By: Danny West

There are fewer things in a man’s life more important than sports; sex, beer and food (depending on what is being served) are all things that are worthy of setting down the remote control and taking your eyes off the television, for at least a few minutes.  And yet, short of these things, there is nothing so important to a guy.

It’s in our blood, almost forced down our throats until it becomes something we need, something we crave, it’s the everyman’s version of Stockholm Syndrome. Sure, for the first year or two of Pop Warner football you hate it, but after that, well, that’s all she wrote. 

Dwight Howard’s “superman dunk”, the Patriot’s almost perfect season, the Lion’s 0-16 record -- not only do these things excite and interest us, but they also give us a certain level of comfort, something to fall back on. Even in the most uncomfortable of social situations, you can always talk about sports.

But what is it that separates the casual viewer from the true sports fan?  Is it the ability to verbalize stats of your favorite team, even from years before you were born?  Is it the owning of a sports jersey for every day of the week, drinking your coffee out of an official team mug, risking write-ups at work because you can’t stay away from stat tracking websites?

Or is there nothing materialistic to it at all?  Perhaps it is simply the viewing of a game, even if your team is being obliterated, and being content in the fact that, here, you are a part of something much, much bigger than any one person.  And while your television set being tuned into a game and your screaming louder and louder, egging your players on, in all actuality does nothing to affect the outcome of the game, one can’t help but think that maybe, in some small way, it does.
It’s about passion, about the love for a game, about the appreciation for one of the only things left in this world that are truly and completely fair. That is what makes a true sports fan.

And whether you follow a particular team because your father did or because they were champions when you were a kid or for some reason that, for the life of you, you just can’t recall, you cannot deny the camaraderie between two complete strangers based on the colors that the grown men playing a school game wear. And while, for the people on the outside, this may be a hard concept to grasp, to us, nothing has ever made more sense.

It’s a club that anyone can join, regardless of age, regardless of race, regardless of gender, regardless of any other thing going on in your life. The fraternity of the sports fan is forever in rush week and all are welcome to pledge.

And while there is nothing glamorous about being a sports fan, while the bragging rights of cheering for a winning team are, at most, minimal, there is something about being able to tell generations yet to come that “I was there”, “I was a part of that”.

In today’s society, of unemployment and financial struggles, of war and terrorism, of bad and worse, the healthiest thing that anyone can do is simply escape everything for a while.
Perhaps, then, a true sports fan can be defined in just one simple word. Sane.

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