All Things Reconsidered by Knox McCoy

Author:Knox McCoy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2020-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

SPORTS TEAMS

When I was six, my parents took me to my first professional baseball game to see the Atlanta Braves play. This was particularly special because the Braves were hosting the Chicago Cubs, my favorite team at the time.1 The Cubs were my favorite because our TV package got WGN and because Wrigley Field didn’t have lights yet in the late ’80s, so all their home games were on during the day after school and before bedtime. I watched almost all their games and loved the team, even above the geographically closer Braves.

Early in the game, the Braves began beating the doors off the Cubs, so much so that we left in the sixth inning. And as we did, I sobbed. Not because we were leaving, but because the Cubs were getting waylaid. My tears were made from the kind of anger and indignation that only a six-year-old can summon, but they were also mixed with embarrassment in the sense of, “How could they do this to me?” Ryne Sandberg, Mark Grace, Andre Dawson, and Paul Assenmacher2 had all let me down.

This was a formative experience, but it spoke to a different, deep-seated desire to not be adversely invested in something that didn’t deserve it. These seeds of preferring objectivity were sprouting and dovetailing nicely with who I was already becoming, but I could sense a value-proposition imbalance: Why was I expected to care so deeply for a team of loosely confederated and variably motivated people who didn’t match my enthusiasm?

Now, as a mostly formed adult, I pride myself on being a pretty objective person. That might sound like a terribly mundane thing to take pride in, but I really do love it.

For one, a worldview defined by objectivity is a fortress against emotions, which feels like the moral high ground. When everyone else around you is losing their minds or taking up inane arguments in the name of supporting something impressive or honorable only because they are emotionally invested in it, my fellow objectives and I get to luxuriate in the satisfaction that comes with seeing the world as it mostly is, not as we want it to be. At this very moment in time, Mitch Trubisky is the quarterback for the Chicago Bears, and he uniformly sucks. Like, so bad. He makes Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite look like Tom Brady. By the time you are reading this chapter, he will probably have been supplanted. In this moment that feels very obvious. But in this same moment, there are people who, because they are Bears fans, are trying to talk themselves into Mitch as a viable quarterbacking option. Thus is the plight of invested sports fans.

And this, combined with my formative experience at Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta, keeps me wondering why we feel so compelled to become die-hard fans, particularly in sports. What is it that makes us feel compelled to root for an arbitrary entity typically under the control of people who are invested for completely

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