Sportsfans like to differentiate real and false team affiliation. It’s old, honored etiquette: if someone in your living room or on the stool left at the bar demonstrates an appropriate deficit of genuine rooting interest or understanding of the sport viewed, their opinion may be loudly discounted as irrelevant: they aren’t real fans. They don’t know what they’re talking about, which gives you the right (if sober) or more of a right than previously exercised (if not quite sober) to spill invective like acid.
Granted, this idea is somewhat absurd on its face: we all have, in a sense, false team affiliation, in that none of us are actually on the team and really can’t speak for it. That said, there are three reasons a line between real and false fans must be drawn:
(1.) Sports rely on spectators with a rooting interest. The industry would collapse instantly if the concept of a home team evaporated. High-level sport is a grueling physical contest; it would be almost impossible not to pick a side, however arbitrarily, if such a contest were viewed repeatedly. Someone has to win; someone has to lose. While rooting merely for good play is enough for some, it isn’t for most, and such abstract appreciation, while admirable among those with real knowledge of the games played, can never be a complete substitute for the thrill of vicarious winning.
(2.) Given (1.), emotional attachment develops to stadiums and players and logos and jerseys. The emotionally invested cannot merely sit by while either generally disinterested spectators or those with no knowledge of gameplay whatsoever loudly claim to approximate such emotional investment. It’s insulting to those who care, and results in arguments that have progressively less to do with a shared love of the game than a desire to yell indiscriminately (which is a large piece of the fun in college athletics particularly, but still: lines need to be drawn).
(3.) I’m a real fan.
With this in mind, here follow the rules for establishing true rooting interest that, while it may bring you derision, should also result in understated respect from those in the know.
1. Love of the Game
This is fairly obvious. Well, it ought to be at any rate: You need to actually like the game you’re watching, or at least the theatrics and social scene associated with it, to root fairly. That frat bro insisting that “Dude, Crosby is a beast!” to his fellow man generally is just covering the fact that he’s never sat through a period of hockey before. You have to enjoy a given sport to explain effectively to other fans why their team is rubbish. That’s where it gets fun.
2. Knowledge
Ultimately, this simple step is what loses the vast bulk of the viewing audience at the Super Bowl (and probably Vinny Del Negro). To have a legitimate rooting interest, you need to understand how the game is played. You don’t have to be a coach, or even have played the game yourself. You just have to see what’s happening as it happens on a basic conceptual level.
There’s usually one rule, position, or procedure that, if questioned, demonstrates your inability to, at present, function as a fan. Examples by sport:
Football (American)
“Why don’t they just pick up the ball?”
Football (Soccer)
“Why does that guy have a flag?”
Hockey
“What the hell is icing?”
Baseball
“Why does the display say 3-2? Nobody scored, right?”
Basketball
“Why is part of the court a different color?”
Cricket
No one should give a damn about cricket.
3. Location
Once an interest in a given game is secure, to properly root for a side the fan must have some tie to the physical location of his or her team. The easiest way to establish this, of course, is to be born in a city with a major sports team, then grow up thrilled with the very existence of said team in your town. That’s normal and proper, which is why Chicago and Boston and Philly and New York are known for (perhaps unreasonably) devoted fans: they’re large cities with enormous rings of suburb producing generations of local spectators. Really, this sort of bitter, alternately smug or fatalist generational obsession with the exploits of large athletic persons in the Midwest and Northeast is the oddly heartwarming bedrock of true American fandom. Throwing snowballs at Santa Claus; screaming all uncouth hellfire at the nearest opposing jersey; teaching your children this unhealthy devotion: all part of the true fan ethos.
Of course, there are necessary exceptions to the location rule. You might live in Montana. Or you might be rooting for an NBA team when coming from Russia, or a La Liga side as a Canadian (which would be simply weird, but bear with me). In these cases, essentially just picking a team to follow is acceptable, provided the two previous conditions (love and knowledge of the game) are met. Also, the pick cannot be based on last season’s winning percentage. You can pick a winner, but you have to like a player or coach or system in place, or have a love of the city in which the team is based. Otherwise, you’re starting as a fairweather fan, and are doomed at the outset. (Also, if at any time vacationing to the city in question, you will, to the best of your ability, see a game in person.)
As a quick note: there is no exception to the location rule for colleges. Your undergraduate university team is your team for life and that’s the end of it. For God’s sake; you take the easiest classes with the athletes. You live with these people. It’s your side: you are your college. Any freshman wearing a UF shirt on Alabama’s campus deserves the beating coming his way. It doesn’t matter if your dad is the chancellor of the damn school. It’s just not cool.
A word must also be said about the Indoctrination Clause. Let’s say, for illustrative purposes, that you are a loyal Detroit Red Wings fan, having grown up in Grand Rapids. One day, you realize that you’ve been living in Grand Rapids, and move to Chicago. In the city, you get married and have a kid. The kid, bless her tiny heart, thinks that Chicago Blackhawks jerseys look cool.
Under no circumstance will you allow this to stand. You will wear your Red Wings jersey at all times around the house. You will, when Red Wings games play on your NHL cable pass (which was purchased for indoctrination purposes), give your child s’mores, so that she associates marshmallows and paternal bonding with the Detroit Red Wings. You will try, to the best of your abilities, to dress her in team colors at all times. Is it sane? Of course not. Is it morally questionable? That’s questionable (so: yes). But you are performing your sacred duty to spread the joy and misery of countless Red Wings seasons to your little girl. And when she grows up in Chicago rooting for Detroit’s squad, she’ll explain to the innumerable assholes questioning her allegiance that she used to watch Wings games with her father.
This is the Indoctrination Clause. Your daughter has demonstrated an acceptable level of connection to a team in whose city she will never live. It is why despite growing up in Florida, I suffer with the Philadelphia Eagles every season. Thanks, Dad.
4. The Four Seasons
Now that you like the game, understand the game, and have a rooting interest, as a fan you must be further developed by pain. There is really no easy way to do this. To grow from novitiate to loyal fan, you must experience the four seasons:
(a) The season of obsession
This happens best when you’re a small child, or at least in high school, because eventually you’ll have to do things like get a job and groom yourself and appear attractive to the opposite sex without using Axe. So spending your time on professional games is easiest in the early days.
That said, it can happen any time. It can happen even when you’ve casually watched for years: that season where you find yourself worried about the team’s draft, or knowing the names of the backups, or being able, without reference to Google, to quote the team’s current winning percentage in conversation. You have arguments with the coach he isn’t even aware of; you check the division standings daily; you fear deeply for the left knee of a reserve. This is the season of obsession. It can only be maintained lifelong by a select few (these are called coaches, or, if not actually paid by a team, sportswriters), but it’s necessary for the formation of every true fan; a time where your irrational linkage of mood and score became permanent, and you were forever scarred accordingly.
(b.) The season of suffering
This may be more than one actual season. Or it might be a single game to ruin an otherwise sparkling run. Or it might be every season (in which case the team is called the Cubs). But you have to suffer with your team. This isn’t negotiable. If it’s losing in the AFC championship game or going 20-62 in the NBA, it doesn’t matter: rooting, in the one of the rare ways it mirrors the real life surrounding it, needs bad times to cement identification, as well as to put wins in perspective. If you’re just there for the party, you’re not a fan.
(c.) The offseason
At some point, the offseason becomes a notable part of your universe. This isn’t necessarily terrible: if you have a well-adjusted life, you might enjoy the free afternoons, or the days spent without biting your fingernails. But you have to notice, somewhere, that the world is not quite as it should be, because your team isn’t playing. You will likely track their offseason moves with interest, should you have time. You will mark opening day. You will be offended by the first person to ask, “Is the season over?” Of course its over. It’s the offseason. A time of hope, fear, and existential unrest. Bring on the games.
(d.) Next season
Once you know the game and team, and have suffered, and have the parameters of league play imbedded into your brian like an internal clock, it’s time to do it again. And again. Until you can start telling younger fans what it was like ten years ago, then twenty. It doesn’t have to suck up your life like it did in the obsessional year, and it’s hopefully not always miserable (apologies, Browns). But you have to watch and hope year after year that your squad will do well relative to their abilities, and root them on. It’s an infuriating, liberating, and amusing part of your life now; a cycle running through the year like fall or summer. The logo, the memories, and the absurd desire to see folks you’ve never met achieve their professional goals year after year are part of your world, in some way, for as long as you’re in it.
You’re a true fan.
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