A couple of notable writers, Rory Smith and Miguel Delaney, recently lamented the tribalism of club supporters these days, with an implication that the anger that comes out in dialogues about sport is nastier, less joyful today than in times past. They write that the World Cup brings a welcome respite from the anatagonistic and frequently malign interactions that define sports discussion. But is this the case? Is this Twitter era of banter more angry, more fractious than times past? Are we fans, in particular, enjoying the beauty of sports less and the failures of others more? Are we more interested in one-upping each other than we are in celebrating the talent and poetry of the games we love to watch?
I was a kid in the 70s, a teen in the 80s, and a young adult in the 90s when sports became saturated in the entertainment industry and on the television. I was an adult (supposedly) in the aughts when online media normalized, and am now a middle-aged/older man in the Twitter era. I listed to one sports radio show a week (Sunday nights, the “Sports Huddle”, in Boston) in those early days. I used to read the sports pages every morning religiously, from then through my early 30s. Now I check my twitter feed and scan websites of the traditional media and dedicated bloggers for more minutes per day than I should.
I grew up despising the Lakers. I now lament that I hated the great Magic Johnson – for no defensible reason other than geography. I wore an “I hate LA” shirt to an NBA finals game in the mix-80s. I thought, as a kid and young adult that the Montreal Canadiens were the epitome of privileged, advantaged favoritism from the NHL central office (perhaps true in the 1950s and 60s, and utterly untrue in the 1980s when I held this belief). I did, and — if you put Raheem Sterling’s tattoo at my head — still harbor thoughts that the New York Yankees are the epitome of foulness, a team whose fans’ stupidity is only trumped by their arrogance. These feelings all came out on Sunday night on that one sports radio show in 1980. They came out at games at the old Boston Garden in dumb, malicious, jingoistic chants. They came out Shaefer Stadium when fans of rival teams (not me) got in fistfights over the dumbest of disagreements. They are all there in our memories, and even in writing by professionals, for us to remember.
In 1977 the columnist Ray Fitzgerald penned a short history about the Red Sox/Yankee rivalry for the Boston Globe (behind paywall, so limited quotes here).
A few years ago, while the Stadium was undergoing it’s $100 million renovation, the Yankees played home games at Shea Stadium, the home of the baseball drunk.
That’s rather impolitic, and not even from a generic fan but a proper newspaper writer! He then goes on to note, about the crowd in Boston (following a legendary 1976 brawl between the two teams):
when the Yankees…came to Fenway Park, the customers turned their wrath on centerfielder Mickey Rivers, whom they’d picked out on television clips as the villain of the Stadium Fight. In a disgusting display of non-sportsmanship, bleacherites threw ball bearings, golf balls, and cherry bombs at the beleaguered Rivers, who wore a batting helmet in the outfield for protection.
Fans were, and still are, terrible to opposing players, clubs, and their own supporters. This tribalism came out in shouting matches (and wedgies) at summer camp when I was 12, at college when I was 20, and also when I was 30 – my physical space unpleasantly invaded (and a hat absconded with) by young men in quite fancy suits at Yankee Stadium while I was clearly the guest of someone, sitting peacefully, soberly, watching a meaningless mid-season game.
In my own world this tribalism has always existed, and rather overtly. There was more time spent on discussing the villains of our enemies than on the artfulness of our own stars, though we certainly, doubtlessly relished in that. I love – and will always love – my memories of game-winners, of seeing artists on the court, of seeing something never seen before. But sports has never been only about artistry. It’s about winning and losing – a binary relationship that facilitiates extremes. These extremes are now showcased on Twitter. On blogs. And, for the longest time, in the traditional media. It may be amplified now, such are the open platforms for discussion that have propagated online. These platforms require self-policing and self-awareness, and encourage deeper anonymity (I myself pen this blog without clear identifiers, though I link back to my “real job”), often to the detriment of the discussions. But I do not believe that the baseline fan is measurably angrier or tribal than they were in 1976 – when fans threw batteries at outfielders. Or in 1980 – when my own nation boycotted an entire Olympic games, quashing the dreams of amateur athletes for nothing but political gain. Or in 1995 when one hockey player nearly killed another – and someone in the print media wrote that there was a “collective cheer” about this transpiring.
Twitter. Sports radio, conventional media posting game summaries and narrative minutes after completion, in digital format. Speed, amplification, call and response time shortened such that reward (or clicks) goes to those who go first as opposed to those who wait and process more slowly. This current moment provides us tiny windows of time in which to think, to contemplate, to offer measured, if still emotional, responses. The medium is the message, to cite Marshall McLuhan. His concepts of obscelsence, retrieval, reversal, and enhancement all still apply to our new ways of communicating. In this context Delaney and Smith’s observation that supporters are angrier, less joyful than those who came before leapfrogs the medium and heads straight to the message. And it omits another distinctive (and, to me, positive) difference between older times and the present: the active participation of the media in this dialogue. This is an incredible opportunity for us supporters, but it catalyzes a process that often becomes a feedback loop.
Tribalism isn’t new. Celebrating the negative isn’t new. The amplifier has always been on. So perhaps what the World Cup will do is temporarily turn the knob to the left.