21 August 2014

Your Favorite Team Is -- You

What do Ryan Braun, Ray Lewis, Barry Bonds and Ray Rice have in common?

Their hometown fans cheered all of them. 

That's after Braun wriggled out of accountability following a year of self-righteous lying. That's after Lewis escaped punishment for his involvement in a double murder. That's after Bonds, generally despised by media and teammates, admitted to a years of cheating and lying about it. That's after Rice beat his wife unconscious.

Do fans not care about smarmy, cynical liars? Do they not care about murder? About inveterate cheating? About domestic abuse?

Sure they do, in theory. But they care much more about something practical and immediate. They care about their own enjoyment.

They care about the success of the teams they care about.

And if disgust over homicide or assault and battery or a malign personality interferes with the hometown nine (or eleven) winning, well, suddenly it's in conflict with something more important. Because our mood is elevated when our team wins. Our happiness is marginally diminished when they lose. And we don't like our happiness diminished, no matter how slightly. Someone else's murder or beating or lying, cheating and stealing are of little consequence compared to a sliver more of our contentment. So we support the sociopath who helps our team win and rationalize his actions.

Some examples
Consider this: whom did you root for in this past year's NCAA basketball tournament? Unless you have a connection to a contending team, the answer is probably whoever you wagered would win. (And if you have a natural preference, you probably picked that team anyway.) You didn't really care about the teams, schools or fan bases. Your favorite team was -- you.

Jameis Winston was accused of rape and caught red-handed stealing food from a supermarket. If he were an ordinary student he would have been expelled from college. Yet he will start every game at quarterback for first-ranked Florida State this football season because virtually the entire population of Tallahassee cares more about Seminole victories than about moral issues. That's for people in Gainesville and Coral Gables to concern themselves with, at least until their key guy commits some felony.

We're All Guilty
In fact, the college football universe generally supports Winston. They want to see him play. Watching him brings us pleasure even if we're not Florida State fans. Consequently there's been almost no backlash at all, even in places like Eugene, Oregon and Madison, Wisconsin and Oxford, Mississippi and most certainly in Bristol, Connecticut. 

It's also why sports fans are generally self-deluded about the college-sports industrial complex that makes billions of dollars for schools, media companies and apparel sellers, at the expense of athletes who are not and never could be college students but are compensated for their profit-creating services with scholarships of utterly no value to them.

So next time you see some thug welcomed back by the hometown fans despite actions that should have landed him in the state penitentiary, don't be surprised. The fans are just honoring the desires of the most important people in the world. Themselves.

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