by Ellie Scott
For the Love of the Game
Introduction
This essay started, in a way, over a year ago, when I stepped into Angell Hall Auditorium D for the first lecture of Jimmy Draper’s Comm 375: Sports, Media, and Culture at 8:30 in the morning on a frigid Tuesday. That class was worth the horrific 7:15 wakeup (upon which, every single time, my first thought was I don’t know how much longer I can do this), against all odds — it got me interested in the academic study of sports, and its connections with psychology and media and fandom. That interest, and this essay, grew further this January, when I began muddling through the modules in my media psychology class (a hellish course experience, with one redeeming quality in some genuinely interesting subject matter) and read about the psychology of fandom, of how we interact with media, of our attraction to narratives.
And in between those, it grew roots as I watched sports fans squabble and angst and joke and cheer on social media and mused about how interesting it would be to study sports fandom, how academically rich the landscape of hockey Twitter is in so many ways, and as I rejoiced with friends in seven different countries when Liverpool F.C. lifted their first Premier League trophy in 30 years and thought about how we build communities around what we love. It struggled — I struggled — to break through the winter frost of the anniversary of the pandemic, and emerged, against all odds, as a meditation on passion, amidst the cold, numb mourning of stagnation and a second indoor spring.
This essay started, as many do, with curiosity. I was thinking about why I get sad when bad players leave my team. I was thinking about Mohamed Salah (a frequent pastime of mine) and how in the two years after him joining Liverpool, hate crimes in the area decreased by 19% and anti-Muslim comments online dropped by 50%. I was thinking about the palpable feeling of collective glee online the night last February when Toronto Maple Leafs Zamboni driver David Ayres, 42 years old, was called in as an emergency goalie for the visiting Carolina Hurricanes and got the win. I was thinking, especially, about how five years ago I wouldn’t have cared about any of this.
This essay is about examining the change that took place in those five years, the 180 I made from being not all interested in sports for most of my life to becoming a huge sports fan. It’s about why it is that I love sports — why it is that we love sports, as a society, as a species. There’s such a divide, with some people deeply, deeply devoted to and passionate about sports and some people who don’t see the appeal at all. I want to bridge that gap, to try and analyze my and others’ love for sports and explain to both groups what it is that drives that. I feel uniquely positioned to explore this topic, as the somewhat rare example of someone who has been on both sides. I also come to this subject with a background in both psychology and media studies, two fields I feel are directly relevant — indeed, they are two of the fields in which much of the existing research on this has taken place.
I also want to answer some questions for myself, about myself: What exactly is it that I get from sports? I think we don’t always consider in great detail why we love what we love, and I want to articulate that better. And why do I continue enjoying sports when they cause me pain? (Liverpool are having an absolutely shocking season. I don’t want to talk about it.) Why did I feel, when I was younger, that sports weren’t for me? Many people feel this way, which saddens me — I don’t think everyone has to love sports, but I don’t think anyone should feel excluded from doing so.
Part of what I want to do in this essay is show people a different way of being a sports fan. I don’t want to convince people who don’t like sports to get into them, but I would like to present a side they perhaps haven’t seen or considered — not only by explaining the reasons why sports mean so much to me and many others, but also by showing an alternative way of being a sports fan. It’s a community that’s often associated with a lot of toxic masculinity and general grossness. I conducted a brief interview for this essay with two of my roommates, who are decidedly not sports fans. One of them said, “I feel like the culture around sports is just, like, annoying. When I think of the kind of person who likes sports I just can’t get into it...I feel like in general, definitely, it’s such a straight male thing.”
I used to feel the same way, but I’ve discovered that it’s possible to love sports and not look and act like that, and to reject the ways that sports institutions promote hegemonic ideas about race and gender. I think many of the people who feel, like I did, that sports are not for them are women and queer people (both of my roommates, for example) who don’t look like the stereotypical jock, and in many cases are wary of sports because of the experiences they’ve had with stereotypical jocks. I want to show that sports are for those people, if they want to explore them, and celebrate the people who showed me that.
This essay is about passion, community, human nature. It’s about the complexity and simplicity of emotion. It’s about identity, and narrative, and culture. It’s about my sister, it’s about Pablo Escobar, it’s about refugees of the Yugoslavian Civil War. It’s about exhaustion and grief, but also joy and hope. It’s about everything that sports are about, which is to say: everything.
Part One
The last time I felt joy was June 25th, 2020. There have been moments since when I was happy, excited, cheerful — not many, but they’ve been there — but I have not felt pure, rushing, unadulterated, overwhelming, pulse-pounding joy since that Thursday.
It was sunny and I felt sick in the morning, overcome with nerves. The air, still and clear, felt too calm to me. I thought it should be electric. I jotted down a stray thought in my notes app: obsession ruins and sustains me. Unemployed and undistracted, I was off-kilter and bittersweet all day. I sank in on myself, restless, until 3:15 p.m. when the game started.
Chelsea vs. Manchester City, in a match that I don’t think any of those teams’ own fans cared much about. It was important to me, though, and millions of other Liverpool F.C. fans around the world, because if Chelsea won, it meant we would win the Premier League for the first time in 30 years. LFC were top of the league table by far, leading second-place Man City by 20 points. If City lost to Chelsea, it meant that mathematically Liverpool couldn’t be beaten.
I don’t remember the final whistle going. Looking back at my Whatsapp group chat tells me there were six minutes of stoppage time and it ended, finally, at 5:10 p.m. Clear in my mind is gripping the leather of the recliner I was sitting in and flicking rapidly between watching the TV screen and checking Twitter and the group chat for updates from those whose broadcasts were a minute ahead of mine. All of it is a blur. I don’t even remember who scored the winning goal. I didn’t care; it wasn’t one of our players. All that mattered was the result, three points for Chelsea and, crucially, not for City. All that mattered was the math, the sealed deal: we were, officially, unbeatable.
I was restless again then, but this time it was sweet, bright, lifting me to my feet: I stood in front of the TV to watch the interviews, propelled upward with elation. I buzzed all night, feeling a distant regret that I couldn’t be drunk with my friends and was instead 20 years old in my parents’ house, states and oceans away from them, but for once my tendency towards melancholy was drowned out. There was too much Liverpool red to feel blue.
It occurs to me as I type that that it's an accidental paraphrase of a Fall Out Boy lyric: There’s too much green to feel blue. It’s from the song Fame < Infamy off of the album Infinity on High, and it’s no wonder I’m echoing it, given that I listened to that album on repeat from the ages of 14 to 16: I’ve probably heard that song hundreds of times. It’s funny to think of the version of me that first learned those lyrics — a 15-year-old covered in eyeliner and not far removed from a Doctor Who obsession who could probably name about three soccer players total (Messi and Ronaldo, obviously, and maybe Neymar under duress) — looking at the version of me that was getting a bit teary watching Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson get choked up in his interview with Sky Sports. There are many ways I haven’t changed — Fall Out Boy still goes hard as fuck — but 15-year-old me would be baffled by some of the ways I have, particularly the fact that I’m as likely to be seen in a jersey as a band tee these days.
In fairness to her, it was an unexpected development. The first experience with sports I can recall having was in kindergarten, when my parents put me on a rec league team. We were so young there were no goalies; despite this, the only goal I scored all season was by accident — I passed to a teammate standing in front of the open net who stepped out of the way. This was the end of my soccer career. My endeavors in tee-ball were equally fruitless, and after first grade my dad, who was the team’s coach and thus had a front-row seat to my immense struggle hitting a ball that was sitting still waiting for me, asked if I wanted to continue and was unsurprised when I declined (I fact-checked the timing of this with him and he said “We were pretty sure it wasn’t ‘who you were.’”). I was enrolled in art classes instead.
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In elementary school recess, while other kids played wall ball or four square, I walked aimlessly around the blacktop or stood at the edge and watched them. I was much more interested in reading than playing kickball or capture the flag (most kids hated having indoor recess when it rained; I loved it because I could stay inside with a book, which was what I always wanted to do) and bad at making friends, and also bad at these activities when I tried them. When I got out in four square I obediently put on a disappointed face and groaned to show willing, but I was secretly fine with it because I preferred standing in line watching other people play.
I was active as a kid, just not sporty. While my mom sometimes had to force me to put down the Babysitters’ Club or Nancy Drew or whatever else I had my nose in and go outside, once I got out there I enjoyed rollerblading, biking, climbing the trees in the park across the street. I played basketball sometimes with the hoop in the driveway, or tossed a baseball or kicked around a soccer ball with my siblings, but they weren’t my preferred activities. Instead, my little sister Cece and I would play games, usually based on our favorite books. While my older sister Lil and my brother Charlie played HORSE, Cece and I would be a few feet away at the edge of the driveway, pretending there were fairies living in the branches of the discarded Christmas tree lying on its side there waiting for my dad to get around to taking it to the dump. Or we would be the fairies, “flying” in our rollerblades and pretending to move hula hoops with our powers as part of a magic tournament. Or we would squirt silver glitter glue onto the rocks behind the garage as “unicorn blood” to discover as knights out on patrol (we were disguising ourselves as men, obviously, but trying to solve the unicorn mystery would lead our secret to be revealed and we would need to make a case to the king, who had become cold and harsh since losing his wife to plague, for lenience and to prove we were just as capable as the men, and he would end up acquiescing because his son, the prince, would fall in love with one of us (me, because I was the oldest so I got to make the decisions)). Or our bikes would be horses we rode on as colonial girls (hat tip to American Girls Felicity and Elizabeth for the inspo) across the meadows/around the block and would dismount from to pick wildflowers (lilacs and forsythias from neighbors’ gardens; sincerest apologies to them) to put in our hair.
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And that was how it was. Cece and I were occupied with swordfighting and playing mermaids, Lil and Charlie were the athletes whose games we were dragged along to — for Charlie, Little League baseball in Gumpert Park across town, where one of the moms would braid our hair and we would try to sneak Gatorade from the coolers by the bleachers, and the far more odious travel soccer games that took us to far-flung fields with the treasures of novel playgrounds but the hefty price of the longest car ride ever taken (half an hour each way). Lil played travel soccer, too, further packing our weekends with these excursions, and also rec league soccer, and rec league basketball, and travel basketball. Charlie played sports, but Lil played sports. Without wanting to discredit him, she was the real athlete — by high school, Charlie had dropped baseball and soccer and started running track and cross country in his freshman year, a perfectly respectable extracurricular activity but one that looked modest when compared to Lil’s sports schedule when she got to high school two years after him. Her every moment was taken up — the JV school soccer team in the late summer and fall, the varsity basketball team in winter and spring, plus AAU basketball on top of that, and training camps for both sports in the summer. (She made varsity soccer her sophomore year.)
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It was always like this, with Lil. Starting before elementary school, she excelled at anything athletic. She was a tee-ball prodigy, even filling in for a game on Charlie’s third grade Little League team once when they were down a player. When she got to third grade herself, she started playing on the boys’ basketball team, because she was too skilled and too competitive for the level the girls were playing at, and continued playing with the boys through eighth grade, after which it was no longer allowed. My own middle school athletic experience consisted of painful gym periods where I embarrassed myself in kickball, soccer, baseball, badminton (my teacher gave me a special foam racquet so I would have an easier time hitting the birdie), and volleyball. I was decent at basketball and good at running (particularly sprints), and could hold my own on a floor scooter (although it’s such chaos when those come out it’s hard to tell who’s good or not, or even what exactly qualifies as good), but nevertheless tried my very best to be invisible every time I entered the gym. The whole ordeal was made worse by the fact that I shared a last name with Lil, whose athletic prowess had stunned every gym teacher in the building and left them with expectations for me that I summarily squashed with a genuinely astounding lack of hand-eye coordination.
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I think this contributed to my image of myself as a distinctly non-sports person. For one thing, constantly being in the shadow of my household’s burgeoning local celebrity athlete was irritating, and I tried my best to differentiate myself from her, fitting myself into a mold that was her opposite. To some extent, I was just leaning into our natural differences, which I think also contributed to the way I thought of myself, because I thought it was a dichotomy, one or the other: you’re either super-athlete watching ESPN every day before and after school and wearing boys’ clothes, or you’re her sister who plays princesses and pushes her stuffed animals around in a stroller. I thought because I liked reading and drawing pictures of dragons and pretty outfits, or later One Direction and Taylor Swift, or later My Chemical Romance and heavy makeup, that meant sports weren’t for me.
I ended up as kind of a “sportsball” person: I thought sports were only for the type of aggro, jock-y heteros who often looked at me a bit meanly or else not at all, the guys who got genuinely angry with me in gym class for serving a volleyball into the net and the girls who dressed like Lil in Nike and prewrap and often looked up to her but at me with an air of annoyed superiority. Further evidence of this belief came from the fact that, as discussed, I hadn’t enjoyed or succeeded at most of the sports I had tried. In fifth grade, I started taking horseback riding lessons once a week, and stuck with it until graduating high school, but I didn’t think of riding as a sport — almost everyone I rode with was a girl, which didn’t match my schema of “sport,” and for the most part they were girls who reminded me more of myself than Lil. Plus, I didn’t compete in shows, and competition seemed to me like an integral component of a sport. So, in my mind, I didn’t like playing sports, and thus I concluded they weren’t for me at all.
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By high school I had become accustomed to my position as the anti-Lil, comfortable with being at most a spectator in her crowds — and I genuinely enjoyed this role, was proud of her and liked watching her and shouting “Yes! That’s my blood relative!” (I am very fun to watch sports with, in my opinion. Others disagree, but I think I am a delight and enhance the entertainment factor of the whole thing). But my resentment of her, and of my own inability to be like her — popular, wildly successful not only on the field and court but academically and socially too, and to my eyes always in my parents’ good books — clouded that enjoyment. It went unrecognized, or perhaps merely unexamined, because it was crowded out by my angst and my understanding that I wasn’t a sports person, that if I didn’t like playing sports, I didn’t like sports, period, regardless of whether it was fun to cheer Lil on. Additionally, by high school, all of that plus the normal business of a teenage life had made it a rare occurrence for me to actually attend one of her games. And when I did, dragged along by my parents if it was an important one, I figured it would be boring and brought along a book or a magazine or talked to Cece the whole time. When I tried to watch, even if I was enthusiastic, I didn’t quite understand the rules or follow exactly what was going on, dampening the experience (but not my ovation, if I was in the right mood: I would simply weave my confusion right in, yelling, “Not sure why we’re clapping but I’m happy for you! Unless the other team is the one that’s clapping! In that case never mind!”).
Additionally, most of my sport-watching experience growing up, outside of my siblings’ games, was of what Charlie and Lil or my dad were watching on TV, which was a lot of football and baseball — two sports that still hold little interest for me. The sports I now like best are soccer and hockey, which no one in my house watched, so I wasn’t exposed to sports I found appealing. I did enjoy the Olympics or World Cups, but I didn’t think that made me a sports fan. Everyone watched those, because they were exciting global events and you rooted for your country or to see records broken (I failed to realize, at the time, that part of the appeal of sports is that they’re big events that everyone watches and talks about and bonds over). And anyway, my favorite Olympic events were things like gymnastics and figure skating, which I didn’t think of as sports (though perhaps they offered me a more accessible entry point to enjoying sports, even unconsciously — there were very few rules to understand, and they might have felt more fitting for me as a girly girl to be into). Or the opening ceremony, which was definitionally not a sport. Ultimately, I wound up considering myself decidedly not a sports person.
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My father getting me ready for tee-ball practice
Me and Cece, circa 2007
Charlie in his travel soccer days
Lil (bottom row, far left) with her fifth grade basketball team
Me with Lil, post-horseback riding lesson
Lil on the court in high school
Part Two
So, I hear you ask, how did I get from sitting in the bleachers at my sister’s soccer games with headphones and old copies of InStyle to sitting in my family room watching Liverpool with a red t-shirt on for good luck?
It was a gradual thing. The transition started, I think, on social media, depending on how you want to define “start.” But I’m not in the business of semantics, so let’s go with that. I joined Twitter around 2015 or 2016. The site is designed, largely, for people to talk about major events in real time, which meant that I would often see people talking about big sporting events, and even though I didn’t care about those games or tournaments or whatever, consuming them through the filter of tweets from people who did care showed me in them some of what I liked about the Olympics: the communal nature, the excitement, the drama, the passion and joy.
And in between scrolling past people live tweeting basketball games, the wonders of social media algorithms also exposed me to a lot of other random sports content — the kind of stuff that makes its way into the mainstream of social media instead of staying in the sports-fan bubble. There are a couple genres of this kind of content, I find. There’s purely fun, funny, goofy content, like clips of players’ ridiculous, charming antics: this 2013 video of the University of Cincinnati Bearcats baseball team doing increasingly elaborate stunts in the background of their teammates’ interviews.
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This went around on Tumblr and a user commented, “i don’t like sports but the bearcats are my new favorite team”. That was exactly how I felt watching this clip, and it echoes the journey I went on as I became a sports fan, seeing things that endeared me to the players, made me care about them, and as a result beginning to get invested in the outcomes of games. You see that video and some part of you starts rooting for the Bearcats, because you like those guys.
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Another category of sports moments that achieve mainstream virality is examples of sportsmanship — a couple favorites of mine are Vincent Kompany confronting his own fans for throwing flares at the other team’s goalkeeper, Simon Mignolet, and at a women’s soccer game in Jordan when a player’s hijab slipped off mid-play and five opposing teammates (who weren’t wearing hijabs themselves) ran to form a tight circle around her so she could put it back on in private. Seeing these kinds of videos gave me a new respect for athletes — it dispelled my assumption that the vast majority of them were big, mean meatheads. I started to see the appeal of sports because I could understand why you’d root for these people, who seemed kind and upstanding.
In addition to starting to break down my stereotypes of “athletes,” moments like those were also examples of how in sports you can see the best aspects of humanity. You can see those attributes almost anywhere, yes, but this was groundbreaking for me because for many years I had, at least in a kind of vague, unconscious way, thought of sports as a place that displayed and championed the worst parts of human nature: aggression, superiority, hyper-competitiveness. Now I saw examples that contradicted that — athletes recognizing when something is more important than the game. I started to see how they can bring out the best in people, how important and celebrated things like honor are in sports — they’re almost ingrained in the very idea of competition, that you can’t truly win if you don’t play by the rules.
Another subgenre of viral sports videos is videos of fans. One that comes to mind immediately is this clip from the Houston Astros’ World Series parade in 2017, when a woman dropped her baseball cap from the 7th floor of a parking garage. Fans worked together to return to her, tossing it up floor by floor until it was back with its owner. It’s a small example, but it’s a demonstration of the community that sports can bring out in people, of the best of humanity. Another video I love is from a 2016 Red Wings hockey game. It shows the crowd cheering wildly for a little girl on the Jumbotron and booing every time the camera switched to someone else. The team awarded the girl the first star of the game — essentially, man of the match, usually given to the best player on the ice. This is another small moment, but it was one that contested my image of sports fans and showed me that they could be goofy and kind.
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Some of the sports moments that most frequently break through to the mainstream are extra-cool athletic feats, those impressive enough to be newsworthy even to non-fans. One of my favorites is also a sportsmanship moment: Did You Just Catch That? Colorado Rockies shortstop Troy Tulowitzki hits a pitch from Marlins player Jose Fernandez — who catches it. I don’t think it’s happened before or since. The fastest a baseball can go after being hit is 150 miles per hour, according to physics professor Porter W. Johnson. Even if Tulowitzki’s hit was on the slower side, that ball was going very, very fast. And Fernandez snatched it out of the air like it was nothing. It’s absolutely insane. Tulowitzki can’t help but admire his opponent, asking in disbelief, “Did you just catch that?” As a viewer, you feel connected to him, because you’re thinking exactly the same thing. Fernandez responds, grinning like he can’t believe it himself, “Yeah, yeah I did.” Not only is it a wildly impressive feat, it’s a sweet moment of connection between competitors, with visible respect and joy between them. It’s also demonstrative of how thrilling and purely entertaining sports can be.
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I also happened to watch a documentary called The Two Escobars in one of my high school classes, that, like these clips, helped to show me what was interesting and appealing about sports. The film tells the story of Andres Escobar, once the biggest soccer star in Colombia, and Pablo Escobar — another Colombian, and the richest, most powerful drug kingpin in the world. They were unrelated, but irrevocably intertwined. Pablo's drug money and fervent support turned the Colombian national team, of which Andres was the star, into South American champions, and they were favored to win the 1994 World Cup in Los Angeles. There, in a game against the U.S., Andres committed a shocking error, scoring an own goal that eliminated Colombia from the competition. Five days later, he was killed outside of a nightclub in Medellín by three men, shot six times with a .38 caliber pistol. It was reported that the gunman shouted "¡Gol!" ("Goal!") after every shot, once for each time the South American commentator said it during the broadcast of the Colombia-U.S. game. The killers were found to be the Gallón brothers, known drug traffickers with ties to Pablo Escobar, who had died a year earlier. It is widely suspected that had Pablo, who was largely responsible for building the World Cup dreams Andres had shattered, still been alive, the brothers would not have targeted Andres. This movie highlighted the way sports can be far more than a game, and have deep cultural connections and implications: For Colombians, their entire national identity rode on the success or failure of their team. It also showed me the incredible narratives sports contain. Stories would eventually become one of the things I love most about sports.
Seeing clips and gifs and stories like this exposed me to the way that sports and athletes could be funny, entertaining, endearing, touching, impressive. They began to show me what other people saw in sports, how it could be something other than exclusive and toxic and aggressive. I saw sports fans having fun, and started to understand why — and, importantly, many of them were people who looked like me, who acted like me and liked the same things I did — but they also liked sports. I was also an avid Tumblr user back in the day, and around a handful of people I followed on there (usually because they posted about Fall Out Boy and other bands/artists I liked, or other fandom stuff like Marvel or Teen Wolf) got into hockey and started to post about it sometimes.
There’s actually a surprisingly strong fandom-to-hockey pipeline, especially from fandom of One Direction or other bands. I follow a pretty sizable number of people who are hockey fans now and three to seven years ago were involved in other fandoms. I don’t fully understand the mechanics of how that transition happens (that’s a task that requires more in-depth academic study than I have the time and resources for at the moment), but it is actually a logical one, despite, perhaps, seeming nonsensical on the surface. These interests have a lot in common, which becomes clearer when you look at how these fans engage with hockey, because it seems like it would make more sense as a way of engaging with a boyband. These are largely young(er) queer women and nonbinary people — not the sports fans typically represented in the public eye — who will post gifs of the players looking hot, discuss players’ relationships with each other and different teams’ energies and vibes, participate in fantasy leagues with teams composed based on themes like “dumb blondes” or “fire signs only.” There are “Incorrect Philadelphia Flyers Quotes” accounts in the same way that there are “Incorrect Harry Potter Quotes” accounts.
When viewed through the lens of this unorthodox kind of sports fandom, the similarities between being a fan of a TV show or a band and a hockey team become clear — there’s a community that builds around it, hot young men you can root for and crush on, excitement and emotions, drama and humor and entertainment, stories and narratives and characters, teamwork and friendship and bonds. You can see how people who were into One Direction, another gang of lads, would find sports appealing. Those fans and the way they interacted with sports highlighted those similarities and made me see how sports could be appealing.
Somewhat by chance, I ended up encountering similar sports fans on Twitter to those I had on Tumblr — I think maybe I followed someone I was following on Tumblr, and then was exposed to the people they followed, and so on: people, many of them queer women and non-binary people, who engaged with sports like any other fandom. They showed me a different way of being a sports fan, as well as exposing me to more sports content, and gradually this built up some familiarity and passive affection for the subject. I would see the same people over and over again, people I liked, talking about the teams and players they were fans of, and doing so in a funny, offbeat way. There’s a hockey podcast called You Can’t Do That, hosted by three Washington Capitals fans I follow on Twitter, that really embodies this type of sports fandom. They have a regular segment where the hosts choose a hockey player as their “Dreamboat of the Week,” and they played a game in one episode where they decided what hockey player would be what bird (Sidney Crosby is a drab seed-eater).
Another good example of how these fans engage with sports is their reactions to the recent spate of hockey trades ahead of the deadline on April 12th. A lot of fans were upset because players they loved were traded away from their team — one person on Twitter described being in “emotional turmoil,” — not necessarily because they thought they were players who deserved to stay for their on-ice performance, but because they felt attached to them. “i'm taking this VERY personally and getting VERY upset,” one Twitter user posted in response to the news that Jakub Vrana was being traded away from the Capitals. Another replied to her, “OUR SWEET BOY”, and they lamented the loss of “baby beans” (a fan nickname for Vrana). Many were also sad about players leaving their teams because it split up friendships — I saw a few tweets concerned about whether Vrana would have someone to hold his hand on his new team (he had a pregame ritual at the Capitals where he would hold a teammate’s hand as he stepped on the ice). A Philadelphia Flyers fan tweeted tearfully (well, crying emoji-fully) about their team trading Michael Raffl but not his teammate Scott Laughton, noting a passage from a 2019 NBC Sports article that described Laughton being anxious about exactly that.
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These people are open about feeling connected to specific players, liking their personalities and caring about them as people and their relationships. It’s an unusual way of engaging with sports, and one that, for teenage me, was reminiscent of the way I was used to engaging with fictional texts and characters. Not only were sports fans having fun, the fans in question looked and sounded a lot more like me than I had ever thought possible, which began to make me think that sports could, in fact, be for me.
I would like to be clear that these people are, indeed, real fans. They do care about the games and are interested in the actual sport — in response to criticism in that vein, one Twitter user said, “I would not fuck up my sleep pattern over these idiots like I do if I didn’t actually care about the results of the games”. Something that she and fans like her understand, though, is that there’s no wrong way to be a fan. It’s okay to embrace the off-field (or off-ice, as it were) side of things and be interested in players as people in addition to liking the action and caring about the results. It’s like how a fan of a musician can love the music and the artist who makes it; all of it is part of the enjoyment.
The You Can’t Do That podcast is, again, a perfect example. The hosts do talk about the hockey games (it’s not all comparing athletes to animals), but the way they do so might be jarring to someone who listens to sports talk radio. They discuss a fight that happened in a recent Capitals game and one says that the player who instigated it did so with the energy of a teenager acting out at his parents. In another episode, they discuss new Capitals signing Anthony Mantha, who they say is a good player but didn’t get the chance to shine on his last team — all perfectly normal sports talk — before transitioning seamlessly to “Also, I have his astrological chart if you’re interested.” These are fans who truly love the sport in the same way that any other fan does, but they are committed to loving it as themselves, having fun, and enjoying whatever aspects of it appeal to them, whether it’s weird or not.
Thanks to these types of fans and their social media presence, I started to warm to sports, or at least began to see the appeal of the whole thing. But I wasn’t a fan, not just yet. I needed a couple more things to push me there. One of those was the webcomic Check, Please! Written and illustrated by Ngozi Ukazu, the comic follows Eric "Bitty" Bittle, a baking vlogger and former figure skating champion-turned-college hockey player, navigating his identity as a gay man and his crush on his team captain.
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I probably started reading Check Please in late 2016 or early 2017, after hearing about it from people I followed on Tumblr. It was a portrayal of a different, more sensitive side of sports, with queer athletes and a diverse cast of characters — fictional, granted, but it was a representation of people I could relate to who were into hockey. It also depicted an alternative, non-threatening kind of masculinity — an ensemble of college-age jock boys who never teased Bitty for baking or figure skating and were completely supportive when he came out. That it was written by a black woman also showed me a different image of sports fandom, and particularly a different image of hockey, a notoriously white, male sport. Additionally, the comic introduced me to further aspects of sports culture, like hockey nicknames (“the noble titles hockey bros give to other hockey bros, representing trust and brotherhood. A hockey player learns a teammate’s first name from his gravestone.”) and, very importantly, the concept of ferda. The word is a hockey slang term that comes from “for the” — fer da — in the phrase for the boys or for the team. But it’s more than a word. It’s a lifestyle, a mindset, an expression of solidarity, of fraternity, of friendship. Though I don’t think it was ever specifically mentioned in Check Please, its energy permeated every panel.
Another contributing factor in my development into a sports fan was that, sort of by chance, I ended up falling down a rabbit hole on Youtube — I think the instigator for this was that I was already a big comedy fan, and a British comedian I like, Jack Whitehall, did a Youtube series in the weeks leading up to the 2018 World Cup where he interviewed and traveled around with a bunch of players. After I watched that I got recommendations for other videos with soccer players, which I watched because I had found the Whitehall series entertaining and figured they’d be similar.
There were a lot of gimmicky interviews with players, especially because the World Cup was approaching and teams’ social media people wanted to amp viewers up and get them invested. They’re very fun, designed to let you get to know the players and their dynamics a bit with games where two players will compete to see who knows the other better or they’ll provide jovial commentary for a past match. One of my favorites was the roommates quiz with England players Kyle Walker and John Stones, who really hammed it up for the camera and clearly get along well. Seeing more of the players’ personalities, them being funny and silly, as well as their relationships with each other, was a big part of what got me more interested in sports, because I started caring about them and wanting to follow how they were doing, to root for them.
Andres Escobar
Part Three
I ended up watching the 2018 World Cup of my own volition, even when no one else in the house was watching. Frankly, this was partly genuine, Youtube-inspired interest and partly that I didn’t have much else to do on my days off and figured I might as well. Watching the games felt odd to me, unfamiliar, sitting in my parents’ bed finding NBC Sports on their TV — I would have felt too conspicuous settling on the couch in front of the downstairs TV, would have invited too many questions from family members surprised and confused to see me taking an interest even in early-tournament games that weren’t that important. I didn’t want to be asked about why I was suddenly interested and have to navigate an answer that, if I were honest, would include me having watched a bunch of gimmicky interviews with soccer players on Youtube. I understood that finding the players charming wasn’t a normal or “acceptable” reason for getting into sports. I also anticipated that they might jump to the conclusion that I was watching because I found the guys attractive (that anticipation was not incorrect; Cece and I had an argument last year because she commented that even if I tried to say I was a real fan I probably only really liked soccer because the players were hot).
I worked at the library that summer, helping run their children’s reading program, which mostly involved giving kids prizes when they came in with enough hours of reading logged on the little timesheets we handed out, and a lot of downtime in between doling out plastic tambourines to check the scores and follow the games via Twitter. Twitter was a big part of what got me to pay attention to the World Cup in the first place, actually — that year there was a big groundswell of hope and anticipation for England to win, for the first time since 1966. I had found out about it through the Youtube videos I had watched, as well as a podcast by some British comedians I listen to that discussed it a bit. The team looked like it actually had a decent chance for once, and people thought they really might go all the way — that football was coming home. The birthplace of the sport, finally taking home its biggest trophy again. On social media, this longing took the form of jokes and memes, but became steadily more earnest as the competition went on and England kept winning. I somehow got sucked into this, despite being an American with no personal connection to the country. Partly, I just found the memes funny, but eventually I started genuinely rooting for England. I love an underdog and an unlikely hard fought success story and I was gripped by the narrative of it all, the simple poetry of It’s coming home.
Between that and witnessing the incredulous enthusiasm of Brits on Twitter, I got swept up and wound up not only watching but actually paying attention to the games — previously, I’d spent many a sporting event reading while trying to tune out the background noise as my family watched. I didn’t totally understand everything (full disclosure, three years on I still don’t have a great grasp of the offside rule), but I was having fun. I found I genuinely enjoyed watching soccer, in a way I never had football, and heralded the triumphant return of my delightful, weird, slightly confused cheering (which I hadn’t had many chances to bring out in the last few years since Lil went to college — she continued playing basketball, D3 for Johns Hopkins, but I only got to a game maybe once a year). As I got into the games, sitting alone and unselfconscious in my parents’ bedroom and telling a Colombian player “Yes! Love yourself, babe,” I realized I’d missed it.
I now had a new appreciation for sports, too, after years of passively absorbing other people’s sport fandom and seeing the fun of it, seeing people who weren’t stereotypical jocks enjoying it, and as a result letting go of a lot of the distaste I’d once felt for sports as a whole. I was able to enjoy watching and participating and feeling like I was allowed to do those things even though I wasn’t a Lil or Charlie type, despite being a young queer woman with appalling hand-eye coordination rather than a hulking man-beast frat bro or whatever. I had been shown a different way of being a sports fan, and I felt okay about enjoying the sport in my own way, as myself: deciding who to root for in games where I had no stake based on which team was hotter overall, giggling to myself about the announcers over-pronouncing foreign names or filling downtime in games with whatever random shit came to their minds (I fondly remember one musing in a faraway voice about how the crowd’s vuvuzelas sounded “like a swarm of bees...thousands of them...”), getting excited and exclaiming nonsensically (“SENEGAL, BITCH!”).
More or less in tandem with my development into a soccer fan, I became a Liverpool fan, specifically. This was because of Mohamed Salah. At the point when I first encountered Mo, I was into sports kind of casually, not following any specific team but engaging with enough sports-related content that the Twitter algorithm would put sports stories on my trending page or timeline with some regularity. I’m pretty sure that was how I first came to be aware of him, during the 2018 Champions League final between his team, Liverpool, and Real Madrid, when he was injured — super fucking flagrantly, might I add — by opposing defenseman Sergio Ramos. There was a lot of coverage and discussion of the incident, because Mo had had an incredible first season at Liverpool and was very beloved by the community and fans, and was also quickly coming to be regarded as one of the best players in the world. Moreover, it was likely that Liverpool would have won if Ramos hadn’t (almost definitely intentionally) hooked Mo’s arm in his and yanked his shoulder out of its socket in the 31st minute (and LAUGHED. He LAUGHED as Mo left the pitch in tears. I will never be over this). This also put Mo in jeopardy for playing in the World Cup about a month later, which was a big deal because he was Egypt’s best player and his final-minute penalty in their qualifying game was the deciding goal to get them to their first World Cup since 1990.
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I’m not sure if I had heard of Mo before this, but the story was all over Twitter and it instantly struck me. It made me a fan before I ever saw him play, I think — or, if not quite a fan, it made me feel connected to him. I sympathized with him, and felt a sense of righteous anger at the unfairness of what had happened to him and his team. I became invested in him and his recovery — not deeply, but I cared about it, hoped he would heal in time to play in his first World Cup. That was when I started following Mo, observing, albeit fairly distantly, how he was doing (his shoulder healed in time for him to play in the World Cup, I’m pleased to report) and how Liverpool, by extension, were doing. The more I paid attention to him, the more I learned about him, the more I loved him.
Mo is an easy person to love. He comes off, immediately, as personable — despite being a world-famous athlete — thanks to a broad, sweet smile and an unruly mess of black curls. Every article about him praises his character: One author observes that “there’s an apparent humility to Salah which is at odds with other players.” John Oliver profiled Mo for TIME’s 2019 Most Influential People issue, and wrote that despite being an “iconic figure the world over,” Mo “always comes across as a humble, thoughtful, funny man who isn’t taking any of this too seriously.” Another article says he is “nonchalant and modest about his influence – as is his character – but he is, perhaps, amongst the purest and most encouraging examples of a sportsperson using their status to make positive change.” This writer makes reference to the fact that Mo is renowned for his philanthropy — every other week there’s a new story about him working with the UN as an ambassador for a refugee education project or funding the construction of a school or hospital in his hometown of Nagrig, Egypt. He also advocates for women’s equality in the Middle East.
Despite the abundance of his good deeds, Mo himself does not draw much attention to his charity work. He doesn’t post about his donations on social media or talk about them to the press. His father has said that his son has asked him not to talk about his charity work, and the Sun quotes another relative as saying that he “considers such donations something that should not be publicised to the media.” In addition to his immense humility, Mo is just ridiculously kind. In a game against Arsenal in December of 2018, he asked his teammate, Roberto Firmino, to take a penalty instead of him so that Firmino could get a third goal and complete a hat-trick — despite the fact that Mo was in a tight race for the Premier League golden boot (an award given to the player with the most points scored each season). He ended up sharing the trophy in a three-way tie. Another story I love: When Mo was a teen, his family was robbed. When the thief was caught a few days later, Mo’s father wanted to press charges against him, but Mo convinced him to drop the case and gave the thief some money and tried to find him a job. The first time I read about this on his Wikipedia page, I actually screeched aloud.
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Mo is the shining example of the fact that I like sports because I like people. Even in team sports, I care about individual players, and part of why I care about the team as a whole is because of those individuals. The people are what brought me to sports in the first place: I fell in love with Mo right away, but really becoming a Liverpool fan was more gradual — initially, I cared about the team only because I cared about Mo, because I wanted him to succeed. Even today, as a full-fledged fan who cares about the team’s success independent of his, a big reason I want Liverpool to win is because I want my boys to win.
I love LFC, and chose it as my team, because of the players — not just the specific players, though they are important to me, but because of the club’s identity, its spirit, which means it attracts and seeks out certain kinds of players. Different teams have different energies, if you will. Liverpool’s identity as a club is shaped by the city of Liverpool, renowned for its strong socialist ideology, multiculturalism, progressive ideals and working-class identity. Scousers, as residents of Liverpool call themselves, are fiercely proud and independent, and their team is scrappy, determined, fiery, but also close-knit and loyal. The club’s motto is You’ll Never Walk Alone, a message of commitment and faithfulness and a promise of support through thick and thin. That’s what I root for. And the people who end up at a club like that, who will stick around at a club like that, embody those values and that spirit, which is why I love them. I root for Liverpool because of Jurgen Klopp, a coach who has special handshakes with his players and gives great hugs and says that “The only thing I can do is to put all I have – my knowledge, passion, heart, experience, everything – I throw it into this club, 100%.”
I wrote about Mo for an essay last year, for the class I mentioned earlier — Comm 375: Sports, Media, and Culture. Writing about him prompted me to consider the reasons I love sports, and how I came to love Liverpool — and soccer itself, even — in large part because of Mo. That, I recognize, is kind of a strange way to get into a sport. It’s definitely strange to become a fan of a player without ever having watched them on the field. I think it speaks to the strangeness of many of the ways I engage with sports. Thinking about that also highlights the fact that it seems sort of odd for me to love sports, given not only my childhood but the rest of my personality and interests. Taylor Swift, poetry, painting, and...hockey?
I’ve started reflecting more on this transition I’ve made, and what I see in sports now that at one point I didn’t understand at all. Thinking about when I was first introduced to Mo reminds me of a lot of it: the UCL final where he was injured is exemplary of a lot of what’s powerful about sports for me. The emotions, the connection to the players, the story. The way the media framed all of it in a way designed to instantly grip readers — the drama of the injury, the loss! The hero Salah, the villain Ramos! — and made Mo a sympathetic figure, someone I immediately sided with. All of it showed me what makes sports so compelling, and ultimately strengthened my love of them.
One of the reasons I love sports is because I feel connected to certain athletes. I not only love and admire them but relate to them, identify with them, empathize with them, and I want them to succeed because of that. There are many players I feel this way about to some extent, but let’s take as a case study the example of Dejan Lovren. Dejan played for Liverpool from 2014 to mid-2020, when he was transferred to F.C. Zenit St. Petersburg after Liverpool’s Premier League win. I first came to love him because he’s close friends with Mo: LFC’s Youtube channel has a few videos of them together, answering “how well do you know each other” questions or facing off in table tennis, which I watched a couple years ago when I first became enamored with Mo. Originally, I just wanted to see him, but I also instantly connected with Dejan, who was funny and likeable in his own right. (He also hates Sergio Ramos with a passion similar to my own, which made me feel like we were kindred spirits. Later in that game where Ramos hurt Mo, Dejan elbowed him in the head, and later admitted to doing so deliberately as retaliation: "I do not want to make a big story, but I think that what Ramos did was intentional to injure my friend, so it was time to pay for what he has done.” Some might see this as unsportsmanlike; I see it as a kind of noble vigilante justice and only a fraction of what Ramos deserves.)
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The connection I felt with Dejan developed further when at some point, maybe a year ago, I decided to procrastinate by watching a documentary he did for LFC TV about his life as a refugee. Dejan was born in Zenica, in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, in 1989, amidst rising political tension and violence in the region. When he was three years old, his family fled the dissolving Yugoslavia to Munich to escape the Bosnian War, and he spent the next seven years in Germany. Dejan recalled the night before they left Bosnia: “I just remember the sirens went on. I was so scared because I was thinking ‘bombs.’ Afterwards...we left everything – the house, the little shop with the food they had, they left it.” Eventually, the family had to leave Germany, their “second home,” because they lacked the documentation necessary to continue living there. They settled in Karlovac, Croatia, where Dejan was bullied in school for his German accent and his parents struggled for money, once having to sell his ice skates to pay their electricity bill.
Watching Dejan describe how hard this experience was for him and his family, I was touched by how much he had overcome. I felt for Dejan and was moved by his resilience in the face of this turmoil, the image of him as a child in ill-fitting clothes finding solace in soccer, the fact that he now advocates for refugees in similar situations to his own: “When I see what’s happening today I just remember...how people don’t want you in their country. [Refugees are] fighting for their lives just to save their kids. They want a secure place for their kids and their futures. I went through all this and I know what some families are going through. Give them a chance.” After watching this, I became wholeheartedly invested in Dejan, his career and his success. It was another instance in which I connected with an athlete on a personal level and that connection strengthened my interest in their performance and in sports as a whole.
In addition to sympathizing with Dejan, I relate to him. I am weirdly obsessed with the fact that he speaks five languages. It affects me in a way I have difficulty articulating but that is probably equally related to how far he’s come from struggling in school because he didn’t know Croatian and the fact that his polylinguism allows him to communicate with teammates from all over the world. It’s a huge reason that he’s what’s sometimes called “good in the room” — an important presence in the locker room, someone with a good personality who gets along well with teammates and brings a good energy to the team, supports them off the field. Someone who’s good in the room isn’t necessarily the best player on the team. They don’t have the most impressive stats. But they have intangibles — stuff you can’t measure, like leadership, drive, dedication, heart, good humor. This is Dejan Lovren, the second-choice center-half who speaks to everyone in their native language, to a T. It’s also me. I haven’t been on a sports team since elementary school, but I am nothing if not good in the room. I may not be the smartest, most athletic, or most talented one of any bunch, but I give excellent moral support. I am a pleasure to have in class.
Another reason I like sports is that, plain and simple, they’re good entertainment. They’re straightforward — black and white, win or lose — but unpredictable, suspenseful. Anything can happen, and it can happen fast. It’s the world of buzzer-beaters and nail-biters. One of my favorite sports moments of all time happened in the second leg of Liverpool’s Champions League semi-final against Barcelona in 2019. Liverpool had lost the first game of the two legs, the away game, 3-0. Now, in their home stadium, they had to win by at least four points in order to beat Barca in the aggregate. With 12 minutes left in regulation time, they were winning 3-0, but it wasn’t enough. The fans in the home stand were growing tense, losing hope that the team could net that final goal.
In the 79th minute, the ball went out of bounds. Possession went to Liverpool, with Trent Alexander-Arnold given the corner kick to put it back into play. He did so magnificently, just seconds after the referee set the ball down — so quickly the Barcelona defenders weren’t even paying attention yet — and sent it straight to the right foot of forward Divock Origi, who against all odds was ready to put it straight past the unprepared keeper and into the back of the net. Anfield Stadium exploded as the commentators shouted, in awe, a phrase that would become iconic among fans: Corner taken quickly — Origi! That kind of moment is electric, the sort of split-second, pulse-pounding, out-of-nowhere thrill you can’t script, and sports are full of them.
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In some ways, I like sports for the same reasons I like my favorite movies or TV shows — for entertainment, for escapism, for drama. A hockey game is exciting in many of the same ways a Marvel movie is. It’s suspenseful: who will win, the Flyers or the Leafs? Iron Man or Captain America? Will there be a twist? A late goal, a deus ex machina? Will the good guys (my team) beat the bad guys (the other team)? Games and seasons and sports as a whole have overarching stories with heroes and villains, plotlines, characters I side with or against.
It’s not only my team vs. our rivals. There are narratives of betrayal: Kevin Durant leaving the Oklahoma City Thunder, after eight years there, for the Golden State Warriors in 2016, sparking an infamous feud with his OKC teammate Russell Wilson (he told Russ he was leaving via text! After playing together for almost a decade! They didn’t speak for a year afterward!). There are comeback stories and upsets: The “Miracle on Ice” at the 1980 Winter Olympics, when the amateur U.S. hockey team shocked the world by defeating the defending four-time gold medalist Soviet team. There are rags-to-riches tales: Manchester United forward Marcus Rashford was raised by a single mother who worked multiple jobs to feed her family, sometimes skipping meals to ensure her children ate. Now, having found wealth through his success as a soccer player, Rashford uses his money and platform to fight food poverty, and many agree he’s done more to help poor families in the UK than the British government.
These stories are dramatic, intriguing, engaging, and especially so when I care about the people involved — the “characters,” if you’ll allow me to extend the metaphor. I connect with certain players and root for them, care about their relationships with one another like I care about the relationships between characters in my favorite TV shows. Many of the aforementioned plotlines involve those relationships — rivalries, friendships, rivalries-turned-friendships and friendships-turned-rivalries. There’s a little tragedy, for instance, in Dejan leaving Mo, best friends being split up. The two are very close, and their relationship is immensely entertaining to watch — they’re like brothers, always joking and making fun of each other but caring deeply about one another underneath all that. Their videos on the LFC Youtube channel are full of laughter and the kind of squabbling that shows how comfortable they are with each other. It’s heartbreaking to think of them being forced apart.
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Many of my favorite sports moments, actually, are really just great stories. David Ayres, the middle-aged Zamboni driver, winning a professional hockey game after being called in at the last minute because both of the Carolina Hurricanes’ goaltenders got injured — signing a one-game contract with the NHL, wearing a borrowed helmet and pads, becoming the oldest goaltender to win their NHL regular-season debut and having his stick put in the Hall of Fame? That’s an amazing story. Mohamed Salah scoring a record number of goals in his first season at Liverpool and celebrating every one of them by kneeling in the Islamic prayer position sujud, while also becoming publicly renowned as exceedingly kind, humble, and charitable — and without intention, radically, palpably changing the perception of Muslims in Liverpool and across the world? Another amazing story.
I often see the very best aspects of human nature in sports. Sports have resilience, dedication, grit. Former Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard, April 2014, in an impromptu post-match huddle following the team’s dramatic 3-2 win over their title rivals, Manchester City, shouted, “This is gone. We go Norwich, exactly the same, we go again. Come on!” The words became a rallying cry for Liverpool fans. Win or lose, we go again. We pick ourselves up, we keep going, we persevere. No matter what, we go again.
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Sports show the most incredible feats of human achievement, people pushing the limits of “possible.” Simone Biles has four gymnastics moves named after her because she’s the first person to ever do them — and she’s still going strong. Sports have kindness and honor. In 2012, in a Division 3 state track meet in Ohio, a runner collapsed in front of high school junior Meghan Vogel in the home stretch of the 3,200-meter. Rather than bag a trophy by passing her competitor, Vogel carried the girl across the finish line.
Sports have passion and commitment. After losing a bet to a fellow sports commentator, Gary Neville, who played his entire career at Manchester United, was forced to wear a Liverpool jersey — United’s fiercest rivals. Years after retiring, he put the shirt on backwards, refusing to wear Liverpool’s crest over his heart. Sports have loyalty. Zdeno Chara played for the Boston Bruins hockey team for 14 years before being traded to the Washington Capitals in 2020. When he returned to Boston as an opponent, he received a standing ovation from the crowd, who showed their appreciation for his service, that they hadn’t forgotten what he meant to their city even if he was ostensibly an adversary now, that he was still welcome there and always would be.
Sports are playful and sweet. I saw a clip recently from a Penguins hockey game that showed an assistant equipment manager on the bench handing Penguins captain Sidney Crosby his stick. Crosby scored not five seconds later and as his teammates erupted in celebrations on the bench, everyone congratulated the equipment guy for his assist.
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After the Washington Nationals won the World Series in 2019, for the first time ever, fans celebrated in the streets in an outpouring of collective glee. There was a great deal of singing and chanting, including a “WHO DROPPED THEIR PHONE?” chant to find the owner of a lost mobile device and “FIX THAT TREE” as fans helped the police right a knocked-over potted tree. These fans’ communal elation and helpfulness is an example of something else I love about sports: they bring people together. Sports create community and connection on a number of levels. Through being a Liverpool fan, I’ve made friends with people in Texas, in Mexico, in Russia, in England, in Singapore. I’ve heard stories of people meeting fellow fans while vacationing in other countries and connecting across language barriers because of the unifying symbol of a jersey, colors and a logo that say We have something in common! The community I witnessed among fans on social media was part of what brought me into sports in the first place. I saw people bonding over teams, saw their inside jokes and references and shared language. Being a fan makes you feel like a part of something, a “we”, all united by a common interest and the same hopes and desires. That community is powerful. It’s why there’s such a thing as a home-field advantage: because thousands of people cheering together, breathing together, and believing together are something forceful.
Sports create community among players, too. My favorite sports are team sports — basketball, soccer, hockey — and I think that’s because I love even just witnessing that camaraderie and connection. I love teamwork and friendship. It warms my heart to see people working together toward a common goal, overcoming differences and bonding with each other. Sports are an arena where, in many cases, you cannot succeed without cooperation and harmony. They demand trust, intimacy, understanding, commitment. Teams can’t do well, long-term, with players who are individually talented but don’t work together. The very nature of the task requires the development of loyalty, support, and closeness. Essentially, it requires ferda. There’s a clip I love of a Boston College basketball player who’s about to graduate and is asked at a press conference what his best memory is of playing basketball at BC. He begins, “Probably just, like…” before getting choked up. He lowers his head for several seconds to compose himself and finishes, tearfully, “...goin’ out to eat.”
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On its face, this video is fucking hilarious. But of course this young man isn’t crying because he’ll miss Boston’s restaurants. He’s crying because he’ll miss going to them with his teammates. He’s crying because he’s about to leave his friends, who he’s formed a deep bond with. That community and love between teammates is beautiful to witness.
Sports are so much more than just a game. Not only can they forge these powerful connections and communities, but they also have fascinating cultural implications and effects. It’s interesting to me that sports are often seen as a site free of ideology and politics, or one that should be, when their relationship to those things is one of the aspects of sports I find most compelling. They are shaped by cultural forces: one of the most memorable sports stories for me is when German soccer player Mesut Ozil, who is ethnically Turkish and Muslim, quit the German national team. He cited racism from fans, media, and the German soccer federation as his reason for leaving, and his statement on the matter included a quote that has stuck with me for the three years since I first read it: “I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose.” It was a striking example of how connected sports are with the society they operate in — that they are not immune to ideology but in fact closely intertwined with it.
On the flip side, the immense cultural importance of sports means they have the power to make significant changes to that culture. Part of this is that knack sports have for bringing people together. They unite people from completely different backgrounds around a common cause, in a way that can promote real understanding and progress. Mo Salah is a perfect example. His accomplishments on the field and his renowned kindness and modesty off of it have had a tangible impact on the way Muslims and Middle Easterners are treated in the Liverpool area. Fan chants about Mo highlight his Muslim and Arab identities, hailing him as the “Egyptian king.” One includes the line “If he scores another few, then I’ll be Muslim too.” These chants demonstrate that Mo’s race and religion are accepted and celebrated by Liverpool fans, who were not always so welcoming: A Yemeni fan told the Liverpool Echo that before Mo’s arrival at the club, “some fans would give us stick over our Yemeni flag. But once Salah arrived fans wanted to have their photograph taken with us.”
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Sports are a place where ideology is contested and shaped, which means that they can act as a force for change, especially because, whatever else they’re influenced by, they are fundamentally about talent and hard work. If you’re really, really good, no one can deny that, regardless of whatever else they don’t like about you. It gives you power that’s hard to take away. At their best, sports are — excuse the pun — a level playing field. They’ve long been a way for marginalized people to show their excellence and combat racist and sexist views; historically, they have been one of the only realms where minorities could represent themselves. Because sports provide a stage these people often don’t otherwise have, they have often been used as a platform for activism — for example, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists in a Black Power salute while standing on the podium during the U.S. national anthem after winning gold and bronze in the 200-meter at the 1968 Olympics.
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Sports are by no means insulated from prejudice, and it’s a fallacy to think they alone can serve as an avenue to truly overcome bias and inequality — at every turn, there are attempts to curtail the power and self-representation sports afford to minorities. The idea that sports are a great equalizer and universally accessible is a myth, but it does come from some truth — they can make a positive impact, whether on a societal level or a personal one. They can give people a way out of poverty or provide a source of solace or empowerment. I watched a documentary last year about a wheelchair basketball team in Miami. The players in the film were deeply impacted by their participation in the sport — this community activity they could take part in, and succeed in, was so important to these men, many of whom felt powerless before they joined the team. The sport was an escape, a place where they could regain confidence in their bodies, their abilities, and themselves. One athlete said, “Basketball’s always been one of those few things that — I could get inside those four lines and nothing else mattered in the world.” For some, it tangibly improved their life circumstances — one secured a basketball scholarship. For these men and many others, sports mean something so much bigger, a sentiment neatly summed up by the Miami team’s coach: “What we do is beyond basketball. It’s beyond wheelchair sports. It’s life, and how we choose to live it.”
Whether the cultural and personal impact of sports is positive or negative, they’re connected to every element of identity and society. I find this endlessly captivating. The University of Kansas and the University of Missouri can trace their athletic rivalry back to the Civil War and tensions caused by Missouri, a slave state, trying to influence whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state. Sports are deeply tied up in culture, and in how we see ourselves. And yet, they can overpower and outweigh anything else. I recall, vividly, watching Usain Bolt in the 2008 Olympics and hearing an announcer talk about how the crime rate in Bolt’s home country of Jamaica had dropped in the nine days he had been competing. I think of that often, a clear image in my mind of Jamaica standing still, weapons dropped and enemies crowded together around the same television screen. Perhaps it’s a juvenile understanding, the rose-colored scene produced by a 9-year-old’s imagination, but that statistic is real. The meets Bolt ran were much more than races, about much more than merely who crossed the 100-meter finish line first. That red rubber track and the soles pounding it had the power to put an entire nation — the entire world — on pause.
Left: Ramos dislocating Mo's shoulder; right: Mo after the attack
Mo (right) with Liverpool teammate Bobby Firmino
Dejan and Mo
Part Four
I feel like the way I engage with sports, the things I like about sports, are...unorthodox. Weird. I think I’m probably among a very small minority of sports fans who have cried about a professional athlete while listening to Taylor Swift. I doubt that if you asked the average Mets fan why they watch baseball they would say it’s for the friendships between the players. I think it’s rare to be upset when players with objectively lackluster stats leave your team because you like them personally and it makes you sad to think of them leaving all their homies (yes there will be improvement on the field but AT WHAT COST!).
I’m not completely alone, though. The fans who originally introduced me to sports engage similarly. And they get a lot of ridicule — on NHL trade deadline day, a reporter who covers the Washington Capitals asked her followers how they were feeling after Vrana’s trade. One reply mocked “weirdo Twitter stans” for being upset (“stan” is an internet slang term for an obsessive fan of a particular celebrity); another scoffed that “The puck bunny world is in full meltdown” (a “puck bunny” is a female hockey fan whose interest in the sport is primarily motivated by attraction to the players, rather than enjoyment of the game).
This is probably unsurprising to anyone who’s interacted with sports culture, which is often very exclusive and snobby. Communications theorists who study the subject state that knowledge acquisition is a key practice for sports fans, who use how much they know about their sport or team “to differentiate themselves from mere spectators.” (Tarver) Fans discriminate fiercely against anyone they deem “fair-weather fans,” who are subject to “moral disdain” by other fans. It’s common to demand a certain level of knowledge and fandom from people, and to dislike casual fans (which, paradoxically, can prevent them from ever becoming serious fans). Sports buffs look down on anything they determine to be bandwagoning or otherwise not a “pure” love of the sport (the goalposts for which, of course, are ever-shifting).
There are a set of accepted practices that fans engage in, a standard of conduct and values for them to respect, that function as a means of positioning themselves as fans. Fans who engage with the sport differently than most deviate from those practices. As a result, they’re looked down upon and determined not to be “real” fans. This is especially true when that engagement also pushes against expectations of masculinized behavior in the realm of sport. As the “puck bunny” comment shows, a great deal of sports fandom’s gatekeeping is gendered — the “equation of detailed sporting knowledge with ‘proof’ of fandom” is applied far more often to women, whose ignorance is presumed from the outset (Tarver). Even women who are professional sports journalists almost universally report having their sporting knowledge and interest doubted. This deep sexism compounds the judgement “unorthodox” fans face for engaging with sports in a manner outside the norm.
But are these types of engagement actually that different from what “real” fans enjoy about sports? On the surface, it seems abnormal that I have such emotional investment in particular players, that I relate to them and support them for that reason, that I’m motivated to root for a team for emotional reasons or because I “like their vibe.” A lot of “typical” sports fans would pour scorn on those things. But if you look a little deeper, I don’t think we’re actually that different. All of those things I just mentioned are forms of what academics call “identification,” which is a major motivation for sports fandom. Identification is a psychological process in which a person assimilates an aspect or attribute of something or someone else into themselves and models themselves wholly or partially on that outside entity. Essentially, it is the construction of identity, our ideas about ourselves — we identify and dis-identify to categorize ourselves.
In the context of sports, identification is fans’ psychological connection to an athlete, sport, and/or other fans. Professor Erin C. Tarver argues that sports fandom “is a primary means of creating and reinforcing individual and community identities for Americans today.” She explains that sports “and the massive public events that surround them form some of the most meaningful ritual identity practices we have today. They are a primary way we — as individuals and a collective — decide both who we are and who we are not.” Fans identify with teams — according to Tarver, what it means to be a fan of a particular side matters because it affects the individual fan’s own identity. All of this seems pretty similar to what I said earlier about the reasons I root for Liverpool.
It’s also been documented that fans, broadly, also identify with specific players. Tarver describes the way that fans adopt a “lusory attitude” that imbues games, objects, and players with a significance they otherwise might not have. Tarver’s research finds that fans have sports heroes who they see as representative of them, often not just for the way they play but for off-field reasons. She uses the example of Tim Tebow, who is idolized by white Christian Americans not just for his sporting prowess, but for his personality and embodiment of their values. He is one of them, but a bit better than them. Tarver notes that this identification “explicitly exceeds the sporting context” — Tebow is “celebrated as an individual,” adored for his character traits, not for his sporting performance. In the same vein, Tarver finds that fans dis-identify with certain players, hating them on a similarly personal level and defining themselves in opposition to these players as a means of identity construction.
Tarver notes that for most sports fans, identification is largely unconscious. It’s clear, however, that what they are doing is the same as what I’m doing when I root for athletes because I feel personally connected to them and or for teams because I like their energy. I’m doing all of this consciously, but other sports fans are still doing it — even if you look at “normal” ways of engaging with sports, many of them are related to or rooted in identification. A great deal of the primary psychological motivators for watching sports are only experienced if a fan identifies with the team and the players — for example, the “positive stress” produced by watching a close game is much more pronounced when you care about the outcome, and the outcome matters to fans because they feel close to and associated with their team.
And yet many of those same people would likely hate the fact that I became a Liverpool fan because I liked Mo Salah’s personality. I would probably be viewed as a fair-weather fan, or something of the like. Maybe the fact that I initially cared about Liverpool because I cared about Mo, because I wanted him to succeed, does make me a bandwagoner or a bad fan or something. (Whatever. Me and the entire nation of Egypt.) I don’t know what exactly is an acceptable way of becoming a fan of a team or a player, just that a lot of ways are looked down on. Would it be better if I decided to become a Liverpool fan arbitrarily? Or if I chose them because I liked the way they played (I do! Heavy metal, baby.)? Should I have become a fan of Mo because of his technique, his style, his speed?
I am a fan of the way he plays, for the record. But I never would have seen him play if I hadn’t first been won over by his personality. And anyway, I think how he plays shows his personality — his dedication, his fire, his sweetness (I often get frustrated watching him play because he never takes any opportunity to get the other team penalized. He’s actually too nice to go down even when he’s legitimately been fouled). I think that’s often the case with athletes. If you like the way someone plays the game — presumably a more acceptable reason to become a fan of them and their team than because you love their soul — if you like that they’re rough, scrappy, strategic, whatever, is that not their personality? Is that not who they are, a manifestation of their character? Are you not identifying with them? And besides, regardless of the fact that Mo and who he is off the field were my way in, I did grow to care about LFC as a whole and be committed to the club, invested in their success, not just his. Shouldn’t people just be happy to have another person on their side? But many of them aren’t.
Many sports fans would probably also scoff at the idea that I like sports because of the narrative and the drama. The NHL had an ad campaign in 2019 with the slogan “No soap operas, just hockey,” contrasting a shot of a hockey player in action on the ice with a romance-novel-esque frame of a dramatic kiss. The ad promoted the message that hockey was free of drama and couldn’t be less like this kind of theatrical tale. But academics who study this stuff often talk about how, broadly, we ascribe myth and narrative to sports — a great deal of literature supports the idea that the narrative aspects of sports are one of the things people find most appealing. Psychology research tells us that we naturally love and are drawn to stories, and sports lend themselves really well to being “storified”: they’re fairly simple, straightforward win-or-lose situations with a lot of inherent drama and intrigue, they’re competitive and action-packed, they have sides to take and people we root for and can identify with, and they can easily be framed in terms of heroes and villains or other narrative archetypes.
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This narrative nature becomes clear when you look at media coverage of sports, which constantly takes advantage of it. Sports reporting draws out themes of loss, betrayal, emergence of new talent, etc., and packages everything as a story, often with emphasis on the personalities of the people involved — the characters — because that’s what people want. Take, for instance, coverage of LeBron leaving his hometown team, Cleveland, for the Miami Heat. All of it was highly dramatized, made into a spectacle, with a great deal of focus on his character and what side people took (Was it arrogant of him to go to a team where he had a better shot at a trophy?). And people ate it all up.
Stats-based sports reporting that focuses purely on the numbers is wildly unpopular in comparison to the “traditionalist” — storytelling — style of coverage. The story is necessary to make the stats feel meaningful for many people. People want the emotional connection and stakes. Communications scholars have studied the way that we ascribe stories to sports — we imbue them with symbolic value and overlay them with narrative arcs; we add meaning. This is a natural psychological tendency: narrative is a fundamental structure of human thought. “Our brains automatically assemble actors and events, causes and effects into the form of a storyline rather than seeing them as a jumble of people, things, and behaviors...We are forming narratives in our minds constantly.” (Dill-Shackleford and Vinney)
It follows naturally from this that we absolutely love stuff that’s already in a story shape, because we don’t have to do the work to make the story ourselves. The media takes advantage of the inherently narrative aspects of sports in order to appeal to this. They impose an understanding that’s easy to grasp and emotionally impactful, and thus easy to become invested in — New Orleans winning the Super Bowl in 2010, four years after being devastated by Hurricane Katrina, becomes a symbol of recovery. It’s not lost on me that the way most people consume sports is via media, and thus what they’re consuming, almost all the time, is the media’s storified version of sports. That narrative, that drama, is what they like. We are drawn to narrative — not just me. Us. All humans. Just about everyone who watches sports does so at least partly for the drama. Hockey does actually have quite a bit in common with soap operas, things that are likely appealing to fans whether they realize it or not. (That ad campaign included pictures of Leafs player Auston Matthews, whose teammate Mitch Marner’s contract situation was a much-discussed hot topic in hockey media the year the ads aired.)
It doesn’t seem that weird for me to be invested in players and their relationships, either — it makes sense that I would be interested in the characters and their interactions with each other, like I would with any fictional story. Moreover, media coverage constantly emphasizes personalities and dynamics. Their mythologizing and their “casting choices” are based as much on what goes on off the field as on it, so viewers are becoming invested in players based on their personalities even if they don’t mean to, or don’t realize it. The fact that there’s continuing coverage of every interaction Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook have, or of the partnership between Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, is evidence that there’s widespread interest in the relationships between athletes. People are clearly intrigued as much by the “behind the scenes” of sports as they are what happens on the field, or there wouldn’t be extensive reporting on all of it. And yet many of them are derisive when other fans are honest about being interested in that, are open about feeling emotionally attached to players like Jakub Vrana.
I think a lot of sports fans would recoil at the idea that what they enjoy in sports is the drama or narrative of it or any of the touchy-feely connection involved. So many of them like to act like they’re superior and above caring about any of that girly stuff. But the research suggests otherwise. Whether or not they recognize that what they get from sports is the same stuff I do, it is. Whether or not they see themselves as “realer” fans than me, they’re not. You do like hockey because it’s like a soap opera. Sorry, Chad, you’re not better than me.
Honestly, the only real difference between us is that I’m just having more fun. It’s more difficult to enjoy and embrace this weird style of engagement because people hate on it so much, but I’ve taken a lesson from the people online who introduced me to it in the first place. Despite constantly facing judgement from “traditional” sports fans, the fans I follow continue to engage with sports in their own way. Many of them are not only unabashedly invested in players as people but are also openly emotional in their engagement with sports: the 2021 trade deadline prompted a few people to reminisce about past trades they’d been dismayed by, in particular Tyson Barrie being traded from the Colorado Avalanche to the Toronto Maple Leafs in 2020. One Twitter user told the story of being “on a call with my therapist when Tyson Barrie got traded to Toronto and working thru that became the rest of our session” and added, “i have spent HOURS in therapy talking about hockey”. Someone else replied, “i’m still not over the Barrie trade. legit was crying at my desk. still think about that soul crushing move and all I could think about was how Joe [Avalanche general manager Sakic] broke up the besties” (referring to Barrie and his Avalanche teammates, who he’d played with since 2011).
This is a very different kind of sports fandom than the traditional model, given that sports fans are not only primarily men but usually extremely masculine men who would likely look down on crying at all, let alone bringing those kinds of weak emotions into the sphere of uncompromising macho toughness they idolize sports as. Actually, sports are an interesting arena where hegemonic masculinity and its values of strength and stoicism clash with vulnerability and emotion — they’re a place where men are allowed to express emotion, in a manner that’s considered unacceptable in most other domains, but there are still very specific limitations to that expression. It’s like, okay, fine, men can cry, as long as it’s over something appropriately macho like their sports team losing. Interestingly, though, these fans sort of turn the rules of vulnerability within sports on their head. Their interactions with sports almost say Okay, I’m gonna be emotional about sports too, but not in the accepted way. I’m gonna cry about the tender relationships between these macho professional athletes, and I’m gonna also analyze THEIR feelings about their relationships, defeats, etc. I’m about to apply a fuckton of emotion to this arena of acceptable male vulnerability, but outside of its parameters of acceptability. It’s almost like they have an attitude of “fuck your limitations.”
And there is an attitude to the way these fans engage with sports. They’re not stupid, they know it’s abnormal and looked down upon. But they do it anyway, insistent on defying expectations and restrictions and going about their fandom in a way that’s authentic and makes them happy, because they also know that the criticism they get is dumb. Most of it is sexist — not only are many of these fans women, trans men or non-binary people, the kind of fandom they’re participating in is very fangirl-esque, the sort of thing stereotypically associated with how teen girls fawn over boy bands. They get made fun of a lot, whenever an unfamiliar interloper makes his way to their little pocket of the internet — see the replies to that Capitals reporter’s tweet, which included a man saying it was “lame” to see “girls freaking out over [Vrana] being traded because he’s cute.”
Accusations of being puck bunnies or just weird are frequent, but don’t stop these fans, because they recognize, firstly, that even if you did get into a sport because you thought a player was attractive, it literally does not matter. So what! Who cares! Let people have fun! (I’d also like to point out that it’s absurd to make fun of female fans for finding players hot when every man in Boston wants to suck Tom Brady’s dick.) Also, the chances of that happening with hockey in particular are slim. Have you SEEN hockey players? So many of them are missing teeth. So many. These fans know the judgement they receive is ridiculous and inaccurate, and the way they’ve responded is by saying “Fuck it” and embracing their quirky version of fandom.
One of the You Can’t Do That hosts, Rave, made a Twitter thread a couple years ago where she talked about why she’s “so determined to perform the Kind of Bad Fandom” she does: “the loud physical desire, the unashamed magical thinking, the telegraphed disinterest in the “real” metrics of the sport.”
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Rave and her fellow "bad fans" know that the way they engage with sports is not the traditional way (how could they not, when other fans constantly take it upon themselves to remind them). They know it's not the "right" way. But they also know that there is no right way, not really. And they'll never make those who try to police their fandom happy anyway.
So they’ve chosen to lean into it, to love what they love in whatever way is true to themselves. And I’ve found that being honest with yourself like that, being unashamed about what you enjoy, is a lot more fun. I’m happy with my weird version of sports fandom, and I’m keeping it. I refuse to be excluded or looked down upon; I’m going to embrace my passion however I want to.
Tim Tebow. Note the cross on his bracelet!
References:
Shackleford, Karen E., and Cynthia Vinney. "The Timelessness of Stories." Finding Truth in Fiction: What Fan Culture Gets Right--and Why it's Good to Get Lost in a Story.: Oxford University Press, May 21, 2020. Oxford Scholarship Online. Date Accessed 27 Apr. 2021
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Tarver, Erin C. The I in Team: Sports Fandom and the Reproduction of Identity: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Date Accessed 27 Apr. 2021