Cut It With the Condescending "Sportsball" Crap
At the very end of a Wikipedia entry that, to be honest, REALLY needs to be updated, I am described as "a longtime Chicago White Sox super-fan.” It turns out that I am in fact the one who described myself as a White Sox super-fan, in an A.V Club article about the inter-species baseball buddy comedy Ed, of all things.
Whenever I see this it nevertheless makes me laugh and feel faintly ashamed, not because there’s anything particularly embarrassing about being a White Sox super-fan but rather because “White Sox super-fan” hasn’t applied to me in a very, very long time.
I was, in fact, once a bona fide White Sox super-fan. There was a time in my life when I would have welcomed an opportunity to spend six hours in line to get an autograph from someone like Carlton Fisk, Bo Jackson or Frank Thomas.
I remember once weeping, legitimately weeping, leaving a Brewers game with my dad because the Brewers had lost the game. It wasn’t even a particularly important game: I was just so emotionally invested in baseball at that point in my life that “my team” losing an inconsequential game could reduce me to tears.
I used to be a very different person. Hell, there was a time when the phrase “Oasis super-fan” similarly applied to me and I have not kept up with the doings of the Gallagher brothers in several decades.
White Sox baseball was my life throughout much of my childhood and adolescence but I did not limit myself to one team or one sport. I was a super-fan of Chicago sports: The Bears and the Bulls were hugely important to me as well.
Then I moved out of the group home where I spent my teenage years, lost my virginity, got drunk for the first time and discovered marijuana. Suddenly sports and video games, two of my biggest adolescent preoccupations, stopped mattering to me.
I never got back into sports, not even a little. I used to watch The Super Bowl every year because it was a social event and my old A.V Club editor Stephen Thompson had a chicken-eating contest during every Super Bowl party that made everything a lot of fun.
If the White Sox were in the World Series of the Bears were in the Super Bowl the only way that I would know would be if my father, who remains a Chicago sports super-fan, were to tell me.
I went from being someone who lived for sports to someone who would never even think of watching the Super Bowl or World Series, from being all in on a pathological level to not caring in the least.
I’m not the kind of snarky smart-ass who condescendingly refers to all athletic endeavors as “sports ball” but in my smuggest, worst moments there’s part of me that looks back at my time as a sports buff with utter bewilderment.
Yet I do not regret the time and energy I expended rooting for a bunch of millionaire strangers who happened to be employed by a sports team representing the city that I used to live in.
At a time in my life when I was absolutely miserable, rooting for the White Sox gave me an all-important form of escape. At a time when I felt utterly alone and isolated, being a White Sox fan provided me with a sense of community.
Even now, baseball and basketball and football are a way for me and my dad to bond, as is often the case with fathers and sons, particularly in the midwest, where sports are generally more popular than expressing emotion.
Michael Jordan and Frank Thomas helped me survive a Dickensian childhood and an adolescence fraught with peril. In that respect, sports fandom fulfilled many of the same psychological needs that Phish, Insane Clown Posse and “Weird Al” Yankovic fandom did later in life. It provided me with a sense of community, identity and escape at a period in my life when I desperately needed those things.
I never gave up on fandom. I remain, at my core, a passionate fan, an enthusiast, a true believer. I just switched from sports to music and podcasts and comedy and movies. So while there’s a very good chance that I will never follow sports actively again I am grateful for the essential, borderline life-savings role they once played in my life, and for the positive role sports continues to play in the lives of others.
In my old age I have learned not to be cynical about what helps people survive a brutal world, even if it’s no longer one of my own personal coping mechanisms or soul-consuming passions.
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