational. You’re a grown up, and you wouldn’t beat your partner just because your grandpa did. You can choose your own team. But you sit with this legacy the same way you cough like your grandpa did and you snore like your great grandfather, even though you never met him.
There’s also rooting for the underdog. It’s fun to go against the grain, to be a rugged iconoclast. Movies tell us this all the time. We don’t root for Cobra Kai even though they are objectively better at karate. We root for that little shit Daniel-san because there’s a spark of joy in the unexpected. A good kid wins with moxy and guts and gumption, while the more talented guy who trained his whole life loses just because he was a dick one time. This is how an entire generation got suckered into cheering for the Giants, because Tom Brady and Bill Belichick spent an entire season sweeping the leg and joylessly sucking the marrow out of the sport. We like to cheer for the best team, until they get too good, and then we want to be surprised when David beats Goliath. If the Bible was written today, we’d be saying Goliath shouldn’t be punished for his God (?) given talent and natural size advantage, and we’d be lamenting how the Shepherd system of slingshot offense had ruined the game we grew up loving. Pretty much how we feel watching Mac Jones somehow succeed on the 49ers.
The underdog affiliation is dissatisfying because they are usually the underdog for a reason, and even if they have a New York Giants legacy of winning unexpected Superbowls, those moments of sheer joy are bookending years of utter humiliation and pain. You date the underdog, you don’t marry them.
There’s a version of the underdog rooting interest, and that’s where I find myself. I call it spite-based fandom. Spite-based fandom is not picking a team because they are the underdog. It’s picking a team because you hate whoever they are playing against so much that you’d cheer for a team of serial rapists and cannibals first.
I first discovered spite-based fandom as a child. My dad loved the New York Jets. Why? I don’t know. Because he lived in upstate New York and was an asshole. I didn’t bother to ask him. I just knew I wasn’t going to cheer for his loser ass team with their bum ass green uniforms and dumb name. So I said, who do they hate? And they didn’t really hate anyone, the way flies don’t really hate the swatter. But my dad suggested the Patriots, a team with a more recent Superbowl appearance and a hot young quarterback named Drew Bledsoe. And I was off, a newly converted Patriots fan.
Did I get to enjoy the decades of success to come? Dear reader, I did not. I jumped off the Patriots after they defeated the Rams in Tom Brady’s first Superbowl. Why? Because I thought they’d give the starting QB job back to my man Bledsoe, who didn’t deserve to lose his job just because the opposing teams were cracking his chest open like a cadaver. Fuck these guys, and fuck Tom Brady in particular, I thought. And I thought, at least I still have my NFC team. More on them in a moment.
During these critical moments of development, I picked my baseball and basketball teams as well. I didn’t grow up liking baseball. Too boring, and I was too short and unathletic and nerdy and antisocial to play in little league. But I saw a lot of Yankee caps in my school. “Who do the Yankees hate?” I asked my best friend, John. “The Red Sox,” he replied. That was all I needed. Never mind that John was the only Mets fan in school and we could have bonded over that if I was picking teams out of a hat. No sir. The spite train was the only train this moral hobo was riding.
Speaking of John, as a good front running child of the 90s, he was also a Bulls fan. Now, there was a slam dunk (pun intended) path to happiness. Rooting for Michael Jordan was like betting on the sun rising in the morning. It was the only sure thing and no one questioned it. I could have been watching the Jordan Bulls rack up win after win and championship after championship, enjoying the glow of euphoria that only came from cocaine and ska music.
So that was how I became a Utah Jazz fan. I’ve only met one other Jazz fan in my lifetime and he absolutely did not want to talk to me about it. I stand as the only man in the world still angry that Deron Williams was the only guy who didn’t play scared, because if Andrei Kirilenko had sacked up for 15 minutes, the Jazz could have beaten the Duncan Spurs (chokers) and beaten baby LeBron to win a championship in 2007. Instead, the Jazz chased their Hall of Fame coach into retirement, traded Williams, embraced a tank job that has been going on for five years and counting now, and oh by the way John Stockton turned out to be an anti-vaxxer and Karl Malone a pedophile. I hate everything.
If spite-based fandom never brings happiness (aside from the Red Sox, who I don’t talk about because it’s the only guaranteed way to make everyone hate me), why not choose a better path? Why not cheer for success or sustained excellence or high achievement? Well, for that, I have two words: Barry Sanders.
As a child, Barry Sanders was electrifying. He’d run into a cloud of linemen on my tiny 13 inch television, gritty with static and low resolution, and he’d emerge like a hamster making a break for the floorboards. He had a commercial with Dennis Hopper speaking of him in mystical reverence. He made Chris Berman squeak like a chewtoy. Barry Sanders was the greatest athlete I’d ever seen, and he brought me pure joy.
He also retired in his prime. Then the Lions went 0-16. Then they drafted Calvin Johnson (Megatron, the greatest Decepticon), wasted him, and he retired in his prime. They also drafted and wasted Matthew Stafford, who they traded to the Rams where he promptly won a Superbowl.
Barry Sanders condemned me to a lifetime of “This famous historical figure died having never seen the Lions win a Superbowl” jokes and argument ending “count the ring” taunts from BEARS FANS of all people. Choosing a team based on the conventional method of “they bring me joy” led me to a lifetime of misery.
I guess my advice, having established that I am a fool, is this: cheer for spite. Chances are, at the end of any given game at least 50% of the people involved will be sad. Possibly more. Glory is unlikely and temporary. Schadenfreude creates the same heat in your belly as victory and twenty-nine teams losing is more likely than one team winning. So cheer for pain. Cheer for sad Yankee fans, bitter Bears fans, Draymond Green getting slapped in the groin. Cheer for the meteorite and the terrorist attack. Whatever you do, don’t cheer for the team that makes you happy.
