The fan condition

In trying times, sports brings us together

Even in these perilous days, more of us are residing upon this little whirling speck in space as fans than as citizens. At this time, more of us are devoted to a team than at any time in history. People all over the world are rooting for their World Cup squad. In this neck of the woods, we are pulling for clubs in the Stanley Cup and NBA Finals. And baseball season is in full swing. Other leagues carry on, everywhere; other games, other races. Tiger is at the tee.

The Lingua Franca of our world is a cheer.

Sports has been with us for all antiquity, but the team -- our team -- the league, the schedule, the playoffs, the championship -- this is a modern development, more for sociologists to study than for anthropologists. It is spectator sports that are the opiate of us 21st century people -- well, except perhaps when religion poses as another competition.

Sports fans, of course, are commonly derided. The extremists among them are employed as models for the whole cohort. Enthusiasts are portrayed as violent hooligans, or as shallow imbeciles with no sense of proportion. There he is, the fat fellow in the Barcalounger, munching candy, swilling beer, pudgy fingers on the clicker, oblivious to family and all other persons not dressed in numbered uniforms. But that's a cheap characterization.

Let's hear it for the Red Wings fans in Detroit, and the Azzurri faithful in Milan, and the Mariners admirers in Seattle, and all the others, wherever in the world they care about their team. I suspect that most people who grow up as sports fans learn loyalty and learn to endure defeat and learn to deal better with the vicissitudes of life. For all that sports teaches its participants, I'm not so sure that it doesn't instruct its devotees even better.

I've always found, for one small example, that while women are supposed to be the sweeter flowers in our garden, the men who grow up sports fans tend to be the most sentimental of all God's creatures. You learn to love and you learn to dream when you're nurtured, as a child, to care about a team, suffering with its defeat and daring to anticipate its victory. I'm sure those experiences make fans more romantic -- even more generous and understanding.

And, in a world so fragmented, a team unifies. It makes such precious strange bedfellows. You don't commune in a dark theatre or a quiet library or even in the happiest zoo quite the way you do in a stadium. Sports fans are social creatures, our best busybodies.

That's why I'm so dubious about all these fantasy leagues, rotisserie baseball and the like. They're insular, rather than embracing. It's my club, my players, my victory. Teams aren't meant to do that. They're meant -- as they are doing now, in this June of 2002 -- to help us find common cause, there with one another. No, not to escape from the anguish of the world, but to find within ourselves, together, how to care and how to share something passionately, so that we may transport those sensitivities to where it matters more in the larger fullness of our lives.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. His new novel, The Other Adonis (Sourcebooks Landmark), is available now at bookstores everywhere.

The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer

 

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