My Contradictory Fandom

On Friday, the football team from the high school that I attended won its fifth state championship. (The first four came in 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2005.) The game was televised in my area and I watched the second half of it on television. While I was not really vocal about it, I was inwardly rooting for them to win and, then, I was subsequently happy to see them win. Yet, I recognize that that happiness is a very contradictory kind of happiness in two ways:

First, that I should root for a team to win its fifth championship in twelve seasons isn’t particularly consistent with my view of parity in sports (a view that I have discussed, to some extent, here and here), particularly when there are scores of teams playing in the same division and playing for the same championship as the high school that I attended. I tend to think that New York Yankees fans, Ohio State football fans, Detroit Red Wings fans, New York Yankees fans, Duke basketball fans, Los Angeles Lakers fans, New York Yankees fans, New York Yankees fans, and others who expect championships every year are being egregious in their desires. Yet, here I was rooting for a team to maintain a very similar kind of dominance, as if it deserved to win so many more championships than everyone else.

Second, I hated my high school when I attended it. At one point while I was there, the parish (it’s a Catholic school) held a rally to support the school because there were concerns that it might have to close. Not only did I not attend the rally; I openly wished for the place to close. So, it’s kind of strange for me today to root for the football team from that place.

I think these contradictions point out a couple of things about sports identifications. First, we find ways to justify the identifications and rooting interests that we have, even when they contradict our own ideological perspectives. Because of that, I can find myself rooting against parity in one instance, even as I espouse the desirability of parity in so many other instances. Second, we become branded with these identities strongly when we are young and that branding is hard to break. I think this is similar to how individuals find themselves rooting for their home country in the Olympics, even if they have good reasons why they might not want to do so. Similarly, connections to local communities die hard, even when people have denounced or, at least, moved on from those communities.

In the end, I think this potentially illustrates how significant sports identities are—at least in the United States and, I suspect, in many other parts of the world as well. There are times when individuals who otherwise divide themselves based on race, social class, gender, sexuality, religion, etc. find themselves bonded (at least temporary) by sports team identification. To be sure, these are commercialized, branded identifications, like identifications with musical artists, television programs, and soft drinks, among other things. And like these other brand identifications, part of understanding the significance of sports, I believe, is recognizing the deep-seated ways in which these identifications work and affect people’s lives as identities, like race, social class, gender, etc., do. Just as we become branded to think about racial identities, gender identities, national identities, sexual identities, religious identities, and other identities from young ages to the point that, as we grow older, it becomes harder and harder to examine our own assumptions along each of these lines, I think that we become branded in connection with sports and sports allegiances from young ages to the point at which it becomes much harder to look at the politics of sporting practices. If we’re going to get at the politics of sport, fuller recognition of the deep workings of sports identities seems to be a very important step to take.