Last night's Wizards game was as fun a game as I've seen at the Verizon Center. The house was packed, the Cleveland frontrunners were duly marginalized, and the Wizards got a semi-meaningful (but badly needed) win.
Because my vitriol for Cleveland frontrunners is severe, I couldn't shut up about it all night. Except that I never considered the company. I was there with a friend, JH, whose loyalties are decidedly fluid. While I deplore the kind of sports fan LeBron James is - he is a Chicago Bulls, New York Yankees, Dallas Cowboys fan - JH would say that successful teams should be rewarded with additional fans.
In this framework, loyal fans who keep supporting losing teams are enablers - complicit in their own misery by not abandoning the teams they love. I have a hard time seeing that, seeing as how I view sports fandom as a grim and desperate battle against the possibility of happiness, but I'm willing to believe that I'm just wrong.
JH, to wit, has an overarchingly difficult set of sports loyalties. I do think that the freedarko attitude is legit - the idea that for some watchers of the game - basketball in this case, but you could say the same for most American sports and for European soccer - the compelling drama has nothing to do with the team name on the jersey, and everything to do with the battle gifted athletic individuals are waging against themselves in an effort to express their personalities through sport. Everything about that freedark perspective is interesting to me, and in the age of free agency, it's hard to think in manichean team-or-nothing terms. There are some guys I just like. Donovan McNabb - I just like the guy. The three guys who formed the core of the 1990 Dutch world cup side - Van Basten, Rijkaard, and Gullit. Chris Paul. Reggie Wayne. The list goes on and on.
So, maybe JH is right. Your team doesn't torture you - they just get boring, and you go with someone else. Nick Hornby alluded to this during the 2002 World Cup - his son not getting that he was supposed to support England, and instead taking an interest i the fates of all the players who played for his favorite club side (Arsenal, right?) There's something cosmpolitan about that. But it also seems like trading your family in, or something.
The other interesting issue JH raised is whether a sport is better when the best team wins or not. He was happy about the Yankees winning the World Series - they were the best team all season, and the playoffs actually, for once, benefitted the best team in the league. This is of course the opposite of the "any given Sunday" ethic of the NFL, or the thrilling fact that soccer is cruel and unfair. I'm totally agnostic about the right answer here, but part of me thinks that if the point of a sport is to be predictable, then...well, I'm not sure there is a point then. That, as the sports bloviators love to say, is why you actually have to play the game: because the better team doesn't always win. Right?
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