I think that once I understand sports fans, then I will understand people a lot more.
I can kind of understand the appeal of sports as spectacle entertainment. People exhibiting feats of strength, speed, or strategy. I don't think that can account for the widespread appeal of sports though.
I don't even even think that it's a surrogate outlet for aggression, just to see people pummeling each other in a mock battle. There's more than enough violence in media or stock car racing.
You take a rational human being and show him a group of individuals, many of whom come from different places, who will only be on the team a year or two, and who are even led by coaches who are usually transplants and may have even recently coached opposing teams, and this person will express devotion and loyalty to this team simply because they wear the local colors and signs.
Imagine during WWII that the American Army replaced it's soldiers with a mixture of Italian, French, and Nazi Germans. Imagine further that Eisenhower was replaced by Rommel as commanding four star general.
Maybe it's a bad analogy, maybe it's more like a corporate brand, like Ford replacing it's workers with ex-Hyundai or its management with the Subaru. I don't think people would really care. As in sports, the consistency of the brand seems to be the main concern. Did people stop buying Apple products after Apple fired Steve Jobs, or even after he died?
Which is odd because in sports there's not much to hang a brand on. No quality of the product, no lifestyle aspirations. No one wears a Red Sox hat because they make such great hats. Nobody has a Saints decal because they aspire to a Saints fan lifestyle.
There's not much brand beyond the uniform, fixity to a particular place, and maybe a team tradition. Of those, the only thing I can understand is the fixity of place. A local team is a mascot of a place, a representation (fair or not) of the town and by extension, the populace.
I can understand it better in the cases where sports is the only reason to ever hear of a town. When Mudtown's Mudfish lose to the Hayville Tumbleweeds over in Bison Head, it's the talk of Sticks County. (And boy, it is a bad week for those people of Mudtown!) So those Mudtowners need to shell out the big bucks to buy a quarterback who can throw past his feet and buy a team to make the town proud.
As far as tradition goes, the only one that seems to attract a following is losing, as in the team which continually sucks so bad, year after year as to make it endearing.
One reason people get emotionally attached to teams because it enhances the stakes and feelings of involvement. If I'm watching Cornshuck play Cottonpick and I don't care about either team, then I'm probably missing out on half the entertainment value. Actually, its rare for me to be entirely neural. I always find myself rooting for one team or the other, often arbitrarily, precisely to artificially boost my interest in the game.
Actually, I think the main reason does go back to place. That feeling you get when you wear your 'Muddy' the Mudville Mudfish shirt, of belonging. The idea of the team, the brand, is beyond the players, it belongs to the town. And when you root for the Mudfish, it makes you feel like you are a part of the town.
That's actually a good thing. If you feel like you are a part of a community, you feel invested in it. You are much more willing to fight for something you have in a stake in. Strong and resilient communities are sustainable communities.
The more I think about it, the more I think that the local team is really an avatar. Something keeps the town a town, coherent. Maybe it's a series of relationships, a group of employers, a farmers collective, a common aim, a particular religion, or set of cultural values. The team acts as a tangible thing to pin all that stuff on which is hard to articulate or even define. It's a reminder to that community of why they are a community in the first place.
I would imagine that when neighboring Hayvillans fight, that they can both still agree that the Tumbleweeds are far superior to the Mudfish.
So I guess I kind of get it, although at the end of the day, it still comes back to the 'us vs them' mentality. Its a dangerous and false paradigm, especially when you start to look at the big picture of things. In a drought, the entire Sticks County is screwed, regardless of whose hat you're wearing.
(Go Sooners!)
I can kind of understand the appeal of sports as spectacle entertainment. People exhibiting feats of strength, speed, or strategy. I don't think that can account for the widespread appeal of sports though.
I don't even even think that it's a surrogate outlet for aggression, just to see people pummeling each other in a mock battle. There's more than enough violence in media or stock car racing.
You take a rational human being and show him a group of individuals, many of whom come from different places, who will only be on the team a year or two, and who are even led by coaches who are usually transplants and may have even recently coached opposing teams, and this person will express devotion and loyalty to this team simply because they wear the local colors and signs.
Imagine during WWII that the American Army replaced it's soldiers with a mixture of Italian, French, and Nazi Germans. Imagine further that Eisenhower was replaced by Rommel as commanding four star general.
Maybe it's a bad analogy, maybe it's more like a corporate brand, like Ford replacing it's workers with ex-Hyundai or its management with the Subaru. I don't think people would really care. As in sports, the consistency of the brand seems to be the main concern. Did people stop buying Apple products after Apple fired Steve Jobs, or even after he died?
Which is odd because in sports there's not much to hang a brand on. No quality of the product, no lifestyle aspirations. No one wears a Red Sox hat because they make such great hats. Nobody has a Saints decal because they aspire to a Saints fan lifestyle.
There's not much brand beyond the uniform, fixity to a particular place, and maybe a team tradition. Of those, the only thing I can understand is the fixity of place. A local team is a mascot of a place, a representation (fair or not) of the town and by extension, the populace.
I can understand it better in the cases where sports is the only reason to ever hear of a town. When Mudtown's Mudfish lose to the Hayville Tumbleweeds over in Bison Head, it's the talk of Sticks County. (And boy, it is a bad week for those people of Mudtown!) So those Mudtowners need to shell out the big bucks to buy a quarterback who can throw past his feet and buy a team to make the town proud.
As far as tradition goes, the only one that seems to attract a following is losing, as in the team which continually sucks so bad, year after year as to make it endearing.
One reason people get emotionally attached to teams because it enhances the stakes and feelings of involvement. If I'm watching Cornshuck play Cottonpick and I don't care about either team, then I'm probably missing out on half the entertainment value. Actually, its rare for me to be entirely neural. I always find myself rooting for one team or the other, often arbitrarily, precisely to artificially boost my interest in the game.
Actually, I think the main reason does go back to place. That feeling you get when you wear your 'Muddy' the Mudville Mudfish shirt, of belonging. The idea of the team, the brand, is beyond the players, it belongs to the town. And when you root for the Mudfish, it makes you feel like you are a part of the town.
That's actually a good thing. If you feel like you are a part of a community, you feel invested in it. You are much more willing to fight for something you have in a stake in. Strong and resilient communities are sustainable communities.
The more I think about it, the more I think that the local team is really an avatar. Something keeps the town a town, coherent. Maybe it's a series of relationships, a group of employers, a farmers collective, a common aim, a particular religion, or set of cultural values. The team acts as a tangible thing to pin all that stuff on which is hard to articulate or even define. It's a reminder to that community of why they are a community in the first place.
I would imagine that when neighboring Hayvillans fight, that they can both still agree that the Tumbleweeds are far superior to the Mudfish.
So I guess I kind of get it, although at the end of the day, it still comes back to the 'us vs them' mentality. Its a dangerous and false paradigm, especially when you start to look at the big picture of things. In a drought, the entire Sticks County is screwed, regardless of whose hat you're wearing.
(Go Sooners!)
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