All right, I'm willing to concede that professional sports are more than "just a game." They're a competition to see which team is better trained, in better shape, with more finely-honed skills. But what I don't get is why fans identify so totally with their favorite teams. It's one thing if your kid is playing on the little league or the high school team, if a team you're cheering for is from your alma mater, even if you've long since left the place. But just because a professional team is called the Philadelphia Phillies or the Texas Rangers, does not mean it's made up of a bunch of home-grown boys. The Rangers have players from California, Arizona, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, just to name a few. And every professional team is the same. So what are the fans so invested in? What is it that makes them so hysterical when "their" team wins, so morose when it loses?
This kind of fan fanaticism is something I truly do not understand, and my inability to do so is one of the things that makes me feel I am not a member of the human race. Maybe one of my psychologist friends can explain it to me. Watching game four of the Series, I was amazed by the people in the stands that the camera would catch, some of whom looked tense and miserable, as if they might cry at any moment, some of whom actually looked as though they were praying, many of whom just looked depressed. All because it really did look like "their" team was going to lose (which it did). And of course when a favored team wins the fans jump up and down, scream, cry, hug one another, and, when they get out to their cars, drive up and down the streets with horns blaring, screaming out the windows.
Why? Why is winning or losing so important? What does it prove? That a particular team, for that game at least, was better at their job than the other team. But their expertise has literally nothing to do with the fans, or I guess I should say the fans have nothing to do with their expertise. Are not responsible for it, cannot take credit for it, really have no right to feel proud of it. And remember these are not local boys -- many of them will be playing for other teams in a year or two or three. Winner's hysteria seems to be saying 'this team, whoever it may be made up of at the moment, has a name and a home base connected or close to where I live and they've won; therefore I'm ecstatic, feel triumphant.'
And Melody doesn't get it. Is it just the old us-against-them mentality, played out in sports? A kind of tribalism, that sometimes seems genetically fixed? Melody herself is such a weird spectator of sporting events that she can actually appreciate a good play by the other team, instead of despairing because it results in them scoring a point, or otherwise furthering their cause. And I have such a strange idea of good sportsmanship that I think in a situation like the one on Monday night, when the Series was lost to a team that just plain played better, someone over the loud speaker should have called for a round of applause for a game well-played by the winning team, and should have gotten it, from a bunch of disappointed, but gallant, Ranger fans. Wouldn't that have been cool? In the best of all possible worlds...
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I'm not quite sure what women experience when they watch baseball, but I do know that most men, at least those of our generation, grew up dreaming of being baseball players, at least those of us who were any good at it. Yet Major League Baseball is one of the most exclusive clubs on earth: 750 men from a nation of 150 million men, and from an overall talent pool of maybe 500 million, counting other countries whose players come here to play.
We have millions of doctors and lawyers, and bankers and businesspeople, and plumbers and carpenters, even though not every kid wanted to be a doctor, lawyer, banker, businessperson or tradesman, but we have only 750 MLB baseball players, even though every kid wanted to be one. That bespeaks how hard it is to make "the show" (MLB). In my whole baseball-playing life (sandlot through Little League through high school), I played with or against hundreds of guys. A lot were even better than I was. Only one made it to the major leagues, and he lasted less than a month.
So, when most guys watch a game, they are acutely aware of how hard what the players are doing is, and very acutely aware of how well they do it, and in the back of a man's mind at all times is the following thought: that's me out there -- if only. So, you attach yourself to the team and the players. And you attach yourself primarily to the home team, because it's the one you see by far the most, and it's the one you can follow most closely from day to day. And that is why you see such agonized looks on losing fans' faces, and such unabashed joy on winners' faces. That's us out there! Tim
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