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The I in Team
Sports Fandom and the Reproduction of Identity
By Erin C. Tarver The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-47013-9
CHAPTER 1
Who Is a Fan?
Do you know what a "fan" is? A crank. A fiend. An enthusiast.
CINCINNATI TIMES-STAR, April 18, 1888 (quoted in Shulman 1996)
In 8th grade, this boy Alex said he was going to the Mets game that night — I was too. I said I was a huge Mets fan and was so excited. He said (and I quote), "I hate it when girls say they are fans of a team. They don't know anything about it." I said, "Of course, I know about the Mets." He told me to prove it and asked me to name three players on the team — I named the entire 40-man roster."
JILLIAN, Mets fan (quoted in Markovits and Albertson 2012, 206)
[The sports purist]'s support for the team that he judges to be most excellent is so contingent and tenuous that he barely qualifies as a fan at all.
NICHOLAS DIXON (2001, 153)
The term "fan" is shot through with values. Although this might come as a surprise to people who are not particularly interested in sports, or to sports fans who have not spent much time reflecting philosophically on their fandom, the concept's value-laden nature is apparent as soon as we attempt to answer this chapter's question, "Who is a fan?" The mere act of defining our terms, crucial in any philosophical analysis, quickly requires us to stake out the limits of fandom — to make calls on who is in and who is outside of the "fan" community — which, as most sports fans will tell you, is a necessarily controversial bit of business. Proving that someone is or is not a fan often involves parsing the smallest details of a spectator's knowledge, behavior, or feeling, analyzing their claim to fandom with the rigor of a tax attorney investigating whether a particular lunch truly satisfies the criteria for a business-expense deduction. Making matters more complicated is the fact that standards for the application of the term "fan" are as unclear as they are frequently invoked. Claims about who counts as a "real fan" are common among fan groups, but those claims are far from univocal in their content. Fans tend to be particularly interested in, as reception theorist Daniel Cavicchi puts it, "distinguish[ing] themselves from 'nonfan' audience members" (2014, 56), an end that is accomplished through a wide variety of practices — including speech, dress, collections, and travel, just to name a few. In its most exacting forms, fandom prescribes a thickly normative testing regimen: repeated demands by one's peers for proof that one is a "real fan," distinct from a poseur, or worse, a mere rider on the "bandwagon." Implicit in the "fan" concept, then, is a set of expectations about how one ought to behave as a sporting enthusiast.
The normative quality of the "fan" concept thus goes beyond the sort of normativity that is implicit in any philosophical definition. It is undoubtedly true that, as poststructuralist thinkers such as Judith Butler (1990) have pointed out, conceptual clarification always requires the assertion of some norm — as soon as I specify the referent of the term "woman," for example, I involve myself in claims about what one "must" be in order to count as a woman and the exclusion of some persons from that category. Likewise, defining even less contested terms always requires some degree of world-chopping: to define a circle is to specify the ideal type of that shape and simultaneously to say that it is not a square, triangle, etc. But "fan" is normatively loaded not only by virtue of the nature of linguistic distinctions or the inherently limiting character of definitions; its specific content is normative. "Fan" denotes a kind of spectator who is marked out from others — whose status exceeds, somehow, that of a mere audience member, whether for good or ill. It is a concept with a history, an "extraordinary form of audiencing" (Cavicchi 2014, 52) whose very name makes explicit its excesses; the term itself exists to mark the advent of a new — and, at least at its inception, aberrant — form of interaction with sport. As we will see, though, the implicit normative claim involved in calling someone a "fan" shifts over time, evolving from derision to legitimation; the application of the term almost always relies on a set of assumptions about respectable spectator engagement.
"Fan" is, in other words, a concept that is not value-neutral. Whereas "circle" carries norms for its application that make no prescriptions beyond how the word should be used, "fan" not only carries norms for its application but also makes implicit claims about standards of behavior. Those claims can be more or less prescriptive, depending on the extent to which one understands "norm" to indicate, on the one hand, "that which is typical" or, on the other, "that to which one ought to conform." As feminists have pointed out, however, the lines between the two senses of the word "norm" tend to be blurred in the case of human behavior, as "the typical" frequently becomes imbued with prescriptive force. For evidence of this claim, we need only reflect on the previously widespread practice of forcing all children to be right-handed because most are, the enforcement of heterosexuality on the grounds that it is "natural," or the subjection of perfectly healthy intersex children to genital surgeries simply because their genitals do not resemble those of "typical" boys or girls. Because the suspicion of abnormality is such a powerful tool of socialization, one might have expected that sports fandom would remain the domain of social outcasts and the generally weird, given its initial association with abnormally obsessed baseball enthusiasts. Yet as "fans" grow their numbers and sports fandom becomes more widespread, the term gains its own prescriptive force, whose implicit claims about how sporting enthusiasts ought to behave are evident in the epigraphs to this chapter.
With such normativity built into the concept, it is perhaps unsurprising that virtually all of the literature in the philosophy of sport dealing explicitly with fans is concerned with fan ethics — with what makes one a good fan, whether it is ethical to support one team over another, and so on. The latter question — whether it is more virtuous to be a "partisan" fan or, on the other hand, a "purist" who values athletic excellence over arbitrary team loyalty — has, in fact, consumed most of the existing philosophical discussion of sports fans. While the interest in the ethics of fan loyalty is a reasonable one, it is curious that philosophers have for the most part undertaken answers to this question without devoting much attention to the notion of fandom as such — without, that is, understanding what makes fans fans, what they do, and why they do it. My interest here is in investigating these questions by philosophically analyzing the meaning of sports fandom, both for the sake of philosophical clarity and for the sake of showing the gravity of the ethical questions that sports fandom ought to raise. Indeed, my view is that when we attend to the details, meanings, and effects of sports fandom in the contemporary United States, we will find that its normative effects — that is, the myriad ways in which sports fandom reinforces particular judgments of value, standards of behavior, and so on — far exceed worries about whether fans should be partisans or purists. As I will argue in later chapters, these normative effects move well beyond the world of sports.
For now, though, I am concerned with defining my terms, and with clarifying the object (and limitations) of my investigation. Contrary to a particularly popular social scientific taxonomy of sports fans (Giulianotti 2002), I will not claim that fans' practices or emotional lives must occur along specific lines or according to particular patterns; neither will I take a stand on whether fans must be partisans or purists. Sports fandom is discernible in a wide range of persons, activities, and practices and can be characterized by affective states ranging from religious devotion to jingoistic pride or a simple desire for positive feelings. My argument will proceed in two parts: historical and contemporary. First, I will offer an analysis of the history of the term "fan," tracing its emergence and development in relation to sport in the late nineteenth-century United States. Second, I will, through consideration of the contemporary theoretical discussion of sports fans and partisanship, argue for a two-pronged, broad definition of "sports fan," which is characterized by a combination of care (that is, emotional investment) and practice (that is, some form of active engagement with the sport one watches). In my definition of "fans," not even "purist" fans are emotionally unattached, for we can see the same patterns of affective investment and semiritualized practice even in cases of fans who lack team loyalties. So, although philosophers might generally be inclined to favor "purist" sports fandom on the grounds that it is less irrational, we should note that no form of sports fandom escapes passionate involvement. Moreover, all forms of sports fandom involve some degree of repetitive practice that is worth further examination; these practices will be addressed more thoroughly later in the book. Although sports fandom is a normatively loaded concept, then, I argue in what follows for an understanding of the term that is not thickly normative or overly restrictive in its application. I employ a broader meaning of the term in order to carefully observe both its evolution and its wide-ranging contemporary social effects.
From Fanatics to Fans
"Fan" is so common in contemporary life — both as a term and a cultural phenomenon — that it is easy to forget that it has comparatively recent origins. Although it is difficult to mark the precise moment in which sporting enthusiasts became sports "fans," scholars generally agree that the term came into popular usage in the late nineteenth century, specifically with reference to baseball fans. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), along with a few other dictionaries of etymology (Barnhart 2002; Hendrickson 1987), cites an 1889 issue of the Kansas City Times and Star as the first print usage of the word when used to refer to "a keen and regular spectator of a (professional) sport," noting that it is an abbreviation of the word "fanatic" (OED Online 2015a). The 1889 article cited by the OED, chronicling the reaction to the ouster of Kansas City Cowboys manager Dave Rowe reads as follows: "Kansas City base ball fans are glad they're through with Dave Rowe as a ball club manager." Rowe had not lasted long in Kansas City, completing only two seasons at the helm, winning only 30 percent of his games in each. The "fan" reaction described in the Times and Star article is a familiar one: relief that team change is coming and hope for the future.
Yet the claim that this is the first recorded usage of "fans" to refer to sports enthusiasts rings false. The "fans" referenced here are devotees of the Cowboys, but they hardly seem "fanatical." Given the vociferousness with which baseball enthusiasts supported their teams in years prior to this reference — spectators at an 1883 game in Cincinnati, for example, became so furious with an umpire that the game was stopped and police called in to curtail the "rowdies [who did] not agree with all of the umpire's decisions" (Cincinnati Commercial Gazette 1883) — it is surprising that the paper would refer to the comparatively tame reaction of relief at the departure of a losing manager as an expression of fanaticism. Moreover, it is worth considering the quickness of the sentence above: the word "fans" does not appear in quotation marks, nor does the article offer any explanation of what it means by the supposedly novel term. It appears, in other words, that the author of the 1889 article expects his audience to know the term already and does not take himself to be abbreviating "fanatics." It appears, instead, that the author is using a term already in circulation to refer to the followers of a particular sports team.
In fact, the OED misses several earlier usages of "fan" in American newspapers and periodicals. At least twice in 1887, articles appear in sporting publications that demonstrate the beginnings of a move to use "fans" to describe baseball enthusiasts — as opposed to "cranks," the term that had previously been most popular. In their Comments on Etymology article, Popik and Cohen note that in June of 1887, the following lines appeared in an article in The Sporting News: "What a pleasure Billy must derive when talking to those cranks and fans who continually harped upon his managerial qualities" (1996, 3). Similarly, David Shulman cites a more thoroughly explained usage in the November 1887 issue of Sporting Life, which offers an account of the origins of the term:
"It was Ted who gave the nick-name of 'fans' to baseball cranks. You never hear a man called a 'fiend' out in the Western League cities. 'Fan' is the word that is invariably used. It is a quick way of saying 'fanatic,'" explained Tom Sullivan. ("Memories of Ted Sullivan," Sporting Life, November 23, 1887, quoted in Shulman 1996, 328)
It is unclear, however, that "fan" was widely in usage beyond the Midwest. As Shulman notes, the 1888 book on baseball terminology, The Krank, His Language and What It Means, "did not include fan," (329) and all of the 1888 newspaper usages of "fan" appear to be confined to Kansas City, St. Louis, and Cincinnati.
This geographical confinement is consistent with the myth of the origin of "fan," circulated in various forms by former manager of the St. Louis Browns Ted Sullivan. In three different versions of the same story (told in 1896, 1898, and 1903) Sullivan claimed to have coined the term "fan" in 1883 to refer to those "cranks" who had the particularly annoying habit of behaving as though they knew more than he did and offering unsolicited advice on the management of the team (Popik and Cohen 1996, 5–6; Shulman 1996, 330). Sullivan's 1898 telling of the origin myth is particularly striking:
The word or term "fan" has passed into baseball literature and is as current in baseball phraseology as the purest word within the pages of Webster or Johnston. The technical definition of the word fan is "a person that is heavily burdened with baseball knowledge, or so permeated is he with it that it oozes out of the crevices of his anatomy as does steam out of the pipes of a boiler." That is one definition, and that definition was prompted by and applied to the person that was responsible for the origin of the term.
... A man came into my place one day and in the presence of three or four of the Browns commenced to ply me with questions about baseball in general. He knew every player in the country with a record of 90 in the shade to 100 in the sun. He gave his opinion on all matters pertaining to ball. ... He kept up this onslaught on me until someone came to my assistance and called him outside.
I turned to some of my players and said: "What name could you apply to such a fiend as that?" Charley Comiskey replied: "He is a fanatic." I responded: "I will abbreviate that word and call him a 'fan.'" So when he was ever seen around headquarters, the boys would say, "the fan" was around again. (quoted in Popik and Cohen 1996, 6; emphasis mine)
By 1898, Sullivan's description of the fan is extraordinarily vivid and literary; the image he draws is one of a man possessed of encyclopedic knowledge, who is obsessive and uncontrollable. The enthusiasm of the fan is palpable and perhaps a bit dangerous, like steam from the leaky pipes of a boiler, portending explosion. Notably, Sullivan's 1896 telling of the origin myth is rather different, not only in terms of the personages involved — his interlocutor this time is Browns owner Chris Von der Ahe, not Charlie Comiskey — but also in terms of his description of the "fan" behavior: "Chris had a board of directors made up of cranks who had baseball on the brain, and they were always interfering with me and telling Chris how the team ought to be run. I told Chris that I didn't propose to be advised by a lot of fanatics ... fans for short" (5–6). In this telling of the story, fans still exhibit a propensity for know-it-all-ness, but they are less unpredictable — meddling board members, rather than feverishly obsessive "fiends." In each case, however, what is striking is that "fan" is used at least somewhat derisively, the shortened form of the word lending an air of lighthearted joking to the underlying claim of disturbingly excessive involvement.
The ambivalence here expressed — anxious amusement at fans' investment in a game — was articulated even before the advent of the word "fan." The 1876 song "The Base Ball Fever" makes use of similarly lighthearted lyrics that describe baseball enthusiasts' love of the game as a form of contagious disease. The song's lyrics prefigure Sullivan's image of the obsessive "fan": a person of near-frenzied enthusiasm for the game, whose inability to contain their irrational need to see matches interferes with everyday life. The irrationality of crazed fans reaches its climax in the final lines of the song, in which the narrator offers to "bet [his] Beaver" that his skills are as great as any of the ballplayers he watches on the field, his judgment having presumably been clouded by "the fever" (Angelo 1876). The puns, rhyme scheme, and piano melody lighten the mood, but the coupling of these comedic elements with a vaguely disturbing image of its narrator as feverishly delusional suggests a decided ambivalence toward this new class of sports enthusiasts, who are, for better or worse, outside the norm of previously acceptable spectatorship.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The I in Team by Erin C. Tarver. Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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