It’s been a long time since I have been so motivated to write an article for the sports blog, so first let me say welcome to EvilEmperorDave. Congrats on a brilliantly written article. When I first read the title, I was ready to systemically pick it to pieces. I was geared up to destroy any notion that being a bandwagon fan was somehow okay. I mean after all, the article essentially condones committing perhaps the worst sin in all of sports: bandwagon jumping or frontrunning as the author refers to it. As it has been said, bandwagon fans are the sporting world’s equivalent to pedophiles and dogfighters. So there I was, ready to shank the author (hey, gotta stick with the prison theme right? At least there was no punishment doled out American History X style) when something odd happened.I couldn’t do it.
That’s not to say I agree with his position. Hell no. But the refreshing thing about having a new writer on here is having a new perspective. You see, I live in the sports world. I probably spend more time thinking/reading/talking sports than everyone else who reads this site combined (which might be a decent explanation of why I am currently single while this new author lives with his girlfriend…well that, and many many other reasons). Additionally, I don’t want to talk serious sports with you (you in the figurative sense of course, otherwise I’d have no readers at all) if you only kind of know what you are talking about. I don’t have the heart to tell you where you are wrong. That the Patriots and Giants played three times this year, including pre-season. That a penalty that occurs away from the play should still be called, even if it offends your sense of justice. It all infuriates me. If you want to learn, I’ll help. But you have to ask. Otherwise you are standing in my world wearing the 1970’s NBA short shorts to go along with knee high socks, Reebok pumps and a Hakeem Olajuwan Toronto Raptors jersey, thinking you fit in. And in reality you are just standing there, in the middle of my world, looking like a jackass. Point being, the sports perspective is my perspective, and I view everything through those Gatorade tinted glasses. And despite being a student of the law (sounds better than law student, doesn’t it?), it’s hard for me to see things any other way.
Anyways, the point of the nearly 400 word rant above is that this author’s article is so profoundly different from anything I usually read about sports. It was five paragraphs before the author even used sports to make his point. Five! Instead we are treated to such light hearted topics as the Vietnam War and, wait for it….welfare moms with “factories in their pants”. Hilarious! But back to the subject matter itself. I thoroughly enjoyed the angle about those who are frontrunners in life. I know a lot of that was tongue in cheek, but I can relate in a way. I feel bad for homeless veterans, but aside from giving money to the Salvation Army or something like that, I have never done anything to help them. I’ll never be able to top the welfare mom comment, so let’s just move on. And finally, living out here in LA, I don’t feel bad at all for famous people who go crazy; I also hate the TMZ’s of the world who think it’s their job to report this crap, and the people who read it. Do I think I am better than them? Yes, with the exception of the veterans, because damn if I wouldn’t have been a draft dodger back then. But anyways, I have strayed from my point.
All that real world stuff aside, and it does provide a good philosophical point of view from where the author is coming from, the premise of the article is that picking the underdog has become the new “front running” thing to do in sports. I think that this is certainly an interesting proposition. Take the Rocky movies for example. As everyone who knows me knows, I am a huge Rocky fan (not including V, which made my eyes bleed). What is the idea behind Rocky? It’s putting the character into every impossible situation the writers could dream of, just so he can “overcome”. In the first movie, Rocky was a bouncer with no real training, dated a semi-retarded girl who ran a pet store, and had to fight the heavy weight champ. In the second movie, Rocky is semi-retarded with a speech impediment, has a semi-retarded wife in the hospital, and still has to fight the heavy weight champ. In the third movie, Rocky is rich and the champ, so we can’t root for him until his trainer dies, Mr. T propositions his semi-retarded wife and “Eye of the Tiger” is played during his training scenes. In the fourth movie Rocky is rich and retired so we can’t root for him until his best friend is killed by Drago, he has to fight in Russia on Christmas, and he has to climb a million mile high mountain with no gear and his semi-retarded wife doesn’t want him to fight to begin with. And yet, we cheered for him every damn time he “overcame” these obstacles. We all wanted to root for the underdog. It made us feel good. It made us feel damn good.
So yes, in that sense rooting for the underdog is the frontrunning thing to do. Come on, don’t you think that if they made a movie out of this NFL season everyone would be rooting for the Giants? I mean rooting for the Patriots would have been like rooting for Ivan Drago. But while rooting for the underdog is nice in theory (and in movies), how many people actually do it? Let’s back up a minute. Let’s view this in the context of real life sports and the diehard sports fan (is it sad that the author of the article referenced real life events before getting into sports, and I referenced “Rocky” before getting into sports?). I’ll keep this in terms of football since it is a good reference point. The vast majority of casual fans (those who watch the Super Bowl and maybe some of the playoffs) like teams because they win. People in general, invariably root for the favorite. In theory that’s not so bad. Who the hell wants to root for a loser anyway? And when you are a casual fan who pops in and out of the sports world, it’d be a drag to always pick the losing team. If you believe, as I do, that the casual sports fan outnumbers the diehard, then the reason you notice people who root for the underdog is because they stick out. They are a rarer breed. The author’s theory of rooting for the underdog as being the chic thing to do does not actually hold up in the sports world.
As I mentioned before, the inhabitants of the sports world are largely the diehard fan. The diehard football fan almost always has a favorite team. Whether it is due to geography, a favorite player, or their father’s allegiance, most fans live and die with a certain team. My team is the Jacksonville Jaguars. Now I am not over the top, I don’t believe the Jaguars should win every game, or that every player can do no wrong. Nor do I refer to them as “we”, as in “we would’ve won that game if only we threw deep more often and tackled better”. I am not a 350 pound 6’5 man who can bench press 400 pounds, nor am I someone who can throw a football 50 yards or run 40 yards in 4.2 seconds. Hell I can’t even kick a football straight. So I’ll leave the “we’s” to those blessed enough to play on a team. That being said, I can probably name Jacksonville’s entire 53 man roster, recite their schedule including wins and losses last season, and tell you who is under contract for next season. Being a diehard fan is about obsession, and I am obsessed. I mean what is “fan” short for? Fanatical, of course. Even though I consider myself a more rational fan, I can barely breathe during Jaguar games. When bye weeks roll around, I need it as much as the team does, because then I can actually spend a Saturday without a knot in my stomach as the minutes tick by until game day.
So any argument the author makes that is couched in reality entirely misses the point. I am not here to argue about why diehard fans rarely root for the favorite. Perhaps it’s because, they cheated. Perhaps its because the media shoves teams like the Red Sox, Patriots and Yankees down our throats every 5 minutes, and I can’t go to ESPN.com without seeing a story about how Tom Brady’s excrement is the best smelling of all time. Or maybe it just boils down to simple jealousy. The favorite has what we all want. They are the team that is expected to win the super bowl.
But I think, therein lies the reason that so many of us diehards hate, and I mean hate with a passion, front running fans. These “fans” that jump on the bandwagon of winning teams don’t go through the agony that we go through. They don’t live and die with every possession of their favorite team. They are not haunted by losses, by the constant “what-ifs”. They don’t have all that animosity built up from years of rooting for a team only to see that team fail and fail again. Sure that might make the frontrunners’ victories less sweet, but who cares when you can have them every year? So the Pats-Steelers-Colts-Pats fan gets to show up to some super bowl party adorned in the gear of “destiny’s” team and rub it in the faces of everyone else whose team never made it there. The logical answer for us diehards is to not be diehards. To take the route of the frontrunner, to back the favorite every year, and come out ahead nearly every time. But what do we do? We hate. We channel the passion that we have for our one team and we turn it into hatred. Some of it goes towards the favored team, but a lot of it goes to that frontrunning fan. We hate that fan. You put us in a room with a frontrunner, especially a frontrunner who is cheering “his” team on, and nine times out of ten there will be some kind of altercation. That’s what makes this Super Bowl so sweet. The frontrunner came adorned in Pats gear, and left with the harsh reality that he backed a loser. Welcome to a little taste of our world. Asshole.
There is a certain kind of camaraderie amongst diehards. I respect the diehard patriot fan. I might be tired of hearing from him, but I was on his side in 2001 when the Pats upset the Rams. Hell, I even respect the Lakers diehard, as much as I hate the team itself. We are all bound by the same torment. We all understand what it is like to foster that love-hate relationship with our chosen team. The hatred is not for our team, but instead for the agony that is attached to each loss suffered by the team we love so greatly. So for the author to say frontrunning is the way to go, it makes sense from an outside world. But, from my sports obsessed world it is complete lunacy. To cut and run now would be to lose a piece of our souls.
I’ll leave you with this; ESPN.com did a poll they released in their magazine. Fans of all 30 teams that did not make the Super Bowl were asked to vote on who they wanted to win it all. For every single team, the fans picked the Giants. Like I said, some of that could have to do with diehards hating the favorite for a number of reasons, and the fairness argument the author makes is hardly undeniable. However, you better for damn sure believe that there is also a part of us that wants to look the frontrunning son of a bitch fan right in the eye and tell him to put his mouth on the damn curb.
Rational? Not hardly.
Fanatical? Absofuckinglutely.
