the creation of a sports fan has a number of requirements, including a specific geography, family affiliations and the sense of kinship one may get from being a fan of a team. She said that in many ways, sports fandom “forms similar to other kinds of identity, where you start associating with folks who have something in common. And then you can feel support from them. You feel that sense of winning when your team wins, or that sense of defeat when your team loses.”
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Duncan elaborated on how our connections to our political identity are markedly similar — our political understanding is largely based on where we are and with whom we socialize.
“When your political party wins, same as when your team wins, you feel that sense of winning yourself. Or when your team loses, you feel that loss similarly.” She added that based on her research in sports and politics, those kinship ties also affect how we perceive bad news about our favorite teams.
“You know it’s going to take more than simple facts for you to believe that your hero of a sports coach has actually looked the other way while sexual abuse happened. Or it’s going to take more than just facts for you to realize that your political party isn’t headed in the same direction or doesn’t share your same values,” she said.
So what could reshape someone’s sports fandom or, by extension, political affiliations? Duncan told me that while some shifts happen when something takes place that “cracks through your sense of reality” and raises questions about how and why you think the way you do, the way many people change in their sports fandom or political alignment often stems from a literal, physical shift.
“We see shifts in political alignment or sports team fandom if you shift to maybe a completely different geographical area where your social structure, those around you, thinks differently,” she said. If you grew up in a very liberal area and moved to a place that’s more conservative, your views might change, or at least your views on what the people now around you believe might change. And your sports fandom might change if you moved to a new town with different sports allegiances — lessening your hate for your traditional rivals as well.
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I am proud of my willingness to be wrong, but I’ve noticed that I have a troubling propensity to excuse my own wrongness in the face of evidence by saying that hey, well, those guys are probably even more wrong than I am.
That’s not reason. That’s fandom.
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watching Michigan play Michigan State today and probably saying many things that perhaps I would not repeat in the paper of record — fandom makes you do some very, very stupid things.
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