Why do we root for losers? Nice, hurtful NYT article.

[T0mShane]

Long, but worthwhile. Much like my dick.

Why Does Anyone Root for Incompetent, Failing Teams?

By Steve Almond

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/magazine/why-does-anyone-root-for-incompetent-failing-teams.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120826

In January 2002, the Oakland Raiders, a football team I have worshiped since I was 5, flew east to face the New England Patriots in a playoff game. I was living 30 miles north of Foxboro Stadium, and I can still remember the color of the sky that morning, the dense gunmetal of a looming storm. By late afternoon, snow was falling at an almost comical rate. It blotted out the yard markers and hampered traction, which lent the game a surreal, slapstick air.

The Raiders dominated, but the Patriots rallied late, led by a rookie quarterback named Tom Brady. Down three points with two minutes left, Brady dropped back to pass and found his receivers blanketed.

If I close my eyes I can still see Brady there, hopping about in the snow like a sparrow. He cocks his right arm as if to pass, thinks better of it, then pulls the ball down and pats it with his left hand. At this precise moment, the Raiders cornerback Charles Woodson (my favorite player of all time) crashes into him and rakes away the ball. Fumble. Raiders recover. Game over.

As all sports fans know, the Raiders went on to win the Super Bowl that year, and the next two besides, while the Patriots descended into a decade of incompetence. Brady, his confidence shattered, soon left football to run a used-car dealership outside Phoenix.

Oh, all right, that’s not exactly how it went down. But you can’t blame a partisan for tinkering with the script a little, especially at such an agonizing juncture.

Consider what actually happened. The referee announced that the play would be reviewed, eventually ruling that Brady was attempting to “tuck” the ball as he was pummeled and was therefore, by some cruel metaphysical logic, still in the act of passing, rendering his fumble an incomplete pass.

The Raiders never recovered from the shock. Not only did they lose the game in overtime; they also imploded as a franchise. I know this because I’ve invested tens of thousands of hours tracking their descent: the carousel of inept coaches; the disastrous draft picks; each and every senseless, drive-killing penalty.

As I prepare to immerse myself in another season of ill-fated devotion, there is a question I can’t shake: Why? Not why do the Raiders keep losing, but why does anyone follow an incompetent, perpetually failing team? It’s a question that resonates across an entire nation of fanatics, from the frigid Cheeseheads of Wisconsin to the yodeling herds of Texas, from the mile-high multitudes to the bellowing masses of New York.

In offering explanations, the afflicted tend to stress the laudable aspects of sport. It’s perfectly natural, we note, to admire the grace and strength of our finest athletes. Their contests reconnect us to the unscripted physical pleasures of childhood. They simplify and lend moral structure to a world that feels increasingly chaotic. And they allow men, in particular, a common language by which to express deep emotions (rage, disappointment, joy) that might otherwise feel forbidden — as well as activating our ancient yearning for tribal affiliation.

Unfortunately, these reasons don’t quite justify the more pathological practitioners of fandom. By which I mean hard cases like me, who spend decades rooting for teams that almost invariably stomp our hearts. To understand this species of devotion requires the invocation of Omar Little, the mystical Robin Hood figure of “The Wire.” As he puts it, “A man’s gotta have a code.”

To my ilk, this code amounts to unwavering loyalty. You stick with your team, no matter how lousy and undeserving it becomes. You don’t chase winners. This is why Spike Lee, patron saint of Brooklyn, will never root for the newly minted Brooklyn Nets. He’s a Knicks guy for life — even if the idiots in the front office let Jeremy Lin get away. Am I suggesting that Spike and I are morally superior to fans who switch allegiances or simply take pleasure in games for their own sake? No, though we certainly enjoy feeling this way. Given the modern sports landscape, in which contract money trumps player loyalty, we lifers are basically rooting for laundry.

This is why each new indignity hurts so much, yet fortifies our bond. The losses echo back across the years. As a weak, frightened kid growing up in the suburbs of Northern California, I rooted for the Raiders because they embodied a certain outlaw attitude I longed to evince. But when I think about my earliest fervor for the team, what returns to me is not pride at the three Super Bowls the Raiders won but a conviction that they could never beat the Pittsburgh Steelers. This feeling is a direct result of growing up in the shadow of a domineering older brother — who just happened to root for the Steelers. So I felt about the Raiders the way I felt about myself: that no matter what I achieved in the world, I would never vanquish my brother. And thus I spent the dim Decembers of my youth in a state of cosmic grievance, absorbing his taunts after another Steelers conquest. The first of these humiliations came in 1972, when the Steelers running back Franco Harris made the Immaculate Reception, plucking a deflected fourth-down pass off his shoe tops and carrying it 43 yards for the winning touchdown with five seconds left in the game.

I rooted even harder the next year.

The code had become my way of holding on to faith in the face of inevitable loss. Because not only had my team lost, but it would lose again, as all teams do, if not immediately then eventually. And this experience forms the unconscious bedrock of our identification.

After all, we live in a culture that enforces competition and deifies success. We’re relentlessly subjected to winners, when the truth is that most of us spend our entire lives losing, or feeling anyway that we’ve failed to win it all. We squander our talent, we mismanage the clock, we choke in the clutch. Our teams, in other words, enact public dramas that we experience as struggles to transcend our own private defects. They allow us to psychically offload our sense of futility.

We need look no further for evidence than to the meteoric rise of sports talk radio. Anyone who has listened to this format will tell you that nothing lights up the phone lines like a crushing defeat. And what you hear in the callers’ voices, beneath the bluster and complaint, is actually quite moving: an effort to grapple with defeat.

So all of us idiots who stick it out with the Chicago Cubs or the Cleveland Browns or the Knicks aren’t just waiting around for a championship banner. We’re also seeking to remain loyal to the parts of ourselves that feel overmatched and doomed to failure in the hope that someday our loyalty — to our teams and to ourselves — will be rewarded.

Over the years, I’ve tried to quit the Raiders. When I moved East for college, I took to viewing my fandom through the lens of my liberal-arts education, as a childish diversion from the world’s real crises and as a callous endorsement of patriarchal violence. (Yes, I attended Wesleyan.)

And yet quietly I clung to my team even more fiercely. Leaving home was an act of self-imposed exile. My love of the Raiders nourished my sense of being an outsider and allowed me to remain connected to the savage resentments that marked my childhood.

During my postcollegiate diaspora, I spent years wandering from one city to the next, searching, it seems to me now, mostly for a TV upon which I could watch the Raiders. It was nearly impossible to find one, a hardship that stoked my crusade. I fancied myself a misunderstood loner, a prophet who drove away the happy and the feckless and then lamented the injustice of my solitude. (It was all very Raiders.)

Fifteen years ago I moved to Somerville, Mass., where I located a vast, bacterial sports bar that catered to sickos like me. Every Sunday in autumn, I drove there to watch my team and to curse softly into my chicken wings. I told no one about these excursions, not even close friends. The whole thing felt like a pathetic infatuation, unworthy of the literary artist I was striving — and failing — to become.

But those lonely afternoons were the central emotional events of my life. How else can I explain the way my hands would tremble in the parking lot? Or how my heart hammered the moment I saw the lovely silver and black of the Raiders uniforms?

Sometimes, during commercials, I would sneak a peek around that bar, at the other regulars gazing upon their teams, the abject gleam in their eyes. And in those moments I could see the tender truth nestled within each of us. We weren’t rooting for our teams. We were rooting for ourselves.

I assumed that marrying and having kids would cure my habit once and for all. But if anything, it has grown more intense. (Adulthood has a way of sending us scurrying for the vestiges of our youth.) Last season, I ordered a friend I was visiting to drive me 30 miles to a sports bar with satellite TV, all so I could watch the Dolphins thrash the Raiders, 34-14.

I take it as no coincidence that my move to New England corresponded directly with the resurgence of the Patriots, who have become the N.F.L.’s marquee franchise, even as the Raiders plumb the depths of dysfunction. In more lucid moments, I can see how gratifying it would be to root for my hometown team. They play with passion and humility. They execute brilliantly. Heck, their revered head coach, Bill Belichick, is even a fellow Wesleyan alum.

But I could no more disavow the Raiders at this point than I could disavow myself. To those who don’t live by the code, this devotion seems deranged. And maybe it is. But as any Red Sox lifer knows, lurking within the weeds of extreme fandom is the perpetual seed of hope.

Which is why I already have that nervous tingle about Sept. 10, when the Raiders open their season against the San Diego Chargers. There is no doubt in my mind that they will lose in some new and innovative fashion, as they did last season, in the final game, to miss the playoffs for the ninth straight year. But I’ll be watching, with the rest of the softhearted goons, hoping for a better outcome, scolding myself for this hope and happily helpless to feel otherwise.

[Maxman]

Cool. Story. Bro.

[HDKostempski]

Well, just because the author roots for the Raiders because of his domineering older brother doesn't mean that's why all fans root for teams even when they've been losers for a long time.

I've always rooted for the Bills, primarily because being Bills fans was a family tradition. It was woven into the fabric of my family just as much as hunting, fishing, and farming. Maybe I was just raised as a dumb redneck farmer's daughter to think that loyalty is more important than being on the winning side.

PS: I also am NOT ashamed of my love for football or my love for the Buffalo Bills any more than I'm ashamed of the fact that numerous members of my family might have inspired Jeff Foxworthy's comedy routine -- and I bet I have more college degrees than Mr. Almond.

[Lizard King]

Sounds like liberal apologist guilt sprinkled with symptoms of possible alcoholism.

[T0mShane]

Sounds like liberal apologist guilt sprinkled with symptoms of possible alcoholism.

You've just described my entire psyche.

[Lizard King]

Nice

[slats]

Well, just because the author roots for the Raiders because of his domineering older brother doesn't mean that's why all fans root for teams even when they've been losers for a long time.

I've always rooted for the Bills, primarily because being Bills fans was a family tradition. It was woven into the fabric of my family just as much as hunting, fishing, and farming. Maybe I was just raised as a dumb redneck farmer's daughter to think that loyalty is more important than being on the winning side.

PS: I also am NOT ashamed of my love for football or my love for the Buffalo Bills any more than I'm ashamed of the fact that numerous members of my family might have inspired Jeff Foxworthy's comedy routine -- and I bet I have more college degrees than Mr. Almond.

You're a female?

[RutgersJetFan]

You're a female?

That makes so much sense. So, so much sense.

[Larz]

4 playoff wins in 3 seasons

jets suck

[Jet27]

Long, but worthwhile. Much like my dick.

Wow...NYT...typical story worthy of doggie poop floor protection...As usual

[Bleedin Green]

Brady wasn't a rookie in 2001, therefore this entire article is meaningless.

[HDKostempski]

You're a female?

Yep. Newsflash ... Women can be football fans, too.

[Bleedin Green]

Yep. Newsflash ... Women can be football fans, too.

Of course they can. After all, we need somebody to make the dip.

Am I right?

[slats]

Yep. Newsflash ... Women can be football fans, too.

That's not the kind of flash I was hoping for.

[Jet27]

Of course they can. After all, we need somebody to make the dip.

Am I right?

Absolutely, that's like seeing a female carrying a heavy load and you saying to her "hey wait you shouldn't be carrying that...next time make two trips".

[FloridaJetsFan]

Yep. Newsflash ... Women can be football fans, too.

While women can be football fans, but not Bills fans.