I was at the Brewers game on Sunday. The game where 40,000+ fans gathered to bang together prophylactic-resembling balloons, called Thundersticks (1), at inopportune times. The game where Jeff Suppan gave up 3 home runs while the Brewers made the passable Joe Blanton look like an All-Star, Cy Young candidate. The game where hapless manager Dale Sveum pinch-hit CC Sabathia because he hit 2 home runs this year and likes batting (2). The game where I suggested to my brother that Corey Hart should change his first name to ‘No.’ The game where the Brewers season ended.
The fact of the matter is none of it should have mattered to me. I was told during the game, via text message, that I am not a ‘real fan (3).’ Granted, the person who accused me of the treachery is prone to grandiose overstatements and that the criteria for this proclamation seemingly reflected only my attendance this season (4 games). Regardless, the comment gave me pause during the shellacking; I began to think about what it means to be a fan (4).
Everyone has a different idea about what fandom is and what it means. For example, when someone says that they are a big fan, I always assume this means that they watch the games and hope that their team wins. I also assume that they know the players’ names, their position, their number and perhaps a number of facts and speculation about the player (i.e. said player is a sex offender (Reuben Patterson), has a nagging injury (Charles Woodson), or has a bunch of kids (Hart)). These things seem important. Still, there is no reliable scientific way to quantify fandom.
But it isn’t as arbitrary as it may seem. I am not certain my Mom cares about the Brewers and Packers winning. I watched the Brewers game with her last week at my step dad’s bar (she spent 10 minutes of the game discussing the proper pronunciation of CC Sabathia’s surname with her friend, then decided to just stick with CC). Had she been at the aforementioned game, she would have been pounding those Thundersticks together with gusto. She seemed fan.
She even appeared upset when the Brewers lost that game. It acted upset too, and I am certain that there are many people around Milwaukee that acted the exact same way. This seems like a good criterion for determining fandom, but here’s the thing, it isn’t. Sure, it’s meaningful, but acting upset, or happy for that matter, after a game doesn’t make you a fan (5).
What about game attendance, as my flamboyant and audacious friend suggests (6)? Sure, it seems like a sensible criterion, being there is important. But it is also easy to refute. There are a million justifiable reasons to not go to the game, here are a few, you are poor; you don’t like crowds; you’d rather watch on TV; beer is too expensive; parking is too expensive; food is too expensive; you can’t get tickets because they are sold out; you don’t have anyone to go with; you like a team on the other side of the country; etc. If you disqualified all of the people that skipped games for these reason, you wouldn’t have more than a handful of ‘real fans’ in America.
Wearing apparel and owning memorabilia is another way people “prove” their fandom. With the new, stylish team attire, fans can look good cheering for their favorite team, but so can girlfriends, moms and grandpa. Simply put, there is no way to determine one’s fanhood based on what they are wearing. There probably never was.
We’ve discussed a number of seemingly savvy arguments for fandom that aren’t qualifiers of a real fan; but why not? Because all of these things are things that you can fake or lie about. When the Packers were making their Super Bowl run, they cut a receiver (I forgot his name, but it may have been Ingram) to make space for Bad Moon Rison. I perceived this as totally unfair. I went on telling everyone that I didn’t like the Packers, but in reality I was watching every game and cheering for them. If you would have asked my parents if I was a Packer fan, they may have said no, but I was cheering for them every game, just not out loud.
The first question we must ask is whose point of view are we asking the question from? If you asked the team, they’d say the best fans are the ones who pay for the best seats. We know that isn’t true. Or the ones who spur others to go to the games with them by hosting numerous tailgates (7). But, we are talking about a comparison of fans here, so we are talking about what constitutes a good fan from a fans point of view.
First, we have already sort of acknowledged that there are different levels of fandom. This is important (but it is not to this specific argument), but my friend wasn’t saying that he could stump the Schwab and I couldn’t, he was saying I wasn’t a real fan.
I belong to an online community called RealGM (8). Many people on this site are so much smarter than I will ever be about sports, they understand things about salary structure, free agency, and myriad other details that are lost of regular fans. These are the super-fans. Yet, when I asked them (9) what it took to be a real fan, none of them mentioned any of the factors that have been brought up so far.
aboveAverage wrote: I don't think you have to attend a lot of games or call in to talk radio, or do any posting on an internet forum to be a real fan. I think you know if you're a true fan if you feel pain when your team loses a big game, and you feel euphoria when your team wins a big game. If the outcome of a game can affect your mood for the entire day, then you are a true fan. If you don't really care after the game, you probably are not a real fan of that team.
adamcz wrote: If you want a team to win and have no money at stake, you are a fan of that team.
MickeyDavis wrote: Attending games has no real bearing. Many people don't live close enough or can't afford to go to many games, that doesn't make them less than a fan.
Balls2TheWalls wrote: Arguing fandom is ridiculous. I agree with adamcz, and thinking you are a better fan than someone else is all masturbation.
BucksFan25226 wrote:Tell your friend he's a tool for saying that. Being a Cardinal fan, I guess he assumes I'm a bigger Brewer fan then both of you since I attended about 20 to 25 Brewer games this year?
These are some of the most intense sports fans I’ve ever had the pleasure of having discourse with and they aren’t picking these incredibly lofty, unreasonable criterion, they are saying that the only person who really knows if you are a fan is you.
And ultimately, this is what being a sports fan comes down to, the things that you can lie about to others, but can’t lie about to yourself. When the Packers lost the Super Bowl to the Broncos, I laid on my bed and cried real, genuine tears. When the Bucks lost (10) in the Eastern Conference Finals, I spent whole day furious with the NBA. When the Brewers lost, I took it really hard. No one really knows these about these feelings I had but me, which makes my buddies argument not only stupid, but superfluous.
There is something greatly unifying about being a fan. The city of Milwaukee felt alive this summer like never before, if you felt it, you are a fan. I saw more Brewers apparel than ever before, wearing it doesn’t make me a fan, but maybe noticing it kind of does. The games I was at were all intense, Milwaukee’s blue collar, white collar and no collar workers, all together, cheering for the team; those who felt the stadium rattle in their souls and got gooseflesh because of it, they are real fans, of course you wouldn’t know by sitting next to them. Which is kind of the beautiful thing about fandom, it is both intensely populist but also inherently private. That dichotomy simply cannot be ignored in a discussion of fandom. The display you put on (games attended, shirts bought, message boards frequented) isn’t directly proportionate (and sometimes is totally meaningless) to how much you really care.
And I think this is what bothers my friend more than anything, even though he probably wouldn’t put it that way, because he felt that he earned more of a right to be there (and be upset) than I did. But maybe he even knew that his elitist rhetoric was bullshit and he was just upset about how the game was going and wanted to take it out on someone. Maybe this was his misguided display of fandom (fan-on-fan verbal violence).
Ultimately, the only person that can properly say if you are a real fan or not is you. What others think about your fandom is about as useful as the Thundersticks were.
(1) They did make a lot of noise, although, I don’t know if you could say the noise was thunder-esque. Also, will the OKC Thunder patent these phallic balloons so we never have to see them again?
(2) I heard someone say on the radio that perhaps this was a bid to convince CC to come back to Milwaukee. To me, that would be like a restaurant giving you a mint at the end of your meal, hoping that the gesture would convince you to return. The fact is, there are a lot of more important factors to these decisions than mints and pinch-hitting appearances.
(3) I initially texted this person to find out the score of the Packers game from the Brewers game, go figure.
(4) My girlfriend, Michelle, would be pissed to hear of anyone challenging my fandom. In September we took a trip to Door County and over the course of 4 days, proceeded to either watch or listen to every Brewer game. During this trip, she inexplicably decided Brian Shouse was her favorite Brewer, seemingly because he doesn’t look like he belongs. Girls, I’ll never understand them.
(5) Usually, it just means your drunk. Michelle works in social work and she said that physical abuse spikes after Packer losses. This is why it doesn’t seem reasonable to assume that this criterion solely determines who real fans are.
(6) According to him, he went to just shy of 20 games this year; there are 81 home games, there were 2 playoff games, he attended roughly 25% of the games. He’s the Jason Kendall of fans, (Kendall batted .246). So what would you call someone who went to 85% of the games, a real true fan?
(7) These are the people Malcom Gladwell talks about in ‘The Tipping Point.’ These Early Adopters inspire action in others, however, in sports, this only works if the team is playing well, unless we are talking about the Cubs.
(8) www.realgm.com, this is where I met the guys who I met Herb Kohl with…
(9) http://www.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=842199
(10) They didn’t really lose, they were screwed by the NBA, Bucks v. Lakers wasn’t as intriguing match-up as Sixers v. Lakers. Conveniently, most of the regular season awards went to Sixers players that year (MVP to Iverson; Defensive POY to Deke; Sixth Man to McKie; I think Coach OY to Brown) in an obvious ploy to make the Sixers seem like a real foe that had the chance of beating the Lakers (They didn’t).
