Sal Paolantonio, contributor to ESPN once wrote a book called How Football Explains America. It’s full of high-minded ideas about how its goals reflect Manifest Destiny (get from one end all the way to the other) and that it is purely American in that its goal is to systematically take the space on the field, turning their territory into yours. While I appreciate the sentiment, I think Paolantonio maybe stretched things just a little bit. I won’t be discussing that today, I will be answering the question, “Why do people like sports so much?” Well, I’ll be discussing it the best way I can in 1,000 words. That may be able to reach the whole goal of 365,000 all on its own!
Sure, there are the superficial reasons like, for example, dingers are really cool. And hard hits are cool. And dunks are cool. However, I’d like to go a bit more in-depth than that.
The simplest way to explain the allure of sports, at least to me, is the same uniting force that has been behind the formation of every society since the beginning of time. Us vs. Them. Since I don’t want to take a hit from Ray Lewis or Haloti Ngata, I won’t be suiting up for the 49ers on Sunday. Neither will any of you, unless Colin Kaepernick or Aldon Smith read this silly thing. Nobody I know will suit up for the Niners, yet so many people refer to them as “we” or “us.” When you join the ranks of a fandom, you reap the benefits of joining a society. Fandom has all the trappings of a society, symbolism (logos), a history with milestones and touchpoints (The Catch, The Catch II, The Catch III), founding fathers (Bill Walsh, Eddie DeBartolo) and Elder Statesmen (Steve Young, Jerry Rice, Joe Montana, Ronnie Lott, Roger Craig… the list goes on). There are houses of worship and a collective consciousness associated with being the fan of a sports team, as well. Kate’s dad refers to going to Candlestick Park as, “going to church.”
Going back to the formation of humanity, you have to realize that there haven’t always been cities, or city-states. There haven’t always been nations and capitols. You have to realize that at some point decisions were made to band together forming alliances and societies. Once a group of people band together, they become an “us,” and anyone who opposed them became a “them.” Athens vs. Sparta is an us vs. them battle; as was the Axis vs. the Allies. The Allies weren’t friends, but they banded together against the dual threats of Germany/Italy and Japan. As the adage goes, the enemy of your enemy is your friend. In no respects would I saw that I am a friend of every 49ers fan, Giants fan or Kings fan. However, I consider all of them in my “us.” We share a society together; the cliché is that it is a “nation.” Raider Nation, Red Sox Nation, what have you. The terminology itself calls upon the loyalty and pride that accompanies a nationality.
This is also why territories play so heavily into fans selecting a team. These players share your space, these players share your city. Anything that befalls the city befalls them. Travelling teams are an abject failure because there is no reason at all to root for them. There are no ties to anything at all there. Now, this doesn’t necessary apply to states where there are no teams, but I may delve into that later.
So what? It’s a nation, a nation of people who you don’t know or even particularly like, tied together by a group of men that the vast majority of fans will never meet. Well, now that I’ve established the sense of group and community that stems from being fans of the shared team, I can get to my main point.
People watch sports because of the shared experience of watching the teams. The successes on the field are your successes. Their failures on the field hurt no less than your own. Simply put, the enjoyment of sports stems from the group experience of inserting yourself into the narrative. Anybody who has seen an amazing game live can tell you there is nothing compared to that experience. I had the extremely great pleasure of watching the 2011 Divisional Playoffs in person. This is the Saints vs. 49ers game wherein Vernon Davis caught the post from Alex Smith to win the game. If you’ve heard about the Niners, you know about this game. Candlestick was ridiculous after that game. People I never met and couldn’t pick out of a lineup were mobbing each other. I hugged everybody around me; people I’ve never seen before and will never see again. 69,000 and change shared in the success of the 53 down on the field. We bought in, whole hog, and it paid dividends.
However, being a sports fan is not all about that rush and excitement that comes from seeing your team succeed. I submit that the best fans are the fans of the teams that fail. By “fail” I don’t mean the fans of the 2012-13 Lakers who may or may not make the playoffs. I’m talking about chronic, abject failure. The Browns, the Kings, the Astros. These teams are are just flat out bad. Why would fans support them? Well, if you follow the narrative above, once you buy in, you’re in, for better or for worse. You’re, in your heart, a part of the team. You can’t leave the team just because they are bad because it feels like you’re abandoning a part of yourself. Just like you have to be bad at something to truly appreciate when something is good, the payoff of watching a bad team turn great is just as satisfying. Having lived through this in 2010 and 2012 with the Giants, I can tell you that it vindicates all the Ryan Kleskos and Lance Niekros. You watch to pay your dues, put in your time, and when your team gets good, you reap the sweet, sweet rewards.
This is why the issue with Sacramento and the Maloofs is so frustrating to me. I feel betrayed. I have felt betrayed for the last five years. I am emotionally invested in this team, and the Maloofs drove it into the ground without even trying to field a competitive product, and then they are trying to rip it away from us.
Imagine that you work and scrimp and save and you finally buy that nice manual sports car that you couldn’t really afford but you tried for years to get. This is the emotional capital that is invested in your team. Now imagine that you go to take a road trip in your brand spanking new car. Somewhere along the line, something goes horribly wrong, and your vehicle gets carjacked. The thief insists he can drive manual. He actually does a pretty good job at first. Then, for some reason or another, maybe his meds wear off, and he forgets how to drive manual. The thief spends the whole time in the wrong gear, and you are stuck in the passenger seat watching. Every time he tries to shift, he messes it up. You can hear your baby that you worked so hard to get being destroyed, but there is nothing you can do about it. You get angrier and angrier, an impotent rage that you can’t do anything about this person destroying that which you loved so much and worked so hard to achieve. He finally acquiesces and says he’s had his fun. He pulls over and tells you to get out of the car. He starts to get out and you think “finally!” There may be damage, but it’s fixable, you still have a car that you worked so hard to get. The thief then picks up a rock off the ground, and sticks it on the accelerator. You have to watch your car drive off a cliff and there is nothing you can do about it.
Then the thief gets millions of dollars for his effort.
Imagine the rage you would feel. Obviously in this situation, the sports car is the Kings, who finally got good around 2000. The Maloofs had just taken over and things were going smoothly. Then their meds wore off. They forgot how to put a competitive product on the floor—among many other things—and are now getting to sell the team for hundreds of millions of dollars for their effort. That anger and betrayal is hard to match (outside an outlandish scenario such as the above). This is our team, we’ve invested in it, and you can’t just take that from us. That is flat out betrayal. To put it flatly, you’re taking the centerpiece of the “us” that we have created, and you’re giving it to “them.” The others, the barbarians, the outsiders. They can’t have it, it’s ours. We’ve invested in it emotionally and monetarily.
To sum it all up, the reason that people love sports is that it creates a bond between strangers, for better or for worse. You can insert yourself into the narrative and make their successes your successes, and you feel the pangs of their failures. It is nation building on a minor scale, and harkens back to the early days of humanities when the first groups of people banded together over territory and whatever other random reason they could to create societies, then nations, then empires.
Side Note: While writing this, I remembered an interaction I had with a fan at the Niners-Packers Divisional Game this year. News had just broken that the Maloofs intended to sell to the Hansen-Ballmer group. They sat down in front of Kate’s family’s seats, and the guy was wearing a Kings windbreaker. “Go Niners!” he said. “Go Niners! I responded, “and screw the Maloofs!” He responded in kind, “screw the Maloofs!” Two fans who never met before and never met again shared joy and despair over such a short exchange. Both knew what the other had gone through and experienced in relation to those two franchises. To steal from Chasing Amy, we “shared a moment.”
That, right there, is why people love sports.
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