5-21-2008.
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a big basketball fan, and that my allegiance is to one team and one team only: the Los Angeles Lakers. Naturally, this has been a rewarding season for me and other Laker fans, with Kobe Bryant winning the MVP award, seven-foot Spaniard Pau Gasol injecting new life into a franchise that has struggled over the last four years to form an identity, and a number one playoff seeding that has so far paid dividends: a mighty first round sweep of the Denver Nuggets, and a second-round silencing of the Utah Jazz and their extremely loud fans. I don’t know whether the Lakers will go all the way this year, but even if they don’t, I think this season is a reason for all Angelinos to be proud.
The question is: why in the world do I think that?
Why do we care so much about our sports teams? Thinking about this question has led me to wonder more generally about the concept of loyalty: what it means to be loyal, and what function (or malfunction) loyalty plays in our lives.
I grew up in L.A. during the 1980s, the era of theShowtime Lakers, when Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and James Worthy led the team to several national championships. It was an exciting brand of basketball they played: runnin and gunnin and take-no-prisoners. I remember being on the phone with my friend Joey, watching them knock out the Boston Celtics at the Garden in 1987. When the final horn blew, we didn’t set any police cars on fire(an impulse I’ll never fully understand), but we did jump around and scream for joy. At that age, devotion to a sports team makes some sense. When you’re young, you yearn to belong to something bigger than your limited self, to feel that you have something in common with someone great. Athletes fill that role nicely. They’re often young themselves, and frequently childlike in the way they talk and act. (David Foster Wallace has written an interesting essay called “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," in which he laments athletes’ inarticulateness, then argues that the same inarticulateness is in fact the essence of athletic genius.) It’s understandable, if not entirely reasonable, for a nine year-old to identify with them. At nine I had just gotten glasses; Kareem and Worthy and Kurt Rambis wore glasses. They were just like me! Hence, their achievements cast a positive light on me. Kids are sufficiently capable of suspending disbelief to keep such specious logic alive.
(Kids, and drunks: Frederick Exley’s excellent novel A Fan’s Notes dissects both the author’s alcoholism as well as his obsession with the New York Giants. Exley is particularly obsessed with running back Frank Gifford, whose ups and downs Exley covets as his own, all the while poking bitter fun at himself for being such a lunatic.)
You’d think that we’d lose these illusions as we mature. When some grandstanding mayor declares a World Series win a “victory for the whole city of X,” is there any rational adult who actually believes that? Athletes are paid to play; they’re paid to win. At its loftiest, their competitive fire can be attributed to a desire for personal glory; at its basest, to a thirst for cash. (Not that there’s nothing wrong with capitalizing on your talent. It just seems less romantic than a purebred desire for excellence.) They’re not playing because they want to glorify a specific geographic location. They’re playing cause it’s their frickin job.
I gravely doubt, for instance, that the Red Sox care that much about Boston. And why should they? They’re not even from Boston. Check out their roster, which contains players from the Dominican Republic, Texas, Colorado, Japan, New York, and Louisiana, just to name a few places. (Oddly enough, there’s even one guy from Boston.) But even if the whole team were made up of Bostoners, the point would be the same. These guys are baseball mercenaries, and the fact that they're in Boston as opposed to Tampa Bay or Colorado is purely luck of the draw. If the money and/or prospects were better elsewhere, they’d be stupid not to go there. Just look at Johnny Damon. (Hahahaha! Sucka.)
Moroever, from the fan’s point of view, if what we desired in our sports teams was a reflection of our city’s superior talent pool, all that diversity would tick us off. No! we’d shout. We can win it all with only Boston [or L.A., or New York, etc.] boys! But nobody in their right mind says that. We say, instead, Get the best our money can buy. We don’t care if our athletes hail from our hometowns. And once a local boy leaves for greener pastures, we (usually) don’t continue to pull for them; certainly not when they play against Our Team. The phenomenal Paul Pierce, forward for the Boston Celtics, grew up in Inglewood. He should be a Los Angeles icon. But if the Celtics and the Lakers end up playing for the championship this year (and they might), you can bet that they’ll be razzing The Truth every time he steps to the free throw line at the Staples Center. I’ll be shouting at my TV.
Finally, I would further point out that, even if fans wanted and got a team consisting of only Bostoners, or Angelinos, etc., and even if that team won a championship, thereby demonstrating some sort of freakish concentration of municipal athletic prowess, the success of those five or nine or twenty guys would have nothing to do with the rest of us fat slobs.
To wit: Kobe Bryant isn’t from L.A. He’s fromPennsylvania. Even if he were from L.A., his ability to nail the J doesn’t say anything about my own (not 100% negligible) shooting skillz. And yet I still went bananas when he won the MVP. I was actually in a good mood.
You might argue that my excitement stems from my appreciation of the amazing things Kobe does as an athlete, irrespective of his team. I beg to differ. If Chris Paul or Kevin Garnett had won the MVP—and they were both legitimate contenders, players for whom a strong, strong case could have been made—I would have been disappointed. Angry, even. Kobe Bryant is gifted and awe-inspiring, but so are those other two guys; and so are Lebron James, and Deron Williams, and Tracy McGrady… Nevertheless I live and die for Kobe because he suits up to play in a certain jersey, in a certain city, a city that I no longer even live in. It’s totally understandable and at the same time totally ludicrous.
Even more irrationally: my original allegiance, to the Showtime Lakers, should have expired when that team declined and fell. There’s no Magic anymore; no Michael Cooper. Turnover is the nature of the sports business. The oldest player on the Lakers is Derek Fisher, who’s about four years older than me. While my Laker fandom took root, Derek was running around doing whatever it is thirteen year-olds do in Little Rock, Arkansas. The 2008 Lakers are as different from the 1987 Lakers as the 1987 Lakers were from the 1987 Celtics. Probably more different.Just look at their shorts.
What gives? It’s not the players that keep us rooting. You could make a case that it’s the city, instead, but I know too many people for whom that isn’t true—myself included, as I’ve already pointed out. I don’t live in L.A.; I live in San Diego. But I’d call myself a Dodger fan, not a Padres fan. We all know someone who has an irrational devotion to a team from somewhere far-flung. I have a friend who lives in California, hails from New York, and roots for the New England Patriots—because that’s where his father’s from.
And I don’t think you can say that fandom is about winning, either, because the majority of teams do not win a ton of championships. Indeed, some people seem to enjoy rooting for a losing team. The Red Sox were far more endearing when they were loveable losers. Now they’re just like the Yankees, a corporatepowerhouse. There’s something charming about pulling, year after year, for a bunch of screw-ups.
So what is fandom, then?
Well, on some level, it’s loyalty to the idea of a team. I root for an abstraction, “The Lakers,” rather than an actual group of human beings. Loyalties that take hold of us at an impressionable age remain with us, regardless of how circumstances might persuade us to the contrary. Fandom is a lot like patriotism, although at least a person’s feelings toward his country can be grounded in real experiences. You can love or hate America because of what America has given or not given you. You can’t rightly love or hate the Lakers for anything except pure love or hate.
And perhaps that’s part of the point. Fandom goes patriotism one step further. By virtue of being divorced from reality, divorced from consequences, fandom allows us to indulge the barbaric and universal urge to tribalize—except without paying taxes (although seehere); without fear of institutional betrayal (although see here); without subscribing to a value system that could, potentially, require you to go off to war and get killed (although see here and here). Fans are allowed to show unbridled enthusiasm, they’re allowed to show that they care; they’re allowed to revel in the catharsis of blind allegiance, and because that allegiance is fundamentally arbitrary, it feels purer and easier to swallow than allegiance to a person or an ideology that has real-world ramifications. The Lakers have never attempted to conquer Europe. I can cling to them without worry because they have no substance. So, in a strange way, the meaninglessness of sports loyalties (and sports in general) is what makes them so important.
Another thought I’ve had is that team loyalty is an outgrowth of our desire not to be wrong. Once we’ve accepted a team as “ours,” we are loathe to turn our back on it, even if its fortunes sink in the future, because doing so would admit an error in judgment. It’s well known among psychologists that once people have paid for an item, their estimation of the value of that item goes up. So perhaps once we’ve demonstrated a preference for a team (although how much choice do we really have?) by rooting for it, by buying its apparel, by discussing it with friends, we then become afraid to say, Hey, wait a second. These guys actually mean nothing to me, and what’s more they can’t play defense. Such an admission casts a dim light on our ability to make judgments in general, it marks us as unstable and wishy-washy.
This leads me to a more general point, which is the high premium society places on loyalty. No one is more contemptible than the traitor. Conversely, the captain willing to go down with the ship is a hero. This is understandable from an evolutionary point of view. Humans have evolved as social creatures; the world runs on trust. Much of the literature on the biology and psychology of altruism makes the point that the stablest social structure is one in which most of the participants are basically nice and easily forgiving. Trustworthiness, in essence, is a promise that the rules will not suddenly change, that someone who has been nice is going to continue to be nice, that they won’t pull the rug out from under us. Demonstrating loyalty to a club, team, country, etc., then, becomes an effective way of advertising one’s qualities as a spouse and business partner. I’ve been rooting for the Mets since 1962 is another way of saying I am one heck of a stand-up guy.
*****
One question I get asked a lot, nearly every time I speak, is Why don’t you write a series? It’s a reasonable question. People love series, especially mystery series, and they seem to outsell standalones by a considerable margin. And let’s not forget the backlist: how people will go buy all the books, starting from book one, if they like one of them. (Now that’s loyalty!) I’m sure my publisher would love me to write a series. Whenever I get my mortgage bill I’m tempted.
The answer I usually give is that I have a short attention span; either that, or I say that I haven’t yet found a character I want to spend that much time with—other than my wife, of course, who’s a real character herself. But all this thinking about loyalty and team allegiance has led me to believe that there’s something else at play here, a slightly deeper level to that second answer. And it is this: I think I can only handle so much upstanding behavior, so much loyalty in my life, and since I’m married, belong to a synagogue, and have my favorite team, that doesn’t leave me much room to wander. My fiction is the one arena in which I get to be anyone, agree with anyone, express dissent, make outlandish or out-of-character statements, explore different points of view…and instead of being called a traitor I’m called creative.
In some ways, loyalty is the antithesis of creativity, insofar as it demands rigidity, conformity, and a stubborn refusal to adapt. What makes art interesting and useful is its ability to pry open the bars of our preconceptions.
This is not to suggest that you can’t be an artist and be trustworthy, or that trustworthy people are perforce uncreative. It means, rather, that art provides normally trustworthy people with the chance to hobnob with their inner demons, to spend a few minutes wallowing in Blasphemy before taking a nice hot shower inPropriety.
Ahem. Now. Go Lakers.
