A post by Joseph G. Moore

I find myself in a Vermont snowstorm surrounded by a massive crowd of rowdy fans at a World Cup alpine ski race. The cheering is loud—very loud. So is the rock music, the excited public announcer, and the cowbells. Mikaela Shiffrin, the hometown favorite, is the very last competitor to come down the steep and icy slalom course. Mikaela skis beautifully—an amazing balance of daring, aggression and control. At the line, she beats the field by over a second, which is an eternity in alpine racing. Screeching stop, quick glimpse at her result on the big screen, and Mikaela throws her poles triumphantly in the air. The crowd is ecstatic and deafening. As am I: my eyes well up, a tingling “chills response” courses up the back of my neck, and I bellow inarticulately along with my new-found friends. As I watch teammates and coaches mob Mikaela, I’m overwhelmed with what can only be described as, well, euphoria.

Euphoria? Really? I’m mildly pleased, of course, that a local skier has brought notoriety to the hill. I suppose this matters a bit. The fact is, though, that I didn’t know Mikaela Shiffrin from Adam until I read about her in the race-day program. In fact, I don’t really understand, or care to understand alpine racing. I was there only to take in the local spectacle. Moreover, my “euphoria” lasts all of fifteen seconds, as my attention quickly shifts to beating the freezing crowd to the warm shuttle-bus that will take me back to my car. Not only is my euphoria strangely ephemeral, but I have no inclination to act on it by, say, trying to congratulate Mikaela or seek her autograph. I’d rather get to the bus.

A second example: I felt fear, even dread (with pounding heart, dry throat, and stomach rumblings) when LeBron James came off the bench a few years back to face down my Golden State Warriors at the end of an NBA championship game. I didn’t feel such dread when a hurricane bore down on our region the year before. But how could I really dread LeBron James? In fact, I greatly admire the things he’s done on and off the court, and would tell him so in person if I could. And I would very gladly accept an invitation to lunch.

I could go on. I’m disgusted when the bullpen blows yet another save. I’m outraged by opposing soccer players who run out the clock with bogus flops, fake injuries, and slow substitutions. I deeply regret that Willie McCovey didn’t hit the baseball three feet higher to win the World Series in 1962, a few years before I was born….

In all these cases, there’s a suitability mismatch between the magnitude and volatility of the emotions I seem to experience and the circumstances that give rise to it. So far, this may not particularly distinguish what I’ll call “sporting emotions” from others. After all, misfit and irrationality come with any emotional territory. But there’s also a striking disconnect between the emotions I seem to experience, and the behavior that ordinarily goes (or doesn’t go) with them. Moreover, there’s the telling fact that, even while I’m in the grip of these affective reactions, I’m at some level conscious of these very mismatches. Indeed, recognizing the mismatches, even focusing on them, doesn’t make the response go away as we might expect. My affective responses seem encapsulated—they come and go through choice and engagement rather than through involuntary reaction and recovery. All of these ways in which sporting emotions differ from their normal garden-variety cousins cry out for explanation.

An attractive possibility here is to extend to sport Kendall Walton’s famous make-believe account of our engagement with fiction. Just as, on Walton’s account, we experience a form of imagined fear (“quasi-fear”) when we see the fictional shark in the movie Jaws, so too we might hold that I merely experience a form of imagined euphoria when Mikaela wins the race, or imagined dread when LeBron comes off the bench. On this view, my “quasi-dread” reaction to LeBron shares some of the phenomenology and physiology of genuine dread, but lacks the right cognitive component, and so the connection with typical fear behavior, like running from the basketball stadium or the TV room.

But even if Walton’s account works for fiction (which I won’t question here), there are disanalogies between fiction and sport fandom that stand in the way of extending the view. Most notably, athletes and sporting events aren’t fictional—Mikaela really exists, she really won the race, and I believe she did.[1] So, those of us who nevertheless think this type of account rings true of our sporting emotions face an uncomfortable question: where’s the make-believe?[2] Walton himself suggests (in 2015) that when fans engage with a sporting event, they make-believe that a victory by their side is more important to them than it really is. So, even though Mikaela’s victory didn’t really matter to me, I chose to imagine that it did, and this (along with stimulating sensations from cowbells and a rowdy crowd) triggered a strong affective state of imagined euphoria. But this answer seems rather “thin”: can make-believing that the outcome of a contest matters more than it really does fully explain the intensity and volatility of my eventual affective state?

In a pre-pandemic paper (2019), I suggested that we might beef up the account with two admittedly sketchy supplements. First, when we follow sports, we often engage in a sort of imaginative “ontological bifurcation”—for example, we tacitly distinguish the real “Mr. James” with whom we’d gladly lunch from the imagined and menacing “LeBron” who is about to take down our team. This is like distinguishing different personae or roles a person might play—though here we concoct one of them to figure in our sporting imagination. Second, I invoked Walton’s own notion of de se imagination:[3] we don’t merely make-believe that a sporting contest matters a lot to us, we also imagine of ourselves that we, or our imagined proxies, are (somehow?) in the contest, schussing down the mountain with Mikaela, or facing down LeBron. Both suggestions—ontological bifurcation and de se imagination—teeter on metaphysical illegitimacy: can we cleanly individuate Mr. James from LeBron?; and is the situation I de se imagine—that I am the Golden State Warriors—even coherent, much less metaphysically possible? I’ve been content enough to chalk these worries up to the vagaries of imagination generally.

In a recent and probing Junkyard post, Peter Kung and Shawn Klein pour cold water on my account. They claim that neither I, nor Wildman (2019), nor Walton adequately answer the “thinness problem”, for we’re focused too narrowly on individual sporting events, as opposed to the robust and more enduring socially-constructed narratives through which fans typically engage with these events and their athletes. Attending to these narratives, they claim, points the way to a better thickening.

There’s much to like in Kung and Klein’s account. It’s certainly true that, beyond watching particular sporting events, fans spend a lot of time—in my case, too much time!—absorbing media-fed, analytics-enhanced accounts of athletes, their teams, impending matchups, and so on. So, we often come to an event already regarding one side as favored, or even “good,” and the other as a force of evil. All of which presumably ratchets up the imaginative intensity.

I think Kung and Klein are nicely bringing out and addressing a second, important way in which engagement with sport differs from fiction. Not only are sporting events not fictional (at least until you “ontologically bifurcate”), but they don’t generally have partisan bias built in. When we read a novel or watch a film, the creators present us not only with fictional characters and events, but they also typically feed us a view about which characters we should identify with. We root for Harry Potter not only because he fictionally does good deeds, but also because JK Rowling presents him as the protagonist—the character whose well-being we should care about. If we find ourself rooting for Malfoy or Voldemort we’ve seriously (or perversely) misread the novels. By contrast, a sporting event doesn’t on its own tell us which side we “should” root for. And so, watching a Superbowl between the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots, Kung and Klein found themselves rooting for opposing teams, and experiencing contrasting affective reactions. (As a die-hard 49er fan, I was rooting for both teams to lose.) Presumably this is because they’ve adopted and absorbed different team-narratives, fed by the different sport-media ecosystems in which they’ve surrounded themselves.

So, Kung and Klein are addressing what I’ll call the problem of valence—why does a fan root for (and imaginatively engage with) one side and not the other? In most cases, the socially constructed narratives they point to give us a nice answer to this problem. But this isn’t always the case. For one thing, we might come to an event without any pre-fed narrative or even inclination about whom to root for. This was so with Mikaela. In these situations, some of us, some of the time remain purists—able to enjoy the contest without the need of a partisan rooting interest. But those of us who find rooting central to our enjoyment, will concoct very thin, random-seeming reasons (mere planks in a narrative construction) in order to root for one side. So, in the ski race, I fastened on locality and (despite myself) nationality as a reason to root for Mikaela. Often, though, I simply root for the underdog, or the athletes with the coolest uniforms.

Notice also that the thicker, socially-constructed narratives that are more often at play are themselves adopted for contingent, and sometimes thin reasons. Why did Kung bring a Go-Eagles-narrative to that Superbowl? The 49er fan in me suspects psychological infirmity, but presumably it has to do with where he grew up, or perhaps his love of the Eagle’s green uniforms. So, I’m inclined to think that Kung and Klein’s narrative view gives a helpful, though psychologically contingent answer to the problem of valence.

The more important point, though, is that the problem of valence is strictly distinct from the problem of explaining the intensity of our affective reactions, which is what I sought to address with my supplements. However, although the problem of valence and the problem of intensity seem distinct aspects of the problem of thinness, I can see two ways in which what Kung and Klein say about valence might help with intensity. First, it seems right that, other things being equal, a long-standing engagement with a detailed narrative makes it easier to imagine that the contest matters a lot. Of course, there was no such narrative in the case of Mikaela, but maybe that’s an exception. The more normal case is my intense dread of LeBron, which was surely fueled by wasting good years of my middle-age feasting on Warrior fluff.

Second, and more significantly, Kung and Klein’s account might help in fleshing out the structure of the de se imaginings I invoke in order to help with the problem of intensity. My thought was that when we engage with a sporting contest, we imagine not merely that we’re watching an event whose outcome is important to us, but that we are, in some hazy way, involved in the contest as participant: we are Mikaela or (somehow?) the whole Warriors team trying to fend off LeBron. In the case of Mikaela, I imagine “what it’s like from the inside” in a sort of generic way—American skier facing fancy European competitors, determined mind-set, remaining poised so that her superior talent (which I read about in the program) wins out. By contrast, my vast knowledge of the character, history, tendencies, weaknesses, and even upbringing of the Warriors’ players, coaches, equipment managers, former equipment managers and franchise-as-such allows me to flesh out this first-personal form of imagination with many more details, and so with greater affective specificity. All of this makes it easier to background the real me, and to become intensely lost in, and affected by the richer imagined world I superimpose on the real events of the contest. So, Kung and Klein’s narratives can aid in fleshing out, and so intensifying our de se engagement with sporting events.

In the end, I remain uneasy about whether my approach makes any sense, much less whether it helps with the problems of thinness. If you have suggestions about how better to advance this type of view, I would value hearing from you. If, on the other hand, you find it all utterly convincing, then I have a stadium to sell you in Philadelphia.

Notes:

[1] This disanalogy also makes the extension of make-believe to sport less theoretically motivated. Walton’s account of fictional engagement allows us to side-step a troublesome contradictory triad: I fear Jaws; if I fear Jaws then I believe Jaws exists; I don’t really believe that Jaws exists. Deploying his apparatus in order to deny the first proposition—that I really fear Jaws—gets us out of this puzzle. But there’s no puzzle to side-step when it comes to Mikaela, since Mikaela really exists, and I believe she does.

[2] Walton sketched a way of extending his account to sport in his (2015). In the face of important skepticism from Stears (2017), I tried to advance the make-believe account in my (2019), from which I give myself permission to crib the opening examples. See also Wildman (2019).

[3] Walton scouts this species of imagination in his famous book (see 1990, pp. 28-35), but oddly doesn’t reach for it when extending his account to sport.

References:

Kung, Peter, and Shawn Klein. 2024. “Explaining Fandom.” The Junkyard, April 10, 2024. https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2024/4/6/explaining-fandom.

Moore, Joseph G. 2019. “Do You Really Hate Tom Brady? Pretense and Emotion in Sport.” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 46, no. 2: 244–60.

Stear, Nils-Hennes. 2017. “Sport, Make-Believe, and Volatile Attitudes.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, no. 3: 275.

Walton, Kendall L. 2015. “‘It’s Only a Game!’: Sports as Fiction.” In Collected Work: In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence. Oxford University Press. Pages: 75-83.

———. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Harvard University Press.

Wildman, Nathan. 2019. “Don’t Stop Make-Believing.” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 46, no. 2: 261–75.