Chad the Elder is a hard-core Vikings fan in the same way that the Pope is pretty Catholic:

Cheering for a team is not about calculating the odds and going with the winners. It’s about loyalty and eternal hope in the face of constant disappointment.

It’s a nice sentiment, but…no.

Family? Country? Faith? All ofthose things are about loyalty and perseverance. Sports? That’s entertainment.

I covered this a few years ago. I wrote:

Except for the Bears and, most seasons, the Twins, I’m the king of the fair-weather fans.

I’m a busy guy – work, kids, time-intensive hobbies, yadda yadda. I go through a particularly rigorous cost-benefit analysis for everything on which I might spend time; does the cost (in time) benefit me in enjoyment more than the other things I might do?

That calculation leads me to toss things out pretty ruthlessly; among the detritus, losing teams (like the ’90 Twins) and even entire sports (Hockey).

And let’s be honest; sports need fans like me. It’s only good capitalism.

It’s a calculation I’d never make with, say, my kids (my son at age 14 is, let’s just say, a net loss in the “enjoyment” department for the next year or two), my faith, or my nation.

But a sports team?

I mean, back in the days when players spent their entire careers in one city, and owners were part of life in a region?  Maybe – and that’s a big maybe.
But all those things – the actual reasons to be “loyal” to a team – went the way of the Corvair, and at about the same time.

In a normal free-market economy, sports teams need to deliver – good teams, good efforts, winning records – to provoke audiences to part with their hard-earned money. If the team is phoning it in, punching the clock, nobody but the absolute hard core will care – and the team will fold, and will deserve to. To draw people, they have to appeal to the fickle tastes of…me!

And of course it’s more than just pure capitalism. Indeed, we owe it to our nation, our culture, and our way of life to see it this way:

In the East-German-like sports economy of places like Wrigley Field, Fenway, and the vision the likes of Patrick Reusse, Joe Soucheray and the like have, everyone would troop dutifully, a horde of gray-faced sheep, to the Sports Allocation Centre, for their weekly ration of Sport. The team would slog through the motions, the herd audience would pay $5 for their hot dogs and dutifully clap at the appropriate times, and go home wearing their $399 sweatshirts.

So you see – fair-weather fans like me are not only absolutely vital for the health and survival of sports; we are good for free enterprise, even democracy itself.

You owe it to this nation, and to those who’ve fallen to defend it, to eschew the Vikings until they turn things around.

Thank you, and God Bless America.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 8:04 am and is filed under The Rare Sports Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.