A fan’s notes

by David Benjamin

“Man may penetrate the outer reaches of the universe, he may solve the very secret of eternity itself but for me, the ultimate human experience is to witness the flawless execution of the hit-and-run.” — Branch Rickey

MADISON, Wis.—The saturation coverage of the recent World Cup featured fans from all over the world who were charmingly festive and persistently noisy. They wore silly hats and waved gonfalons while singing songs, blowing horns, playing bagpipes and chanting “Olé! Olé! Olé!” ad nauseam.

This, I contend, was largely a facade, promoted by soccer propagandists and their commercial TV enablers. Being a fan is not all yelling “Woo!” and high-fiving the stranger in the next seat over. Being a fan, actually, is hardly any of that.

I can testify to the occasional thrill and the prevalent agony of sports neurosis because I’ve a fan for most of my life—and a sportswriter for some of it. My first team was the Milwaukee Braves, with whom I fell in love the year after they won two straight National League pennants, and who betrayed my devotion by absconding to Atlanta when I was in eleventh grade. But I still had the Green Bay Packers and the Wisconsin Badgers, and I regained baseball in Boston, where I discovered the Greek tragedy that’s played out every summer in Fenway Park. Of course, this love affair began the year after the “Impossible Dream” Red Sox won the American League Pennant—and 36 years before they won their first World Series since 1918. I mark the four seasons not so much as spring, summer, fall and winter but as baseball, football, basketball and that barren spell—relieved only by a few weekends of March Madness—between the Super Bowl and Opening Day.

The simplest explanation of any sports fan’s passion is tribalism. The fan attaches to his local team(s), or to a non-local team that has somehow, inexplicably tickled his fancy. Non-fans cite such attachments—to “team colors,” slogans (“Go Pack Go”) and mascots (the Philly Phanatic, Uga the University of Georgia bulldog)—as proof than fanhood is merely mindless tribalism.

To answer that charge, I offer George, from Appleton, 28 miles south of Lambeau Field. who has been true to the Green Bay Packers since birth and can recite all five offensive linemen who opened the hole for Bart Starr in the Ice Bowl. With every vagary and vicissitude that afflicts the Packers, George sees a glass that that’s far lower than half-full. Sometimes, after the Pack lose to the hated Vikings, the glass is bone dry.

In that sense, George reflects the soccer fans I’ve observed in European sports bars. There, I listen (but rarely watch), as—every five minutes or so—the roar of fifty fans glued to the telly reaches a crescendo of anticipation, only to crash into a collective “Aaaaaaaw!,” punctuated by expletives. Then, five minutes later—as the teams battle toward soccer’s classic outcome, a nil-nil tie—the same goalus interruptus happens all over again. And again, and again …

Frustration hounds the genuine fan, either driving him or her mad, or turning the fan into a student, an analyst, a stoic philosopher, a nerd. The author Paul Dickson has averred that anyone who can’t properly fill out a pageful of little squares (with arcane personal notations), for nine innings, in a baseball scorebook doesn’t deserve to be deemed a real baseball fan. I agree. One of the joys of attending a game at Fenway Park is that the stadium is too small and too old, to install a ring of garish LED displays along its interior facade, where appear inducements to the crowd, like “MAKE NOISE!” Such a message would insult Red Sox fans, who know baseball as well as any 35,000 people in America. Real fans know when to make noise and when to shut the hell up.

Real fans are romantics. One’s attachment to one’s team is like a marriage. When I fell in love with the Milwaukee Braves, they were defending their National League championship. They lost it. Three years later, they were a fifth-place team. But I loved them in fifth as much I’d loved them in, well, second place. One learns a team’s flaws, quirks and moods much as one learns the same about one’s spouse. It’s a bond, like marriage, that began with a burst of infatuation, a dream of lifelong love. It is the memory of that romantic epiphany and the hope of its rebirth—as well as the comfort of familiarity and the accumulation of new memories—that holds fans to the team, and spouses together.

The Braves were my first divorce. To be alienated from one’s ex-beloved is a bitter ache not easily purged. As Neil Sedaka said three years before the Braves dragged Henry Aaron into Jim Crow Georgia, “Breaking up is hard to do.”

A while ago, I wrote a novel that I subtitled, “A Football Romance.” A Sunday Kind of Love is a mildly tragic love triangle, set during the Green Bay Packers tumultuous 2009 season, in which Trish, my protagonist, discovers the pleasures and miseries of being a football fan. She’s aided in this education by a family of fans, among which is a barroom philosopher named Gabriel.
One NFL Sunday, Gabe explain to his fellow barflies, including diehards, cynics, and the neophyte Trish, the pathology of being a fan. Here’s an abridged version—I’ve deleted comments from Shane the cynic—of his soliloquy.

“For many of us, who have no particular affection for our employer, or have no employer, whose relationship to religion, or to God, is marginal or skeptical, for those of us whose families are scattered or estranged, who have no school to be true to, who don’t have a cause to fight for or a patriotism we’re willing to die for, the biggest thing in life—our Emerald City—is the Green Bay Packers.

“We live today in an atomized, balkanized, polarized culture. People clawing at each other’s throats over theological minutiae like the quickening of the fetus in the womb, and orifice choices among sex partners. Every day, we discover new private feelings, fresh personal prerogatives that seem like they’re designed to separate us from the main, to distance each one of us from our fellow humans. And yet, the hunger for community nags at us, doesn’t it? Why do we all gather so faithfully here in this dank watering hole if not for that primordial desire for social contact, solidarity, fellowship? We sense, not rationally but confidently, that we make a greater and better whole as friends than we could hope to be if we defended to the death our right to be perfect, uncompromised individualists.

“Take Big Al. Divorced from the Packers, he would be in control of what Thoreau called a ‘life of quiet desperation,’ a routine existence both humdrum and incomprehensible. He would face little risk or suspense from now until the day he gives up his ghost. There would be no great moments of shattering heartbreak, nor would there be the occasional epic triumph. He would have no heroes in his life, and his worst villains would be petty bureaucrats and TV characters. Miracles would be out of the question. His life would be entirely his own. It would be safe and sane, it would be painless and it would be dull—except for the Packers.

“The Packers, ironically, are the element of uncertainty. They are everybody’s touch of exquisite madness. Although, as a corporation, they remain as immutable and certain as the Internal Revenue Service, they are, for all of us here, life’s greatest adventure. Like us, the Packers follow day-by-day a changeless routine. But unlike most of us, that routine—every once in a blue moon—ends in glory, fireworks, parades and national hysteria. The Packers seek this glory—they assure us of this, and we believe them—because of us. They do it all for us, the fans.

“Or maybe not! Maybe they don’t care about us. Maybe it’s all just dollars and cents. But what a world-shattering thought! I don’t dare believe that. My God, where would I be? Nor does Shane believe, truly, that Lambeau Field is overflowing with bullshit. He only wishes it were so. Shane’s dirty secret is that he really does have faith in the Packers. He has given over a piece of himself, compromised his peace of mind, to the vagaries and inconsistencies of 53 unfathomable and disparate strangers—most of whom aren’t as smart as the majority of us here in this idiot-infested bar. We do this because it gives us, vicariously and from a great distance, a share in the glamour and the counterfeit heroism that accrues to sports champions. As we suffer through every day’s degrading race against our fellow rats, the Packers are an endless, regularly scheduled series of voyages into the unknown. They are trips to the moon on pigskin wings. They are high drama. They are a matter of life-and-death in the midst of life.

“But here’s the unselfish, uplifting thing, the human part of it: We follow the Packers together because they bring us together. United by the Packers, by our love and by our loyalty, we are each a little greater than we could ever be if we were just sitting at home, alone, on the couch, on Sunday, readin’ the funnies and watching ‘Meet the Press.’”