Sports Biblio Digest 3.18.18: The Tribal Faith of Modern Sports Fans
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also in This Issue: The Complicated Legend of Bill Tilden; O.J. Simpson; The St. Louis Browns; Ichiro’s Endless Winter; New Sports Books; The Loyola Ramblers; Remembering Tom Benson
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This is Digest issue No. 117, published March 18, 2018. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website. To view this newsletter in a browser, click here.
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I don’t think I can ever be a sports fan the way I was as a kid, the way most adults are who’ve never made a living inside the world of sports, or in my case, sports journalism.
Like many fans, however, these days I’m content to get my sports experience via a television or video screen. I suppose I’ve given in to convenience and the comforts of home, and I’m not particularly proud of this mediated reality I’ve chosen.
Especially with the ongoing insanity of the NCAA basketball tournament. Crazed fans euphoric over upsets by Buffalo, Loyola-Chicago and, most improbably of all, Maryland-Baltimore County are the charm and the joy of March Madness.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m as astounded by what’s been happening as anyone, and as I’m typing this Michigan has pulled off another heartstopper, a 3-point shot at the buzzer to down Houston.
The sports fan in me usually comes out for this event, and baseball season, but little else these days, for myriad reasons that are best left explained at some other time.
I just find it hard to be one of them, on a constant, year-round basis. Their 24/7, all-on media world is very different from mine, formed first by newspaper accounts and radio broadcasts, then television and the multi-platform torrent of today.
Sportswriter George Dohrmann’s newly released “Superfans: Into the Heart of Obsessive Sports Fandom,” is a welcome look into the landscape of today’s fan culture.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who recently joined The Athletic, explains to Jeff Pearlman that many of these individuals find a tribal sense of belonging, as well as purpose, to going to the lengths they do:
“We can argue whether they should find something else to fill those needs, but what is clear is that most people are happier as a result of their fandom, and almost all the people I profile are doing no harm. So, I say, let them be fans.”
More podcast interviews with Dorhmann here and here.
One of his prime examples of the Superfan is a Minnesota Vikings fan who found solidarity after struggling to adapt to post-military life. Vikings World Order resulted from that need, and the social psychologists Dorhmann spoke to suggested that these individuals are finding something in sports at critical junctures beyond the playing field:
“They arrive a transitional moment in life. A binding thread among many of the superfans in my book is that their fandom ramped up at times when they felt a void in their lives, a need.”
If that sounds a lot like a religious moment, Dorhmann doesn’t explicitly say. But he noted that those who follow unsuccessful teams aren’t usually deterred from keeping the faith:
“Most people will do things to protect their self-esteem from the blows of consistent losing, like lowering expectations for the team, but they won’t quit on their team entirely. It is too big a part of who they are to walk away, and even rooting for a loser can become, in a way, part of their identity and something they take pride in. They can always say they are not a fair-weather fan.”
I deeply admire this propensity, I really do. I’m desperately trying to believe that my Atlanta Braves, for whom I’ve rooted for nearly a half-century, will win the World Series again in my lifetime. Or at least become seriously competitive again.
At this point, I’d take a return to the playoffs, but I have become deeply pessimistic about the business of baseball and the current ownership’s obsession with becoming real estate developers while they field a mediocre team and charge breathtaking ticket prices. For the next 30 years, some of my tax money is going to help pay for their lavish new stadium, which I don’t plan to support with any more of my cash.
I never had a vote or say in any of this, but my elected officials who voted for this swindle have chosen instead to keep reduced public library hours and other services.
As Rafi Kohan, author of last year’s excellent “The Arena” wrote, there’s no distinction between these jaw-dropping, state-of-the-art palaces of fan experience, where the ball game can easily become a sideshow:
“As much as in private memory, tradition wraps itself in physical spaces, seeping into the walls, the cracks in the concrete. In a new home, there are no ghosts. It is easier to turn away.”
These things do matter too, to many obsessive sports fans, a test of their faith in an aesthetic sensibility that fits their passions.
Dohrmann does delve into the darker side of over-the-top fandom, especially the cyber mobs ready to leap into open warfare with fellow fans, writers and anyone who challenges their belief system.
Yet Steven Roberts, reviewing “Superfans” at The Washington Post, thinks Dohrmann’s missing a lot about fan culture in providing little about baseball, favoring instead a younger, strongly male band of fans of a pro soccer team. There’s little about class, immigrants, female fans and actual religious identity here from Dorhmann, a Notre Dame graduate. As Roberts notes:
“He writes, almost sneeringly, that ‘fan bases are like ancient religions in that most are so old it is impossible to accurately trace their origin.’
“But that is not true. Those origins are kept alive by myths and memories, faded photos and bubblegum cards and ticket stubs, collected and cherished over many generations.”
Perhaps all of this focus on zany, wackadoo, and screaming and yelling behavior is overdone. Instead of the peculiarities, shouldn’t there be some examination of the perfectly normal everyday acts of following a team, no matter what, and riding the waves, or patrolling the depths, of their results? That's what modern sports fans are, more than anything else.
It's also what Will Leitch has wondered in reviewing “Superfans” for The Wall Street Journal, and feel free to substitute your team’s name for what most of us consider our rather mundane, but no less abiding, fan experience:
“Why do I cheer for the St. Louis Cardinals? Because I cheer for the Cardinals. I am happy when they win and I am sad when they lose, and nothing else in my life is ever going to work out that simply. And humans need that simplicity.”
Sports Book News
Allen Hornblum’s highly anticipated biography, “American Colossus: Big Bill Tilden and the Creation of Modern Tennis,” was published March 1 by the University of Nebraska Press. That the subject of the tennis star’s sexuality, and specifically his convictions on charges involving minor boys, didn’t come up until late in the book didn’t impress reviewer Edward Kosner at The Wall Street Journal, and he referred readers to Frank Deford’s 2003 biography instead.
The new book comes after a period of some controversy in Philadelphia, Tilden’s hometown, over how, or even if, to commemorate him. Frank Fitzpatrick recently delved into how Tilden’s legend was launched at the U.S. Tennis Championships in 1920;
Alex Wolff talks to Alex Belth on the making of his new basketball writing anthology (Sports Biblio post here);
Being published this week (non-baseball books, which will be previewed here next week): The Russian Five: A Story of Espionage, Defection, Bribery and Courage, by Keith Gave (Gold Star Publishing). How Sergei Fedorov, Viacheslav Fetisov, Vladimir Konstantinov, Vyacheslav Kozlov and Igor Larionov left the clutches of the Soviet sports regime to play for the Detroit Red Wings; The Goat Getters: Jack Johnson, the Fight of the Century, and How a Bunch of Raucous Cartoonists Reinvented Comics, by Eddie Campbell (IDW Publishing). An illustrated history of one of boxing’s iconic events, collected by a cartoonist who has worked with acclaimed novelist Neil Gaiman;
Recently published: We Matter: Athletes and Activism, by Etan Thomas (Edge of Sports). The former NBA player and MSNBC commentator explains his advocacy for social justice issues that go far beyond the playing courts.
Sports History Files
PBS recently premiered “The St. Louis Browns: The Team Baseball Forgot,” and it’s making its way around affiliate stations ahead of the 2018 season. Narrated by St. Louis baseball celebrity Jon Hamm, the film is based on the 2017 book “St. Louis Browns: The Story of a Beloved Team,” by Bill Rogers, Bill Borst and Ed Wheatley.
Wheatley’s a member of the St. Louis Browns Historical Society, and the book and the film delve into the battle between the Browns and the Cardinals for supremacy in a baseball city. Though they reached the World Series only once, in wartime 1944, Wheatley speculates in an interview with St. Louis magazine that fans turned out despite longtime futility because “baseball was the distraction for a lot of these people. That's the memory of their life at that time."
A 98-year-old nun named Sister Jean is more than just the chaplain of the Loyola Ramblers basketball team which shocked Tennessee Saturday to reach the Sweet 16 for the first time in 33 years. The Jesuit college in Chicago earned its greatest sporting acclaim in the early 1960s under the legendary coach George Ireland, and not just for winning the national championship in 1963.
It was during that majestic run that the Ramblers made some notable history at the dawn of the Civil Rights era, fielding an all-black starting lineup in that championship season. Along the way, they played an all-white Mississippi State team, led by All-SEC standout Bailey Howell, that defied orders from Gov. Ross Barnett not to compete against any integrated teams.
Ireland started four blacks in the title game as Loyola upset Oscar Robertson and defending national champion Cincinnati, whom the current Ramblers could face in the Sweet 16 next weekend. The current Ramblers’ 28 wins is the most since that 29-win title team.
As journalist and former Chicago Reader editor Michael Lenehan wrote in his 2013 book about those historic Loyola teams, which were followed in short order by the start of the UCLA dynasty and fully integrated teams in the South:
"Fifty years ago basketball was played mostly on the floor, black players' opportunities were severely limited, and our country was reeling with racial conflict. Today basketball is played largely in the air, black players dominate, and our country is … well, still conflicted, but at least a little steadier on its feet."
A Few Good Reads
At the Buffalo News, Tim Graham gets O.J. Simpson’s first major interview since his release from prison, in his fortress-like abode in Las Vegas. Although questions were limited only to his football career, Simpson talked about Colin Kaepernick, Donald Trump and CTE;
This is scary: Former ESPN president John Skipper tells the Hollywood Reporter about his surprise resignation in the context of what he said was a cocaine extortion plot against him;
The late Bud Collins was recently honored at Indian Wells, and fellow Hall of Fame tennis journalist Steve Flink offers this tribute;
Ichiro Suzuki is back in Seattle at the age of 44, for what likely will be his last stop in Major League Baseball. Wright Thompson spent several days there in early February, just as he signed a one-year deal with the Mariners, staving off for now having to contemplate the terror of retirement;
Two Stanford professors have prepared an online course on the history of sports and universities in the United States, and they’re sitting on a goldmine of a laboratory on their own campus, with an illustrious collection of coaches and elite athletes, as well as other academics whose research focuses on sports-related topics.
Passings
Tom Benson, 90, brought sports hope to a town synonymous with music, food and its unique culture when he purchased the forlorn New Orleans Saints in 1985, then maddened many of the team’s passionate fans with threats to move the franchise. But the combative, controversial billionaire cemented his status as a civic icon when, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and after yet another threat to relocate, he decided to keep the Saints in town, then put in place the pieces for a Super Bowl championship.
Benson later became the owner of the New Orleans Pelicans (formerly the Hornets) NBA franchise, also keeping them from moving, although there was no basketball counterpart to “The Benson Boogie.” His wife Gayle was named the sole beneficiary of his fortune and both teams.