quote of the day
Roger Angell of the New Yorker wrote this a while ago. It explains something that I’ve given a lot of thought to, especially since, in my group of nerd friends in particular, I’m very well acquainted with the “amused superiority and icy scorn” phenomena and just how exceedingly fucking annoying it is to be condescended to about this.
Anyway.
“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”
Of course, my nerd friends do care, as ardently as the most lunatic sports fan… about computer games. Which, apparently, aren’t “sports,” which I think is “bullshit.”
This doesn’t explain the phenomena of why most Raiders fans are unbearable assholes, or why most Boston fans period, of any sport, should have thier faces sewn to the underside of an elephant for a week or two.
(btw, I got that quote from the sports guy on espn.com.)