Q: When is a sports team not a sports team?
A: When it's a sports team!
You're welcome.
One of the things you notice when you move from The Big City to the suburbs is how many people in the auslands wear sports-related merchandise. In the fall, on the San Francisco Peninsula, the merch hails the 49ers (a football team, for those of you who wisely spend time other than following sports franchises); in the winter/spring, the Warriors (basketball); in the summer, the Giants (baseball).
Not that people in The Big City don't wear sports gear or live and die by gridiron or diamond or court wins and losses. It just seems more evident in the suburbs. Warriors flags flapping from car windows; Giants t-shirts stretched across swelling bellies; 49ers beanies pulled low over winter-chilled scalps--these things advertise a kind of fealty in a way that, at first, seemed odd to me.
I was not much of a sports fan as a boy. Oh, I watched ABC'S Wild World of Sports every Saturday afternoon, and on long summer days would head out to the driveway or the yard to mimic what I'd seen. I'm a Harlem Globetrotter! I'm a downhill skier! I'm a motorcycle racer! I also read Tennis, the magazine of, well, tennis, because I played the game. But I couldn't throw a baseball accurately to save my life, and I was too small for football and too short for basketball. So I never developed the kind of team loyalty some kids do.
Anyway, my fealty was more to rock bands than to sports teams. Because I found other like-minded souls--not an enormous challenge in the sixties and seventies--it seemed completely normal. I knew who'd played in what band, what year, and who'd guested on whose record. Only years later did I understand that this attention to musical minutae was mirrored in how others could name the great players of the great teams in the great years that those teams had won the Series or the Superbowl or the League Championships.
As did many in late adolescence and early adulthood, especially in that era, I went through a period of anti-establishment rage, which dovetailed with coming out as a gay man. When your wider society tells you, explicitly and implicitly, that you don't belong, you tend to reject that society and to create some variation of your own. To me this meant, in part, decrying sports, the purview of "straight" "jocks," those jerks--so the story went--who beat up queers.
A funny thing happens if you keep on living: perspectives shift. In 1999, when I was forty-two, a friend took me to the now defunct Candlestick Park to see a Giants game. I loved it. My sociopolitical resentments had evidently dissolved just enough that I could enjoy not only the athleticism (to a guy who can't throw accurately, a great double play is mystical), but the cheerful fan fellow-feeling. This last was not novel to me; as rock guy I'd spent plenty of time with tens of thousands of others, in arenas and stadiums, dancing and cheering as music blasted. Still, the experience left an impression.
The next year, the new, in-town Giants stadium was to open. (It should have been called Willie Mays Park, but the corporate money funding the thing also named it. It opened as Pac Bell Park. It is now known, odiously, as AT&T Park.) My friend and I decided to split season tickets that first year. Our seats were in the nosebleeds, out beyond the third base line--Oakland, across the Bay, appeared a short swim away--and we sat in them on Opening Day, April 11, 2000.
I never sat in them again. For the roughly forty games I attended that year, often alone, I'd gain entry on the ticket and then scout an empty seat close to the action. I'd sit there until someone showed up, and I'd find another. (Kids, don't try this. Follow the rules. Do what Mom and Dad say. Brush your teeth. And so forth.)
As most artists (and fans) are, I was obsessive in my pursuit to understand baseball. I did some research. I bugged baseball-versed friends for insights. Plus, I just liked being at the park, so I attended game after game after game.
As most artists will, I presently funneled my impressions into an article I wrote that summer for the newspaper at which I then worked. In the piece I likened baseballs players to cats, and in my own cats' mortality saw glimpses of my own.
As most artists do--I'm sorry, but we are terrible people for the rest of you to depend on--after completing and submitting that piece, I entirely dropped baseball. No tickets the next season, no games on TV (I didn't have cable), no sports merch, no nothin'.
Until, that is, this year.
I bought a TV this past spring and faithfully began to watch Giants games. I fell in love with the announcers, "Kruke and Kipe." I attended a few games at AT&T park, sometimes alone, sometimes with my partner. (I like baseball; he likes food--he's partial to the park's crab sandwiches.) And I became, again, a Giants fan, which of course led to thinking about the whole idea of sports fandom.
To love "The San Francisco Giants" (or any other team) is, in essence, to love an idea. Yes, the Giants exist in reality: the organization, the players, the gloves and bats and uniforms. But players' careers last, at best, a decade and a half; they come and go. Managers, too. Same with pitching and hitting coaches. Any fan loves the players on the team in a given season, but a long-term fan loves the idea of the team as much as its earthbound reality.
In this way, loving a sports team is like loving one's country. A nation, first and foremost, is an idea formulated out of guiding principles. To an idealist, a country at its heart is pure: it stands for something (or many things). When these things--democracy, justice, fairness, equality--manifest in reality, the country achieves greatness. Most of us past the age of twelve understand that humans are complicated creatures, too much so to hew perfectly to any ideal or set of them. And so in a place like America, we have three hundred-plus million people with an idea of what the country stands for and means, and most of us disagree on what that is. (Happily, this is a democracy, so we can disagree freely.)
Countries, like humans, are subject to the corrosions of time, the whims of Fate, the winds of change. In this lies life's melancholy. The suggestion that we might "Make America Great Again," for example, while perhaps coded to suggest certain racial realities, really is a simple appeal to the idea that America--or any of us citizens--could stand out of time, athwart Fate, changeless. This, of course, is a delusion.
The same is true with a baseball team. Perhaps that's why, on some deep level, fans hew to teams and fly the colors: it's national pride writ small. Humans are by instinct tribal creatures; we're hard-wired to stay in the group. If we hadn't done so at the dawn of humankind, we'd have been eaten by the tigers in the jungle. In human endeavors, this instinct manifests in ways both great (close-knit communities) and grotesque (rabid nationalism/nativisim). Loving a baseball team, being part of the tribe--here's a safe and easy way to identify with a group, to be for something, to belong to something.
That a fan belongs to an overarching idea rather than a fixed, longterm reality--therein lies sports' melancholy. The "San Francisco" 49ers now play at a stadium in Santa Clara, nearly an hour south of the city. The "San Francisco" Warriors, the basketball team, has long been "The Golden State Warriors," since they play in Oakland. (A new arena may be built for them along the San Francisco waterfront. Will they again be the "San Francisco Warriors?" Stay tuned.) Only the San Francisco Giants play in San Francisco.
But who cares? Watching a Crawford-Panik-Belt double play--perfection. A Hunter Pence homer? Sweeeeet. A Madison Bumgarner strike-out? Excellent. And that's enough for this reconstituted Giants fan.
Summer is coming to an end and the baseball season is waning. Why not, then, simply keep the eyes open and the heart awake to these last few precious games. Win or lose, the playing's the thing--the only thing that really counts, until the stadium lights finally go dark.
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