A Non-Sports Fan’s Guide to the Diseased Little Mind of a Sports Fan

Why my disorder is healthy

Above: Tottenham fans struggle to come to grips with the fact that they are Tottenham fans. (photo by Bradley Collyer via Getty)

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Explaining sports fandom to an alien would make you sound insane. “You see,” I’d tell Alf as his probe poked against my spleen, “I’m pretty in to this thing where groups of guys compete to see who’s better at hitting a ball with a stick. The group of guys I like — none of whom I’ve ever met — was pretty good at hitting the ball this year. But in the end, a different group of guys was better. Anyway: That’s why I screamed at my son for incorrectly identifying the sound that a horsey makes.”¹

A sports fan’s mood swings can be baffling to those who don’t partake. I would, after all, gain nothing real if my team won — no dividend check was coming in the mail — and no hired goons will arrive at my house now that my team lost. The whole thing is so abstract that I might as well cheer for the weather; in my wife’s eyes, it’s like I’ve been grumpy for the last couple days because it rained in Uruguay when I wanted sun.

But I’m here to argue that experiencing real mood changes because of sports is rational. Oh sure: It’s weird, silly, and needs to be kept in check — I’m not saying that it’s okay to put your fist through the china hutch because your team missed a field goal. But I think experiencing sports as if they actually matter makes sense. I think it’s a thing that humans do because it provides things that humans need.

The first important point is that we all need leisure time, since we are neither robots nor 19th century Irish immigrants.² All work and no play does, indeed, make Jack a dull boy, as you know if you’ve ever been stuck in a conversation with a 20-something lawyer cutting their teeth at a big firm. We need hobbies — gardening, falconing, enforcing homeowners association rules with the rigidity of the East German secret police (the #1 pastime of the elderly)…anything. We need a treat on the weekend so that we’ll face the drudgery of the week without going on a shooting spree.

Sports are a popular leisure choice largely because they appeal to something deep inside of us. For the first 199,950 years of human existence, survival depended on outcompeting your rivals; only in the last few decades has the ability to bury your ax in a rival’s skull become less important than, say, proficiency in Microsoft Excel. People — especially guys — are wired to compete. Sports let us channel our innate competitiveness into non-murderous forums so that we can experience competition without sacking, looting, and burning cities except for our own city when our team wins a championship.

Sports are also social. When a country does well at a World Cup, there’s often a baby boom in that country nine months later, because the World Cup is a nation-wide party, and when a party goes well, people shag. Sports are one of the few things I had in common with my dad, and I’m currently sharing Seattle Mariners grief with my sister, one of the only other Mariner fans where we now live in Other Washington. At a time when social media is atomizing society and rotting our brains, getting together with friends to yell at a TV and eat food that’s basically a cheese-flavored suicide attempt oddly seems like one of the healthiest things a person can do.

And actually caring about sports is what makes it fun. TV writers (I used to be one) talk a lot about “stakes”, which is shorthand for “why should anyone care about this made-up bullshit?” A good show or movie makes you legitimately care about the characters; I felt something when Jesse broke free at the end of Breaking Bad, which is bizarre, because I knew that “Jesse” was an actor who would not be trapped in a meth dungeon and was probably playing Willy Loman on Broadway at that very moment. Between sports, entertainment, and the notion that your bond with your pet is anything other than transactional, probably everyone on Earth attaches importance to at least one utterly made up thing.

I like sports more than other forms of entertainment because the stakes are real. When you’ve worked in entertainment, it’s hard to not see the wires holding up the facade; 99.8 percent of the time, what happens in the story is what needs to happen to keep the show or movie going — that’s why a henchman could fire a machine gun at James Bond from five feet away for 20 straight minutes and not hit him once. In sports, you might actually lose. It might even be a crushing, unfair loss from which no one learns anything except “shit fucking sucks sometimes.” A screenwriter won’t expose the audience to heartbreak because we want to keep you coming back, but sports does not promise justice — right, Bills fans? The lack of a safety net makes it exciting.

It’s human to want a diversion, and it’s extra nice when that diversion can be experienced while snacking and lying horizontally. Personally, I’ve chosen a diversion that scratches an evolutionary itch, brings me closer to people I care about, and has me hanging on every twist and turn because anything can happen. The result is that I honestly do care whether a ball in a far-off city goes into the thing or merely near the thing — and I admit that that’s weird! It’s weird, arbitrary, and — from an evolutionary perspective — one crazy-ass development. But don’t call it “irrational”, because I actually think it makes perfect sense.

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1. I did not actually do this. I’ll tell some jokes in this piece, but I honestly think I’m pretty good at keeping my sports-induced grumpiness in check.

2. I josh the Irish. I consider them fully human — I’m quite progressive!