CASUAL
BARNES, FRED
Casual A REAL FAN’S WORK IS NEVER DONE Here’s a little-known fact about genetics: We are born not only with certain physical traits and dispositions, but with a set of athletic teams we are...
...I’m sure of it...
...Real fans lie in bed and meditate about their teams before going to sleep...
...How would I fill all that time I used to devote to thinking about them...
...His brother Joe was the Yankee...
...It overwhelms them...
...They try to figure out how their teams will fare years from now...
...But I haven’t figured out how to fill all the white space on my mental calendar...
...I can still see the play vividly, and my mental picture of it will never go away...
...Victory makes you crazy and stupid...
...Victory causes fans to lose all perspective and common sense...
...When Virginia’s then-unbeaten football team lost to Georgia Tech this fall, I tried to blot it out...
...As bad as they are, I’ll wind up going to a game or two...
...Even if I could abandon some of my teams, there’d be a problem...
...Now I’ve started watching The X-Files...
...Dom played on the Red Sox...
...Daft stuff...
...The rest— Skins, Wizards, UVA—are partly environmental because I grew up in northern Virginia...
...It’s all downhill from here...
...But there’s a genetic element, too...
...All the hours spent going to games or watching them on TV— that’s only a small part of it...
...When the Skins won their first game after losing seven, one of my friends declared, “You know, 97 would probably get the Skins into the playoffs...
...After the Skins dropped the next game, leaving them at 1-8, he was still living off the single win...
...For me, it produced a big-time mood swing...
...Faced with a stinging defeat, I try to exert mind over matter...
...Before I elaborate, let me mention another little-known fact: Sports fans dedicate far more time to their teams than non-fans realize...
...It affects their state of mind for days, months, occasionally years...
...They contemplate trades...
...For me, the greatest moment in decades of fandom was the second quarter of the 1988 Super Bowl, when the Skins scored 35 points against Denver...
...He’d become delusional...
...An 8-8 season isn’t that bad,” he said...
...Casual A REAL FAN’S WORK IS NEVER DONE Here’s a little-known fact about genetics: We are born not only with certain physical traits and dispositions, but with a set of athletic teams we are destined to support...
...So is the large amount of time devoted to talking about their favorite teams...
...But the Wizards didn’t even make the playoffs, and Webber was exiled to Sacramento...
...Defeat causes clinical depression and aimlessness...
...The Skins...
...Being a fan is painful, the basic problem being that the thrill of victory barely exists...
...The reason I like West Point football is my dad went there...
...I failed...
...Sad to say, it has been...
...I was planning on it, and I had a lot of emotion wrapped up in the thing...
...This fall, I’ve managed to dwell less on the Skins, and the NBA season has been delayed...
...They’ve peaked...
...I was born with a strong predisposition to like the Boston Red Sox, the West Point football team, the Washington Redskins, the Washington Bullets (sorry, I mean Wizards), and any team, male or female, from the University of Virginia...
...I’ll be specific...
...As for the Red Sox, I pledged to stop paying any attention to them after the sixth game of the 1986 World Series...
...One victory and he’d lost his mind...
...But with many men, including me, it activates early in life and never wanes...
...It rarely works...
...Ever...
...Ever listen to what callers say on sports talk radio when their team has won...
...Okay, let’s turn to defeat...
...Genetics, again...
...I was confident they’d rise to the top tier of the National Basketball Association last season, led by Chris Webber...
...Sunday nights, I used to scour the sports shows for Skins clips...
...But I woke up the next morning—a beautiful sunny day—obsessively recalling the touchdown pass that gave Georgia Tech the game...
...But it’s thinking about their teams that sops up the most time...
...Yes, there is a thrill of victory...
...I recognized the symptom, having experienced it myself...
...And I still have empty mental time...
...FRED BARNES...
...The Wizards...
...Weeknights, I watch tapes of old X-Files shows to compensate for Wizards games that aren’t being played...
...With women, the team gene is often latent...
...My father once coached Dom DiMaggio on an Army team in California in the 1930s...
...There’s the agony of defeat all right...
...I don’t know...
...The game was won...
...It lasts a few seconds before agony settles in...
...I still like the Red Sox...
...But there’s also the agony of victory...
...As a military officer, my dad was bound to work at the Pentagon sometime and thus live nearby...
...And, of course, they commit the sports section to memory every single day...
...And immediately a doleful thought crept into my mind: The Skins will never be better than they’ve just been...
...They juggle lineups...
...Victory makes life better, but only up to a point...
...The truth is fans can’t deal with defeat...
...Years later, he gave me a ball with Dom’s autograph, and it touched off my genetic bias in favor of the Red Sox...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 12
