The Mental Instability of Sports Fandom
You may worry about sports like they're important, but for your own mental health, you can realize that they're absolutely not.
I wish I could say I was surprised by the rash of fans trying to make headlines for themselves during the NBA playoffs, but I’m really not. The frequency of these incidents, whether it be the fan in Washington Monday night diving onto the court during the Sixers/Wizards game, the Bostonian chucklehead who threw a water bottle at Kyrie Irving Sunday night, the guy at Madison Square Garden hocking a loogie on Trey Young a week ago today, or nerd who dumped popcorn on Russell Westbrook in Philly that same day, might be alarming. However, I feel like the reason the number of incidents has spiked is that fans have been away from arenas for so long. COVID-19 restrictions loosening has brought back fans into arenas with a LOT of pent-up emotions in them. These fans have been waiting since March 11, 2020, the last time fans had been allowed to gather en masse to watch sports before the novel coronavirus cancelled games and then necessitated their playing in bubbles and in empty arenas.
The thing about these instances of acting out is that they’ve always happened. From the first time a fan got the idea to charge onto the field naked, sports have seen their fair share of unwanted intrusions from the paying customers, be it through physical entry or the launching of projectiles. Only twice in my memory, both live and researched, do I recall players reciprocating. The first was when Ty Cobb went into the crowd to beat the shit out of a heckler, and the second was the Malice at the Palace. Given how many times fans have felt themselves, it’s shocking that there haven’t been more incidents of players getting them their pound of flesh. Athletes as a group seem to have more mercurial souls among their ranks than other groups of people. Lord knows a huge swath of the general public would support them attacking boorish assholes who do things like toss loaded projectiles at them from height for the “crime” of stomping on a logo. Thankfully, they as a group outside of Cobb and Ron Artest, have shown remarkable collective restraint.
Of course, if you want to talk about lack of restraint, the fans acting out are a meaty subject despite the fact that, on average, the ones who are bold, crazy, stupid, or arrogant enough to act completely on their id are in an extreme minority themselves. The mindset that leads to that sort of realized psychosis, however, is not as rare as you might think it is. Sports fans in the Western world, not just in America, have a tendency to let sports dominate their brains more than something they merely pay money to consume rather than get paid to participate in ever should.
Take for example your fearless newsletter writer. I have gone to my fair share of sporting events, mostly baseball games to see the Philadelphia Phillies in action. I’ve hated teams and players, and I’ve shouted my share of ribaldry at the opposing teams (and sometimes at my own team when they play like nerds who seemingly have never played their respective sports before that given day). I have never once thought to run out onto the field or throw anything onto the field, let alone a weighted bottle. I have, however, allowed the results of a sporting event to ruin my mood for an otherwise nondescript or even good day. Typing it down even in generalities makes me feel like a fool for even letting an Eagles regular season game make me feel like utter balls. It doesn’t make sense at all.
Yet, people pride themselves on how much of their mental health they bank on their favorite sports teams. It’s supposedly the “price of being a real fan,” but if the Sixers losing a playoff game devastates you to the point where you lose sleep, get an upset stomach, or take any other physical ill, is that price worth it? It would be one thing if the players themselves feel that way, mainly because it’s their job. They’re the ones playing. That being said, there are a great number of athletes who treat a game like it’s just a means to an end. If an athlete doesn’t take their game as seriously as death, whether it be Darius Slay retweeting compliments about his play after a loss or Johnny Damon saying “rivalry? What rivalry?” by signing directly from the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees, then why should you care?
There’s no doubt that there’s vicarious exhilaration to be had from watching pro sports, and the thrill of victory can lead to incredibly fun times, whether just watching by yourself or celebrating with friends. People like to mistake the idea of needing to be there for the bad times as well as the good times as pertaining to supporting a sports team. No, that phrase pertains to important things in life, like relationships, family, pursuing dreams. Sports fandom is about as superfluous as Krusty the Klown’s third nipple. You shouldn’t feel the need to obsess over anything, and if you have a mental health affliction that makes you do so, you should go and get therapy for that. Again, therapy rocks. You shouldn’t ever worry about sports. It’s okay to look at a team like the 2021 Philadelphia Phillies and say “y’know what, I’m gonna spend my weekday nights during the summer gardening instead of watching this team play some grotesque facsimile of baseball that isn’t really baseball at all.” You do not have to watch every demoralizing loss in order to enjoy the dizzying highs of winning a game, be it in April, July, or the end of October.
Oddly enough, it was the 2008 Phillies that taught me this lesson. Watching them win the World Series was the biggest sports-related thrill of my life to that point (Super Bowl LII would be bigger for me, personally). Until the Eagles won the Super Bowl, Philly sports saw some pretty dismal times, from close-calls to winning titles that ended painfully to some of the worst seasons anyone could sit through. None of that really bothered me the way it used to before that World Series Championship. Reaching the highest heights didn’t accentuate the bad times; that title made the bad times seem insignificant, paradoxically enough.
Perhaps seeing my favorite teams break through twice in the 30-plus years of being a cognizant sports fan made me realize how rare winning a title was. Not everyone can be blessed enough to be born in close proximity to a team that is good AND lucky enough to win multiple titles in short spans, and not everyone is either smart or craven enough to root for a team that always wins. Then again, the downside to that method is that teams like the Lakers, Cowboys, Yankees, and Canadiens don’t stay good forever. Still, for the vast majority of people who root for teams local to them, the odds are they’re not going to see many, if any, titles for their teams in their lifetimes. Realizing that is the case is the first step. Realizing that you have absolutely no control over how they perform, and thus have no skin in the game, is the second and harder step.
Trust me though, it’s worth taking that bit of worry out of your life. You may not be the kind of person to hurl a bottle at someone for “disrespecting a logo” or to dump popcorn on someone merely for existing. I doubt that kind of person reads this newsletter, but the same sort of psychosis that drives someone to throw batteries onto the field or snowballs onto the field or snowballs spiked with batteries onto the field leads people to far less outwardly destructive tendencies but the same sort of anguish internally that leads to things like lamenting your team’s loss to the detriment of your life, job, or health. Sports can be really good, but the best part is you’re under absolutely no obligation to care about them when they are not.