It seems to me one of life’s great mysteries that we root for sports teams. By “we” I mean not just the sort who strip in freezing weather and paint themselves blue, or beat up those who make the wrong choice in their rooting. No, I mean a lot of otherwise quite reasonable people, including most of the men I know and a surprising number of women, who you would think would surely know better. Including, yes, myself.
We seem to be absolutely desperate to root for something, anything. How else to explain our ability to ignore all the reasons not to root for what we root for.
The current Red Sox scandal, for instance. First there was the expenditure of obscene amounts to put together a team that surely would at least get into the World Series. Even if the Sox had gone all the way, the triumph would have carried an implicit asterisk, as have all Yankee triumphs for right-thinking people everywhere: * bought by obscene wealth.
The role of money in creating an uneven playing field ruins the drama of sports. Or so you would think.
At least the Yankees have succeeded much of the time in getting what they paid for. Our already morally suspect team on the other hand goes into an unprecedented late season swoon and ends up not even making the playoffs because, as portrayed in the media, instead of actually trying to win and caring about how things were going (as fans were caring so desperately about them), players were lolling about the clubhouse drinking beer, eating pizza and generally behaving like dissolute louts.
Every year we see key players we have come to adore as only fans can adore their idols perfectly willing, for mere money, to pull up stakes and lend their skills and their portable loyalty to another team, sometimes the very team they have pretended to hate along with all their fans, t he object of the entire region’s hatred (see Roger Clemens, Johnny Damon, etc). You’d think this would be disheartening to fans. But you’d be wrong. Undeterred by betrayal after betrayal of this sort, the dedicated fan roots on.
Recently there was a news story on the University of Connecticut being chastised for failing to graduate most of their basketball players (who last year once again won the national championship). Apparently they are working on this; “ UConn men’s team improving academically” went the headline. Ah the hypocrisy; gotta love it. As if college b’ball and academics have anything more to do with each other than the female bodies that used to be draped on cars to sell them had with automotive performance, or cowboy macho with Marlboro coffin nails. As if it makes any sense to require these geniuses at what they do to go anywhere near a classroom, especially given the high drama of their lives during the long season.
Of course if a player wants the degree (or even the knowledge, who knows?) as a hedge against failing at the pro level, it should be available. But let’s not kid ourselves; they and we all know why they are there.
Why would undergrads and graduates feel any particular connection to the young pre-professional athletes recruited by their alma mater to wear the uniform? No logic to it whatsoever. Or so you would think.
Money, lack of loyalty, hypocrisy…let me see. I haven’t even mentioned the steroid scandal that makes the greatest individual as well as team performance suspect, requiring more asterisks.
Surely, given all the good reasons not to be one, you would predict that there would be no sports fans at all.
But we seem hardwired to need to root passionately for something. Blindly, crazily, irrationally for sports teams if not for something that actually makes sense: the return of economic good times, a cure for cancer, the triumph of good over evil, clarity over confusion, Pete Seeger for president, Philip Roth to win the Nobel
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