This weekend is the weekend all American sports fans die and go to heaven, right? Well, then I must not be a very good sports fan.
I'm actually a very big fan of sports - just someone who came to it at a later age in life (if college can be considered "later" in these things). I love seeing the best team or individual rewarded for displaying superior athleticism on the field/pitch/court, and I enjoy the pageantry and watching things change over time.
However, there's something that's always made me probably not so good of a sports fan: I am the quintessential middle child. The easiest and most preferred option was always to go along with what others in "the pack" wanted to do, to seek out their preference and adopt it as my own - to not have my own differing opinion. Combine that with being raised by parents who insisted we talk through everything in our lives (and who didn't watch sports, except to cheer on their children for their own success) and I learned at an early age that I didn't want to stick out too much and sports outside of mine or my family's direct participation was generally considered to be a waste of time.
Fast forward to 2010, the year when I left the first pack I'd ever willfully selected in my adult life, in San Francisco, when I moved to LA. The pain of leaving the pack of which I'd grown so fond, while it has dulled and softened over the years, is still very easily reopened at times when I feel distinctly set apart from what once was all I'd ever known.
What does this have to do with sports?
Well, sports fandom is very much something that I've experienced through the lens of my pack. Within two years of moving to San Francisco, I loved my Giants, cheered for the A's (which made me not a very good Giants fan, but whatever), enjoyed a few 49ers games in person and otherwise watched their games, and adopted the PAC-10 as my new favorite collegiate conference (yes, I went to Cal, but the football team was never very good in my time there). I never did give up on my alma mater - Michigan - even as they struggled for years in football (and still do) - mostly because I was and still am a die-hard Wolverine. It was at Michigan that I finally started to find that voice inside me that has only gotten stronger since.
So then I fell in love with a man who went to USC and Ohio State. Ahem, "The Ohio State University." Yeah, whatever. :-) Our rivalry relationship ought to be the subject of a separate blog post. Suffice to say that I learned to get over my irrational despising of another place, and I actually now cheer on both the Trojans and Bucks, all within reason of course, and certainly NEVER when they're playing my schools.
Which is part of what makes me a bad sports fan, right?
And then there's that thing about my pack. When I moved to LA, I left my pack, and I left behind the teams I cheered for. As the Giants finally won their first World Series in like 50 years that fall of 2010, I watched and cheered for them in the solitude of my living room or on tvs in LA bars, where most others were nonplussed. It was a lonely experience, but at least my husband supported me. It was also a moment when I questioned why it mattered so much.
Only months later I went to my first game at Dodgers Stadium and had a horrible experience as a Giants fan (yeah, the night after Brian Stowe was beaten within an inch of his life). And I still loathed the Lakers, couldn't care less about the Clippers, definitely did not like the Angels, and had little reason to give UCLA a second thought. I was a middle child without a herd who'd plopped his blazing orange butt down in a raging sea of blue.
Then something strange happened. The pack that I'd left behind turned into its own mosh pit. I watched as friends mocked the teams in my town, even as I generally felt little interest in them. It was all in good fun, I suppose, but the comments often came from people who'd also freely told me how much they disliked my newly adopted city. I mean, who does that? That's just rude - and people generally did it because they felt like it was normal to just say awful things about someone else's home. It felt, somehow, personal. And the sports angle was an element of that - clearly about something not linked to a person's identity, and yet layered on top of that.
The Dodgers weren't just a rival team in blue, they were the team from LOS ANGELES. I'd already felt the sting of people openly doubting or mocking my decision to move south, and now the same people were mocking my home teams. It lit a small flame where there'd previously only been embers.
Fast forward a few years, and I've adopted my LA teams (not the ones in Orange County, mind you). I've cheered on the Kings and been to both their Stanley Cup parades, lost my voice at a Galaxy game and read up on Robbie Rogers, and even regularly sport a Dodgers ballcap that has oddly become a part of my journey, actively choosing a pack I'd once despised, and now separating myself from the only pack I'd once ever known.
From my time growing up in a family where sports was always personal (because we only ever watched sports when a family member was playing), and in an environment where I learned to be an ally to those around me and not rock the boat, I've now forced myself to independently choose and cheer for teams I once mocked and loathed but in which I now oddly find some redemption. Yes, sports for me is entertainment, but it's also a living, breathing metaphor for something much bigger than that.
Which is why this morning I'm labeling myself a "bad sports fan." I actually genuinely care about the success of people like Tom Brady, Russell Wilson, Yasiel Puig, Clayton Kershaw, Robbie Rogers, and Jonathan Quick. I also genuinely care about the impact my alma mater's football program has on the pride and pleasure that its current students get out of going to games that I still remember as the only reason I ever started caring about sports - outside of just for playing them - in the first place. And I genuinely care about seeing my adopted home teams do well and the feeling of community that comes from a whole city collectively getting behind something that's fun.
So, go Tom Brady, and go Russell Wilson. I hope that you have a fantastic Superb Owl. And if that makes me a "bad sports fan," so be it.
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