Explaining sports fandom to a non-fan is difficult. For the fan it’s often simply “natural.” That is, caring about a sports team stems from something beyond our ability to precisely rationalize. I’ve tried to explain this, taking a number of different approaches, with varying degrees of success. Or, at least varying degrees of willingness in my targets to placate me. Non-fans often chalk up the sports fan’s zealotry to one of two factors: a) latent fascism, or b) vicarious male fantasy. While both of these views hold some ostensible value, neither is the final answer.

A) Fascism: I’m no love-thine-enemy hippy, and I freely admit that I love to win. In fact, it’s probably one of the greatest things in life. Whether it be putting the hurt down in a round of Super Smash Bros., dominating the badminton court like a grass-stained Genghis Khan, or making my opponent cry with a triple-word-score lay-down of “WARRIOR” (seven letters, bingo), victory is what makes games fun. Second place is first loser, et cetera.

But winning, as the saying goes, isn’t everything. I agree with this statement, with the understanding that winning is only the manifestation of something that is everything: being good. That is, being good at something is where the thrill comes from, and winning is only the probable outcome of being good.

Taking this back to the realm of sports, having a good team is what it’s about. It’s not necessarily about vanquishing all those who oppose your team’s will to power, though that’s nice too. The elegance of a precisely executed double-play, or the concentration and reaction needed to intercept a well-thrown pass, these are the things that make watching sports exciting. Alas, a sensibility for this sort of aesthetic seems lost on the non-fan.

B) Fantasy: I also admit that my first ambition in life, before the dreams of rockstardom kicked in, was to be a professional baseball player. This is hardly rare in children of my demographic. Visions of bottom-of-the-ninth, bases loaded, walk-off shots to deep center danced in my head like an eternally recurring ESPN Beyond the Glory documentary. Unluckily for me, athletic destiny would be denied by my less-than-robust stature (and what one of my friends so-kindly referred to as my ‘velociraptor arms’), and the fact that I was better at reading Dickens than off-speed pitches.

Videogames helped me out a bit. Around 1997, every EA Sports title started including Season or Dynasty modes, allowing users to create their own players, and vicariously experience the glory of athletic victory. My favorite was NCAA Football, in which I quarterbacked the Michigan Wolverines to a national championship, led the Big Ten in passing and rushing, and finished second in Heisman voting after my “freshman year”. It was pretty rad.

But if being a fan was simply a matter of this sort of adolescent fantasy, then those videogames would surely be more important than real, live sports. And they’re not. I’ve never wanted to cry from losing in a video game, but after Michigan’s loss to Ohio State this year, [and last year, and the year before] I was a distraught young fellow, to be sure.

C) Community: So, while both latent fascism and vicarious male fantasy might have something to do with the appeal of sports, I think that both are derivative of a greater context, a context that defines the whole cultural institution of athletics: community. I’ll discuss this idea through the use of a brief personal narrative.

A couple of months ago, I packed up my belongings, and moved nearly twenty-five-hundred miles away from home to Portland. I didn’t have a place to live, a job to work, or any overarching idea of what I was doing. I had one friend in Portland, an acquaintance from my freshman year (my “real” freshman year, not my virtual national championship run) of college who’d I’d kept in intermittent contact with over the years. She’s also from Michigan, and lives with her BF and a couple of other exiled Michiganders.

Generally, I am not very quick to “make new friends.” I can be stand-offish and shy when I’m uncomfortable, and it usually takes me more than a while to get situated in a new context. When I first hung out with M and M (my friend and her bo), we talked about music and books, and that sort of stuff. But then, we broached the more important stuff. He asked, “How ’bout them Tigers?”

“Fuck yeah, them Tigers.” For those unfamiliar, the Detroit Tigers have been, for the past twelve years or-so, a perennial last-place shit-show. But not in 2006. This year, they led their division for most of the season, and made their first playoff appearance since 1987, when I was four years old.

That simple question he posed to me, then, sparked off a conversation of Michigan sports-in-general. I was invited over to watch the Tigers, and we watched them first whoop the Yankees (boo-fuckin-ya), then sweep Oakland, and then make it to the World Series. Though they lost in that final matchup, the glory of surpassed expectations was undiminished, and my new anchor-less life was given an intriguing back-narrative, in which our common hopes served as a bond of friendship and comradery between my new friends and me.

All sappiness aside, I think that this highlights why sports are important to the fan. It has more to it than the definitively isolated activities of conquest and personal fantasy. It also has more to it than getting to talk shit to the douchebag at the bar wearing a Yankees hat in Portland, Oregon (lame). It has to do with caring about something with other people, about the sense of shared destiny involved in giving one’s hopes over to a team of super-human performers. It’s about post-touchdown high-fives (or knuckles), and mutual consolation after a tough loss.

If I were more the “gender studies” type, I might here launch into a diatribe about male bonding being discouraged in capitalist society to an extent where it can only happen in certain prescribed, violent domains like sports. But that’s just gay. Sports offer us an artistry, pathos, ethos, and pantheon of heroes that we can hold in common, though often at-odds, a stage upon which the conflicts of human nature are substantiated and resolved, if only for a short while. They give us something care about, when politics and religion seem to be nothing but hot air, and day-to-day life rarely gets us too excited.

And if that doesn’t work for you, go watch a ballet or something.