As a teen, hell even as a young adult, I was way too invested in the success of my favorite sports teams. Wins or losses determined my mood for the rest of that night/week.
While I will always encourage fans to be passionate and to support your favorite clubs with the same fervor that I had as a young person, there are some that need not cross that line.
For me, it's possible that working in the sports media business for over 15 years has desensitized a bit about the results of my teams. Losses no longer affect my mood, and it's liberating to say the least. Of course I still root for them, and feel upset when they win, but it ends there.
Having the ability to speak to some of these athletes has shown me the human side of things. Sometimes the pressures that come with the constant critique of their jobs, plays a massive role in their mental health and subsequent performance on the field or court. It gets even worse when they have to deal with or think about verbal abuse online.
While I obviously cannot expect everyone to understand this without having the same opportunities to speak with these players, I can expect for fans to be courteous and respectful humans.
For quite some time now, we've been dealing with players being called racial slurs on social media and we need to be better.
My colleague Joanne C. Gerstner had Quinnipiac University journalism professor Molly Yanity as a guest writer on her Bulletin Open Court to discuss this very topic. Here is a portion of her piece, observing how the poor play of certain teams affect their fans. The link to the full post is at the bottom of the page.
The word “fan” is short for fanatic, or “redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim,” philosopher George Santayana wrote in his 1905 book “Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense.”
That aim has been forgotten for many fans.
I saw this in action when, dressed in a Steelers jersey, I attended a Week 6 game in Pittsburgh.
For the most part, the fans around me were strangers to me and each other. Yet, I listened as they lamented the poor team that played before them -- bad offensive line, bad quarterback, bad coaching.
“This is the worst Steelers team I’ve seen in my life,” said one fan who couldn’t be much more than drinking age. He wanted Tomlin to be fired. Others agreed.
The young man seemed to be in agony right until Chris Boswell kicked a game-winning field goal in overtime to seal his team’s victory over the Seattle Seahawks.
That’s a perplexing phenomenon when half the teams must lose each week.
(JCG note: Or if you are the Lions, you can tie and NOT lose! Whoo!)
With the advent of social media, fans’ requesting personnel changes is as part of the game as the coin flip.
“This has always gone on, but now their reach is farther than just the local sports radio airwaves. They put it out on social media, into the echo chamber and it reverberates,” Danielle Coombs said.
Coombs is a professor in the School of Media and Journalism at Kent State University. She is also an expert on sports fandom having developed a theory on the subject along with her co-author Anne Osborne of Syracuse called performative sports fandom.
The gist of the theory is that people become a sports fan by performing the role of a sports fan. How they act, then, is based on context and audience.
"A big part of this is fans now think they have the expertise because they can manage a fantasy football team. They’re quicker to say, ‘I know what’s going on.’”
Fan identities can change based on who you’re watching the game with, for example. Those identities are also forged through how much fans know and care.
From purchasing jerseys to the NFL Sunday Ticket to traveling to games and buying tickets, that monetary commitment only raises the stakes for fans. Fantasy football and gambling boost them even more.
“Fans have the financial investment because they care deeply,” Coombs said. “They resent it when they feel a coach or players doesn’t have the same investment. You see the emotional commitment, the fan identity and it often shows itself as, ‘This is the person standing between my team -- me by proxy -- winning.’”
Of the 32 NFL head coaches, only 11 have been a head coach for more than five seasons. It stands to reason, then, that fans often get what they want.
“There is only a select group that sees what that truly means. Coaches move their families. They lose their families for months of the year. They are well compensated, but they go through the ringer,” Coombs said. “Fans don’t see that. And, even if they did, I’m not sure they’d care. Fans don’t want to give them time or grace.”
Here’s where this research gets crazy: Coombs is a rabid Cleveland Browns fan. Osborne? You guessed it: A Steelers fan.
