It’s something I wonder about semi often. What does it mean to be a fan of a team? Why are we fans? Are we born into it? Is it something that is genetically set in our blood? Or is it something you stumble upon, like true love. You’re never looking for it but when you stumble upon it it’s absolutely beautiful.
I realize these kinds of articles have been written a million times before across the course of human history. Why should you care? Why is this different? Well through this exercise I hope I can bring up questions you ask of yourself. This is not here to provide answers it’s here to construct questions.
It’s something I want to explore this summer on the Endzone Podcast but something I want to explore on this blog as well now that we are into the bogs of the offseason. So I want to start with how does fandom crawl into our lives. I’ll start with my answer.
I am a Denver Broncos fan. I started cheering for the team simply put because I knew being a Star Wars geek was not going to get me through middle school. I needed something to talk to people about. I chose football. I almost immediately fell in love.
In no small part thanks to my hero and favorite athlete of all time Peyton Manning. Manning was incredibly exciting to watch in his first season with the Broncos, at this point in his career he was still a top 3 QB in the league. I fell in love more or less with a front runner lead by an all time great.
I also found myself gravitating to the Broncos because my favorite uncle watched them religiously. He had imprinted on me, from a very young age that if I was going to be a football fan I was going to be a Broncos fan. There was no alternative, maybe my mom’s quasi team the Steelers but no, they weren’t on TV in Salt Lake City Utah.
Which brings me to my first conclusion on fandom. We cheer for who we cheer for based on our environment. The people in our lives influence why we root for the teams we do. My dad is a Colorado Avalanche fan, it’s why I cheer for the Avalanche. It gives us a common bond. That’s another crucial reason why we cheer for teams the people in our environment cheer for it gives us an interpersonal connection.
Though environment is not the only reason we become fans. Sometimes there is just a team and you fall in love with it. For me, that comes in Baseball. The Los Angeles Angels and Cincinnati Reds are two teams I have been tracking closely for the past two years and teams I have fallen in love with. An organic love, the kind that can’t be made up, the kind that lasts through thick and thin. That kind of pure love can create fandom.
How do you stumble upon that kind of love though? There is no easy answer for this question. I told you this is about questions not answers.
Why do we stick with fandom? That’s the question that comes next.