I woke up early Sunday morning groggy and tired as all hell with a horse for a voice feeling as if I had just ran the Boston Marathon, and to make matters worse I was late for work.
And I couldn't have been happier. In fact, I knew that the whole week was going to go okay as flashes of the previous night's Sun Devil football game hit my mind like a Rudy Carpenter touchdown pass. Flashes of overcoming unreal hardships from the Bears in blue to the Zebras in stripes. Flashes of Carpenter throwing up the middle to run the clock out, flashes of a defensive second half shutout, flashes of rushing the field to declare victory for ourselves and our team.
And as I anticipated, my mood did not damper. The illogicality of all this soon began to hit me. Should we have lost, my predisposition would have certainly been different and my absurd excitement over events in which I did not directly affect seemed to elude common logic.
So why do we care? What's the point of spending money and time over a team that will perform regardless of my obsessiveness? What solace do I take in victories I did not myself earn?
The concept of the mildly obsessed to raging fanatical fan is almost illogical. We cheer for a color, root for a name, but what logical purpose do sports actually fulfill? I mean, should this school win some sort of title, we the students will be buying the shirts as well as the tickets and anything else. They don't give us a championship shirt like you see on the field.
Many sports fans can't address this question. They watch because they love, they watch because they enjoy watching their team playing their game. But it is far greater than mere entertainment. Within this lies the idea of displacement, our ability to concern ourselves with simply the game, and it's truly the best therapy out there (even if you are a Bills fan). This is because for however long a particular game is going on, communities can forget about life and make a game the only thing that matters.
I believe also we as a community crave something bigger and greater than us. It isn't blasphemy to say sports legends are gods to some. We like to see and believe in the superhero, we yearn for the impossible. We need things out of our control to matter, not just so we can forget about life, but also so we can see something far greater than ourselves within the realm of human possibility.
It's important to realize that this idea of cheering for ones team is far from new. Competition is a universal theme that wasn't just practiced by the Greeks. According to NPR and professors Ed Hirt and David Potter, as well as Sports Illustrated writer Richard Deitsch, as chariot races took place from Constantinople and throughout the Roman Empire, colors began to identify people from different regions. It was far from a conscious decision. It was literally something these Romans grew up with. It was part of who they were. Whether you were a "blue" or a "green" you represented your neighborhood and community, making it a part of your everyday identity. This sense of identity is an extraordinary important concept of the sports fan. While bandwagoning has somewhat changed the definition, identity is what causes us to paint our faces stupid colors, it is why we learn songs and cheers. Identity is the foundation sports fans have because we cheer to belong and we long to prevail.
This innate sense of competition has evolved and expanded. In fact, studies have shown changes in a man's testosterone levels based simply on the outcome of a particular sporting event. Sports are, in a very real sense, a form of drug because of their literal impact on negative and positive emotions. To further this idea, consider that when a game is played in a neutral arena, there is a guarantee that half the fans will go away disappointed, yet the mere high of the game, the intense moments that people allow themselves to experience as if they were more than mere spectators, is what makes up part of the illogical sports fanatic. Victory merely intensifies the high to its climax.
If you as a fan are willing to live and die over a teams success and failures, if you are willing to allow yourself to feel anguish beyond comparable expression, sadness and shock equitable to acute illnesses, then finally when that day comes for great victory, you will achieve complete and utter ecstasy (the legal form) as you are granted joy comparable to that of the players themselves.
Reach the reporter at: joshua.spivack.
