Sports Are the Fire that the Fans Desire.

Posts Tagged ‘Sports Are the Fire that the Fans Desire.’

Fans: Heads Are Where Their Hearts Are

December 30, 2014

“We ain’t exactly crazy,
But we ain’t exactly sane!
If our team don’t win.
We’re gonna complain!”

The writers and athletes don’t call us sports “fans” for no reason. As you must certainly know by now, the original slang word “fan” was short for “fanatic”, or “fanatical”. It did not take long use for the the three-letter word to encompass all the insanity rapped up in the longer noun and adjective versions of the idea. Before the word “fan” took over for supporters, 19th century baseball partisan ticket buyers were known as “cranks” – a word that still fits our moods pretty well when things don’t go our way for our team on the field. Our behavior can often ascend above all mean-meanings of the adjective “cranky”. In fact we may sometimes rise to cantankerous heights of objection to bad results.

At any rate, it’s all part of our involvement is supporting “our team” – whomever they are – at whatever level they play – in whichever sport comes to mind. It’s just sadly true, sometimes, that the 21st century media pundits forget why we come to the games.

Over this past weekend, a couple of Sports Center talking heads on ESPN were waxing their way through one of of those year-ender searches for meaningful retrospection on what we all may learn from the big news in sports for 2014. One of these wizened observers jumped almost immediately upon the fact that fans seemed ready to dismiss their concern over domestic violence that came to light in the separate, but dual “bad boy” cases of running backs Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson. Rice was videotaped knocking out his then fiancee and now current wife in an elevator – and Peterson was convicted of parental abuse for tree-branch switching his young son on the legs until the skin was broken.

Together, the two cases have launched a new national attention upon the serious problem of domestic abuse in our American culture in general, but, as the ESPN guy observed, paraphrasically, “the fans seem to have already put the reality of domestic violence behind them with the approach of the playoffs. All they seem to want to talk about now are the prospects for their various teams making the cut of those few that will be playing soon for a chance to reach the Super Bowls. – What does that say to us as a culture about the priority of NFL fans – or sports fans in general?”

Well, all the NFL playoff spots got settled on Sunday, but the fever goes on in football for the Super Bowl quest – as well as the upcoming first NCAA Division 1 college football tourney for a champion among the surviving “Final Four”. – That said, The Pecan Park Eagle will “risk” an answer to that ESPN wise men query about the priorities of sports fans with a compound question of its own. Since the expert observers keyed upon the NFL fans, we shall answer primarily for those fans, but these same observations slide easily to baseball, basketball, hockey, or even soccer, in some rarer USA instances:

Do NFL Fans, or sports fans in general, spend big money going to games to get closer to reality – or do they show up all the time at games to escape reality as much as possible for the sake of hoping their team can succeed for them in ways that never seem to come up so reachably – and so clearly attainable – and in ways that never seem to arise for them personally – at home, the office, the store, school, or shop? Several corollaries come into the picture here which support the over-identification of fans with their teams, but we shall note only one here as a question, in the interest of time and space: How many fans are as blessed to have the equivalent of a “J.J. Watt” defending them from the obstacles that oppose the accomplishment of their personal goals at home, school, or work?

The following is a pictorial answer to the central question, now expressed in simpler terms: Do sports fans attend the games of their favorite teams to get closer to the realities of everyday life? Or do they show up to escape reality as much as possible?

Based upon the following NFL fan pictures, you decide. 🙂