Celebrating winners is a thrill not just for sports enthusiasts but also for victorious players, their owners, and even league commissioners, who may let slip their partiality after a championship is over. But the major leagues must soon get back to work. Here the job is to pursue a regularity in the output of their product that elicits the regularity in the publics who follow major league sports. The central challenge of the major leagues is to achieve a regularity that is not seriously disrupted by the winning and losing that sport competition unavoidably produces.
…Where publics seek a resolution in the struggle for supremacy among teams, major leagues seek a repetition across seasons that sustain a lack of resolution. While game and season victors are celebrated as heroes, it is up to major leagues to ensure that victors are not really any different from the vanquished – so that when the victors and vanquished meet again, game after game, season after season, interest the outcome will remain at least as high as when they last met. Every game looms as a potential event where something might happen, but it is up to the major leagues to ensure that nothing ever really happens. The more successful major leagues have become in their pursuit of sameness and repeittion, the more energy publics have put into finding differences through events.
- Eric Leifer, Making the Majors (1995), pp. 5-6
It must be a sign of my irredeemable nerdiness that I have to turn to a bit of sociology for comfort after the bruising, wounding, humiliating loss of the Dallas Cowboys to the New York Giants in yesterday’s NFC playoff game. People find the fact that I’m a Cowboys fan one of the most peculiar things about me, since there is nothing in my personal background or my everyday conversational habits that would indicate an interest in any kind of sport whatsoever, much less the fortunes of what’s perhaps America’s still-most reviled major league franchise (apart from the Yankees, of course). Yet, I’ve been a Cowboys fan ever since I started watching professional sports, and some of the most vivid growing-up memories I have – both painful and joyful – are of the team’s various victories and losses over the years. What’s odd about these memories, though, and as Leifer observes, are while they’re undeniably unique – they’re my memories, of particular games and particular players and particular teams – they’re embedded in a system of repetition that’s intended to go on, season after season, in a never ending cycle of rematches that aren’t really rematches. Even a major victory such as a Superbowl win, however gratifying and significant, is at once memorialized – entered into the record books and hailed for all posterity – and then effaced, as good only until the next time around. That’s why you root for the jersey, as the saying goes, because if your rooting is attached to particular players or particular games at particular points in time, you’ll soon be rooting for nothing at all.
At the same time, however, this isn’t to suggest that rooting and being a fan is simply an emotive commitment to a team or player; it’s also a knowing experience. In an organized system of sports, meaning can emerge out of observing the subtlest differences in accomplishment or even minute swings and oscillations in status, ability, or performance (argh! Tony Romo!). From the perspective of an outsider, all of these tiny differences may seem to ‘average out’ across teams or players, or seem like so much unobservable and incomprehensible detail. But for those ‘in the know,’ even slight differences can carry momentous consequences of lasting emotional significance. Hence the importance of championships, personal records and the historical accomplishments of storied franchises: they’re ways of organizing and communicating our emotional commitments, allowing us to draw and debate differences in the face of insistent and recurring sameness. (In hockey, especially, my lack of knowledge of these pieces of information is what leads a friend of mine – a lifelong, devoted follower of the New York Rangers – to consider me a Ranger fan of unmentionable shallowness.)
I know that part of being a sports fan is to engage in a kind of vicarious existence or identification with ‘another world,’ though no one I know who’s a major sports fan really wishes he or she were this or that player, even though most fans, depending on the context, do have particular players or figures for whom they retain tremendous admiration and ardent devotion. Rather, if the fan wants to ‘be’ anyone, it’s more likely to be the coach or the general manager, the person who knows the game in its minute intricacies – in its very vibrations and swings – and knows how to use the ‘talent’ to elicit successful performances. Likewise, on a broader plane, I have a number of relatives, friends and acquaintances, both male and female, who can easily reconstruct the last thirty years in terms of the miscues that their favorite franchise or franchises have taken: they can tell you not only about games misplayed and misfortunes and calamities suffered, but also give you a rundown of the ‘good guys’ who were let go and the ‘jerks’ and ‘idiots’ who were retained, of the ’smart moves’ and the ‘disgusting’ sellouts and compromises committed by team owners and league officials. What accounts for the particular and distinctive success of sports as a medium of historical, factual, and ethical knowledge?
