In Defense of Sports Fandom

It’s a healthy outlet for our passions and antipathies.

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I will never understand marathon runners and triathletes. I run only when chased, and, as Rodney Dangerfield said, when I die, I’m donating my body to science fiction. 

But it’s indisputable that the mortification of the flesh in which these skinny people engage can have tremendous benefits. It is an arbitrary passion, but for many, an essential one. I know lots of people for whom their happy existence, productive work, fulfilling family lives, sobriety, and more are arranged around the centerpiece of some kind of exertion that I find appalling. Thank God for it. 

Arranging our passions is hard work. For most of us, it is the work of a lifetime. What the philosophers of antiquity called the “chest” was the space between our heads and our guts where we put things in the right places. As modern philosopher C.S. Lewis put it, the deconstructed anomie of our world creates “men without chests”—people unable to arrange their passions. Without belief in powers universal and transcendent and the understanding of natural law that such beliefs demand, how shall we choose our priorities?

All people worship. What Blaise Pascal called the “God-shaped void” in all of us is a demand as potent as hunger and thirst. If we deny that truth, we allow our worship to be haphazard and hidden from ourselves. We pretend that our idols are simply correct, scientific, obvious, and necessary. The reason I crisscross the country continually, always talking, always writing, always exhausted isn’t because I’ve made an idol of my vocational success, but because it’s important … right? 

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    I’ll defend marathon running just briefly here - not because I didn’t think Chris was fair, but because I thought of something additional I might add.

    Sports gives people a healthy outlet for tribalism. But playing sports, and participating in various athletic competitions or pursuits (especially difficult ones like marathons), gives people healthy outlets for other things as well. I commented about this on David’s recent piece about men and boys and Eberstadt’s book. David said something about how it was important to teach young men about the virtues of fatherhood and productive work and not to focus so much on action and heroism which can’t be gotten so easily in the modern world (or something like that).

    I said that that was all well and good but that actually athletics provides a healthy realm in which to exercise action and heroism and experience physical challenge, which complements the rest of life: fatherhood, work, etc. For men, it is a healthy outlet for physical aggression. For everyone, it is a way to keep some of the best and most meaningful benefits of early human life with all the benefit of civilization. People lament the lack of opportunity for adventure today. Well, playing sports, or running, or engaging in other recreational athletic activities can scratch that itch for adventure (hey, sometimes you really do bleed).

    Sports is a healthy outlet for tribalism. And athletics writ large is a healthy outlet for adventure, action, physical aggression, heroism, competition, and even traditional honor culture (ex., racing each other instead of dueling).

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  2. Avatar photo
    Jeff Greene

    Indeed. My wife and I have a mixed marriage--she's a Trojan fan and I'm a UCLA alum (and huge ND fan by upbringing). Her team stands for everything I abhor and was born and raised to hate, but it really only matters a few hours per year...

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  3. George Bascom

    Thank you Chris Stierwalt. I will post a copy of your article on our refrigerator. Consequently, my otherwise dear wife will have to read it. When it comes to sports she’s a hollow man, spiritually dead to the joy of victory, the agony of defeat and the fierce tribal loyalty engendered by fandom.
    Sir Kenneth Clark observed, in Civilisation, “Communal enthusiasm is a dangerous intoxicant, but in an age of secular rationalism it is an alternative to naked materialism.” Not sure the good Baron, devotee of high culture that he was, recognized communal enthusiasm for sports teams is also a partial, but potent, antivenin to poisonous political squabbles between people. Place me next to the most militant neo-Chavista Democratic Socialist of America. If he wears Jayhawk garb that man is my brother. Seat me in a section of the most deplorable MAGA cultists in Arrowhead Stadium and I’ll happily break bread and share a Boulevard Wheat with them after the tomahawk chop. We can build on that.
    Conversely, the cognitive dissonance in fans; triggered by the disruption of long-standing regional rivalries; engineered by the cynical suits who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing; was best exemplified in 2012 on the plaintive placard hoisted by a Mountaineer fan: BUT I STILL HATE PITT. Substitute MISSOURI for PITT on your placard Chris. I think it would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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  4. LucyTrice

    Chris, this was beautifully written. "Arranging our passions is hard work." Yes.

    Thanks for this.

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  5. Patrick F

    Men and women of good faith and sound mind can all agree -- Pat Narduzzi is the worst.

    Go Irish.

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  6. Avatar photo
    Jesse.Wick

    Fandom can end badly. Ask the partisans of the blue and green factions at the Hippodrome.

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  7. Nicco

    I like the idea, but I’m not sure sports and politics are like enough to compare. If my team wins the championship, my life changes almost not at all. If my team doesn’t make the playoffs, my life changes almost not at all. If my candidate wins or loses, there is potential for my life (and everyone else’s) to change substantially. The winner of the Stanley cup doesn’t set policy or influence regulation or raise/lower taxes, but the winners of elections do. The stakes are simply higher. Sports are entertainment, like my favorite movies. Politics impacts my actual life.

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  8. David R

    But I'm sure Syracuse fans (waves) and WVU fans can both agree that these mega-conferences are terrible (what kind of college football universe do we live in where SU, Pitt, WVU, and Penn State don't all play each other every year?), and all Penn State's fault.

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  9. Natty Bumpo

    Agree with your premise about fandom being a generally positive outlet for our competitive nature, as long as we can demonstrate the self-awareness you evoke in your post here. It is certainly fine to lose yourself in the contest, or the campaign, for a time, and to imbue your adversary with malign character. But that all must be a veneer that we can quickly transcend when dealing with the actual human behind the opposing fan or athlete. I have very strong rooting interests in one collegiate program (at least for football and wrestling, but generally all of the teams), an MLB team and an NFL team. I can engage in good-natured ribbing of my Brother-in-law for his misguided affiliation with the Dallas Cowboys, and lustily declare a rhyming denouncement of sports teams of the University of Pittsburgh. However, I have known and worked with fine people representing those constituencies, and the nature of the rooting relationship is quickly apparent to me, even in the heat of the moment.

    Sports rooting may do us the favor of reminding us that those on the other team are as human as we are, and deserve that consideration, whether in victory or defeat.

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  10. Austin

    I have made great friends at work with Detroiters who were big Wings fans (I was, and still am, an Avs fan) - you'd think we would have started snapping at each other immediately, but instead we just reminisce and marvel at how much fun that rivalry once was.

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