Enjoy the game. I'll be back early tomorrow with more exciting entries from the Boston Globe.
"Are we teaching kids the wrong parts of being a fan?" by J. Niels Rosenquist | August 17, 2014
At its best, sport should be one of life’s great metaphors, filled with lessons to be learned about hard work and the role of chance, winning and losing, and sportsmanship regardless of the outcome.
You gotta love sports! It's one of the protocols to being an Amerikan.
I think that, like most children who enjoy sports, my son’s initial tendency will be toward experiencing competition through that lens.
What I worry about is letting the more negative parts of fandom — some of which I definitely see within myself — take root. Enjoying the misery of others has always been a part of sports. The problem is that, more and more often, I am also not alone in taking greater pleasure in seeing rivals, and their fans, lose than in my own team’s victories. Do we really want to teach our kids that name-calling, nastiness, and bullying are wrong — unless, that is, it’s in the name of “supporting” our team?
What do we tell them of mass-murdering wars built upon foundations of lies, and the propaganda pre$$ that sold them?
I’m not the first person to note that sports rivalries share much in common with other forms of tribalism throughout human history.
Interesting choice of words there.
What else would explain how I can easily choose one team to cheer for in an English Premier League match between two cities I have no ties to, a game that has zero impact on American soccer.
A wager?
I just need the opportunity to root for one group against another. Psychologists call it “basking in reflected glory”
— when we seek to associate ourselves with a team and pretend that its
success somehow elevates us as fans even though we only watched.
Of course, when one of the teams involved actually is “my” team, things deteriorate even more quickly.
I find myself engaged in real and imaginary vitriolic exchanges with people — including my friends
— about college and pro football.
This guy is the adult, right?
I can’t deny this trigger within me,
where a TV sporting event can and does conjure up intense negative
emotion, which I can’t turn off. Jerseys become an object of my own
emotional projections or, as Jerry Seinfeld once observed, laundry I am rooting for.
And when my team does lose, I rationalize it by finding alternative ways that it is — and, by extension, I am — superior.
A certain tribe does seem to have that mindset, yeah.
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Not infrequently, however, I also find myself angry, frustrated, and just plain mean when rooting for — and especially against — teams even in sports that I don’t usually follow. Watching the Red Sox lose to the Yankees in the 2003 American League Championship Series is understandably emotional, but the 2012 Ryder Cup? I probably don’t watch more than an hour of golf in a year, and yet I found myself despairing angrily as the US team choked away the title.
Obviously I’m not the only person to succumb to these tendencies. Examples abound from the offbeat and sad, like the poisoning of special trees at Auburn by a disturbed Alabama fan, to fan injuries and even deaths resulting from fights at sporting matches here and abroad. In the past, when I had no connection to these teams or leagues, I might shake my head and softly laugh at “crazy SEC fans” or “football hooligans,” for those folks are clearly unhinged and not like me. The truth, however, is that I see the roots of some of these disturbing outcomes in my own emotional reactions to events.
Yet being a good sport is becoming increasingly difficult. While there have always been unruly fans, today’s ever-expanding “sports-industry complex” is making matters worse.
Earl Warren, the former chief justice, famously declared that he read the sports pages before the news in order to read of man’s accomplishments before his failures. Modern sports media, though, thrives on missteps and shortfalls. Controversy brings millions of viewers to television channels like ESPN and thousands of hits to sports websites. Twenty-four hours a day, the most intense fans can weigh in, stoking a never-ending flame war (see James, LeBron) of comments by haters, trolls, and other unpleasant web denizens.
For live events, team owners face a delicate balance of taking money from the most rabid fans while ensuring they don’t cross the line into family-unfriendly territory. NFL ads focus on excited fans anxiously watching a last-minute play, cheering a win, or heartbroken over a loss. The angry fan exploding never appears — though it is often not hard to find him at the game. Like the alcohol industry, sports teams probably don’t want to enable people whose addiction has gotten out of control. Yet the reality remains it’s those individuals filling their coffers, leaving little incentive to keep sports civil.
What’s comforting, though, is how different my experience as a fan is from that of being an athlete myself. Thinking again of my son, I want him to know the fun and satisfaction I feel when I shoot hoops or throw around the football in the backyard. When I play, almost all of my aggression and emotion is directed toward the physical activity. Sure, I may get into it with someone who calls touch fouls (or dishes out inappropriately hard ones) in a pick-up game. Yet, more often than not, in the exhaustion I feel at the end, I shake hands with my competition and look forward to playing again.
I will admit, I get caught up in competition on the basketball court, and it points out to myself how inculcated and indoctrinated I have been since birth. Never realized it, and even loved it.
Just another lo$$ now.
And that’s what I want to teach my son about being a fan, too. To respect those who choose to root against his interests, to imagine being the person in the other laundry.
Why did Palestine just flash into my mind?
I’m going to start by reminding myself of that goal every day as I head back over to the Eagles/Michigan blogs I read obsessively. I can’t stop being a fan, but hopefully I can be a better one.
If only war crimes and genocide were a game.
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