Whenever I admit to enjoying watching sports or having seen a particular game, a usual question, especially from those who do not usually watch sports, is, “Who are you rooting for?” It’s a fine question, and displays some interest in the part of the asker regarding my feelings. Sometimes it gives them a reason to consider the game themselves, as in, if I am rooting for Team X, they can choose to be my ally and join me in Team X support, or elect to be my enemy and side with Team Y. But the fact is, I normally don’t have an answer. I can make up some reasoning that sounds like I’ve established a nuanced position. But generally I just want to know who will win, or I want to learn about how the teams play each other, or I just want to stare at something with an immediately graspable storyline (namely: Team X attempts to beat Team Y, while Team Y tries to do the same to X).
Following sports is usually done for one of two reasons, I think. Either you care about one team above all others (the Team-Rooters, who say, “Go Team!”) and care strictly about them and everything relevant to them and little else, or, you just kind of pay attention to everything that’s happening from a more objective standpoint (the Sports-Rooters, who say, “Go Sports!”) and hope for good matchups and interesting games. I’m pretty much the latter. I want to know who wins. Games are a laboratory experiment where a team with one set of components is pitted against another team with different components in a particular environment. A season consists of a whole bunch of different experiments (with wildly inconsistent results, mind you, so here’s where the science analogy veers off an embankment) that eventually lead to a general conclusion about which is best.
Nevertheless, I do have favorite teams. It’s just that I frequently watch games that do not feature these teams. Either because my team isn’t playing at the moment, or, much more often, I can’t watch their game where I live. I suppose I could find a way to rank all 32 NFL teams from favorite to least favorite and base my rooting interest on that, but it’s hard to have a readily-available defined position on all teams (or at least one that wouldn’t be based on something fun but ridiculous, like color scheme (Lions) or which helmet logo I like best (I dunno, maybe the Raiders? Dolphins?)). Anyway I tried to maintain such a rank of all the teams when I was a kid, using these pushpin helmets on a bulletin board in my room to order teams based solely on my subjective opinion on them from day to day. The list shifted a lot, particularly when one team was playing well or not, or how recently they had dealt a team I favored an important loss. So I probably wouldn’t bother ranking them today unless we get near the end of December and I’m still trying to post every day and am running desperately low on ideas (watch this space December 30!).
The other important thing about not necessarily rooting for one team or another is that my favorite teams, like the fan base for every team but one in every league, are not currently the champions. They might be really good, but more often, they are average or worse. Most fans of teams watch through years of ho-hum, so-so performances. Occasionally there are bad runs. Occasionally there are good runs. Those are what you long for. And while they’re not the best and don’t have a national reputation and aren’t featured on a lot of games, you don’t have a lot of opportunity to watch. Maybe you still do, even if they are the local team, but who wants to watch those losers? So you can either just do something else with your life (well, I’m not about to do that, and anyway, I’m not one of the Team-Rooters), or make up a tortured analogy about how watching sports has some higher objective (which I do, as a Sports-Rooter).
I’m at one of those lulls at the moment, where all of my professed favorite teams* are average or worse (hint: usually worse), so my Sports-Rooting tendencies are in phase. Go Sports!
*Coming tomorrow. Wow! Yay!
