A post by Peter Kung and Shawn Klein

Peter is a lifelong Eagles fan. Shawn is a diehard Patriots fan. We separately watched Super Bowl LII and, to put it mildly, felt wild swings of emotion. But…why? It was only a game.  Why do sports fans sometimes (often?) go crazy at sporting events and then afterwards go about their day as if nothing much happened. If something of genuine significance happened, something that warranted the emotional ups and downs the fan experienced during the game, why don’t its effects linger?

Walton (2015) thinks this puzzle of sports fandom parallels the paradox of fiction.

“The fan imagines that the outcome matters immensely and imagines caring immensely—while (in many cases) realizing that it doesn’t actually matter much, if at all. She is caught up in the world of the game, as the spectator at the theater is caught up in the story. Afterwards, like the playgoer, she steps outside of the make-believe and goes back to living her life as though nothing much had happened—even if the home team suffered a devastating and humiliating defeat. It’s just a story; it’s just a game” (p. 77).

Walton himself and other authors (Wildman 2019, Moore 2019) who have tried to explain this aspect of sports fandom have applied Walton’s theory in a quite limited way. These three Waltonians have an impoverished view of sports make-believe and sports fandom. There’s a better way to apply the Waltonian theory to sports.

On Walton’s account, the prop in a fan’s game of make-believe is the sporting event: the game, the contest, the match. What’s the content of the sports fandom make-believe? Walton mentions a few specifics:

• In addition to one’s real-world concerns about the outcome of the game, one is supposed to imagine that the game matters a great deal (p. 78).

• Spectators’ affective response to whatever real-world concerns they have with the game can serve as reflexive props; a small sensation of excitement at a successful third-and-long conversion is imagined to be much greater sensation responding to a fictional concern (p. 78).

• Frequently fans imagine, in a fairly indeterminate way, that the opposing players are the “bad guys” and that the preferred team is the “good guys,” and fictionally desire that the good guys triumph (p. 79).

Walton notes that sports fictions have no author and hence no authorial direction, unlike most works of art. The fan chooses which side is the good guys and which is the bad, and can even switch halfway through, without being guilty of misinterpreting the fiction.

Two worries crop up. First, all three authors tend to frame the puzzle using the assumption that, in reality, sports don’t matter very much to fans. This is a strange way to frame a puzzle if you are taking sports fandom seriously. Sports matter to fans!

A second, deeper worry is raised by Stear (2017): On the Waltonian account, the content of sports fiction is unacceptably impoverished. Let’s call this the thinness problem. Stear argues persuasively that the thinness problem undermines the Waltonians’ ability to explain the very thing they set out to explain (p. 281). The goal was to explain spectators’ apparent emotional reactions to sporting events, both their intensity and their fleetingness. In a novel, quasi-emotions are caused by a story that identifies protagonists and villains, and conveys why the protagonists are admirable and why the villains are deplorable. Why do we root for one character and deplore another? The answers are in the story.

In Super Bowl LII, why did Peter root for and care about the Eagles success while Shawn rooted for and cared about the Patriots success? According to the three Waltonians, nothing in the game itself explains why a fan should root for one team over another. The game itself is a prop for fans of both sides, so how could the game on its own make Eagles the good guys for one set of fans and the Patriots the good guys for another set? To answer to this question, we need a richer account of sports make-believe.

All three Waltonians focus on a single sporting event: a game (Walton), a soccer match (Wildman), or a ski race (Moore). But for many fans, individual sporting events are only part of the fan experience. Partisan sports fans follow the season, the team, the sport. The NFL regular season is now 18 games. For many fans, that is not 18 discrete episodes of sports fandom make-believe, like reading 18 unconnected short stories over several months. The individual games are rather like chapters, or more accurately, scenes in a much longer novel. There is a story of your favored team’s season and that story persists and is largely crafted in between the individual games.

If you focus on the individual games, the Waltonian story for sports is not that plausible. On reflection it shouldn’t be surprising that there are additional props in fandom make-believe, though unlike novelistic fiction, there is no single set of canonical fandom props. (If there were a single set, the puzzle about Peter and Shawn’s diverging rooting interests would reemerge.) There is also, as Walton notes, no single author. The story that a sports fan engages with is a collaboratively written story; sports fandom, unlike reading a novel, is a social enterprise, a social enterprise focused around knitting individual games into narrative arcs, stories, legends, and characterizations. These imaginative prescriptions are provided by a number of sources: other fans, who retell team lore and who share with each other interpretation of games and other events as they unfold; team players and ownership, which have a vested interest in presenting a flattering and outsized image to fans; sponsors, who aim for reflected glory for their companies and help craft athlete personas to do so; media, which includes journalists and commentators, who play a dual role of reporting on sports (in the fact-gathering sense) as well as narrative storytellers and commentators; and gaming, which includes fantasy sports and gambling.

The live games themselves are fairly limited props; the props that give those games and the fan experience meaning are social, dispersed, and collaboratively authored. The stories that make up fandom make-believe are passed to new generations of fans in a way more reminiscent of the way stories in the Iliad or The Romance of the Three Kingdoms might have been passed down orally. Sports fandom make-believe is more like folklore, and less like a novel.[1]

While our view offers the potential for a richer make-believe, you might wonder, “Well, why not say that we simply believe (rather than imagine) all that stuff?”

First, there are claims in the sports fandom make-believe that seem too incredible to believe. Despite the commercials, we don’t believe that Michael Jordan can really fly.[2] We don’t believe that the sports gods punish teams whose coaches make cowardly decisions. The Boston Red Sox may have endured many, many seasons without winning a championship, but we don’t believe that they were literally cursed. A player having their picture on the cover of Sports Illustrated or Madden football doesn’t doom the player to injury or a poor season. 

Second, a key difference between imagination and belief is sensitivity to evidence. Sports fandom exhibits insensitivity to evidence (or more precisely, insensitivity to a lack of evidence), so it is less plausible that the fan believes all her claims. In NFL telecasts, you cannot even see about half of the players on the field. The average NFL fan has never played football at an advanced level and has no clue about the incredibly complex plays that NFL teams run. This means that most fans have no idea what plays the offense and defense called on particular downs, so they have little hope of analyzing who was at fault when a play doesn’t go well for one side. For the average viewer, the rational answer to “why did this play turn out that way?” or “why did this team win by this margin?” would almost always be “I don’t know.” But where’s the fun in that? Much more satisfying to imagine that you know answers that fit within well-worn or intriguing narratives. 

A third reason is that sporting emotions do not have their usual lasting effects. A sports fan might root hard against a player, “hate” him when rooting for him, but then avow beliefs and exhibit behavior that does not match with genuine hate or dislike. As Moore notes, a fan of an opposing team might nonetheless admire and respect LeBron James and eagerly accept an invitation to lunch with him. There’s also how quickly sporting emotions can dissipate; Wildman notes that after “the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat” one might chat and laugh with friends in the pub, the sporting emotions seemingly gone. That’s true, but it is not always so. We both have experienced our teams’ devastating losses that linger. Our view explains this. Ardent fans are more immersed, and more likely to continue to dwell on the game in follow up discussions with fellow fans, media coverage, and so on. They remain engaged with the fiction. Sports fandom make-believe occupies a greater proportion of their lives, more than just the duration of the game, so you would expect their sporting emotions to be more lasting and to play a larger role in their lives.

Fourth, negative emotions based on genuine beliefs tend to interfere with relationships. But as David Drucker insightfully noted on a recent podcast, “...actually sports rivalries between friends can be very enriching to the friendship, whereas we have seen lately, political rivalries between friends and family are debilitating.”[3] Peter and Shawn can honestly say about each other, “Even though he’s an [Eagles|Patriots] fan, he’s still a pretty good guy.”

If any readers are interested in the full-length paper version of this post, we’d love comments.

Notes

[1] It is worth noting that not only does our account offer a thicker sport fandom make-believe, but it also explains how some sports fandom narratives can be morally suspect or objectionable when arguably the game itself is not. Collaborative fandom fiction can and frequently has been racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic. For example, Warren Moon and the players on the field with him may not have been doing anything racist in individual games, but narratives surrounding Moon that led to a future hall of famer being undrafted certainly were.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5NalM5yBMo.

[3] https://thedispatch.com/podcast/dispatch-podcast/can-we-call-it-quits-roundtable/.

References

Moore, J. (2019). Do you really hate Tom Brady? Pretense and emotion in sport. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 46(2), 244–260.

Stear, N. (2017). Sport, make-believe, and volatile attitudes. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 75(3), 275–288.

Walton, K. (2015). In other shoes: Music, metaphor, empathy, existence. Oxford University Press,

Wildman, N. (2019). Don’t stop make-believing. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 46(2), 261–275.