Fanning the flames of
self-righteousness
Posted: Wed May 27,
1998
Last week two suits were filed by fans against the Florida
Marlins—one for breach of contract, the other for
false advertising. Why? Well, if you recall, the Marlins
won the championship of the world last year and then the
owner gutted the team to save
money.
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Marlins fans don't have much to cheer about.
(Al Tielemans)
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We don't have a defending baseball champion any more than
we have an existing baseball
commissioner.
So these particular Marlins fans feel they've been cheated.
What is interesting about this, though, is their
reaction—litigation. Think about it. Various teams in
all sports have traditionally been rotten through the
years. But as far as I know, nobody
ever sued before. Why, if Chicago Cubs fans had taken to
suing, the entire Cook County judicial system would have
been tied up for much of the 20th
century.
But the actions by the Marlins fans are instructive,
because they show, in a broader sense, how differently
sports fans feel now—how frustrated they are, how
alienated. In a very curious way, in fact, I think fans,
like these gentlemen in Miami, feel
more possessive of their team—while at the same time they
feel less connected to the players and the owners. That
probably sounds like a contradiction, but, in fact, it
makes
sense.
Fans today are scared to get close to players. It's like
being on the front lines during a battle. Don't make
friends, because your buddy may get shot tomorrow. Don't
get too attached to any player, because he'll be in some
other uniform tomorrow,
playing
against you. Paradoxically, although players have their freedom
now, they are
perceived today to be mere product, to be commodities. Effectively,
players have bought their freedom at the price of their
humanity.
I think maybe that's why there seem to be so many more
fights today in sports. It's a way for players to blatantly
demonstrate the passion for their team that they used to
feel
naturally.
Likewise fans feel no affection for the man who runs the
team. The
owner. Think about it. Except in sports, is there anywhere else
that we use the word "owner"? Owner: Good grief,
it sounds like something from the Industrial Revolution,
from out of Dickens. But once upon a time, we sort of liked
our owners. How could you
not like somebody who was responsible for bringing you a
game? Now, though, we don't like owners at all. The sense
is that they're not only rich SOB's, but they're meddling
with our team, like it's their own personal toy—plus
they're living off the fat of
the land, operating in stadiums that are subsidized by us
taxpayers.
Fans today even seem to have a different attitude toward
stadiums and arenas. People who watch a game at home on TV
tend to merely watch, in the traditional passive fashion.
But nowadays, when folks go out to the ballpark, they tend
to behave more
interactively. There is a sense of entitlement—they've paid
a great deal of money to come to their ballpark, and by
God, they deserve to be part of things, adjunct
participants. And it is uppermost in their minds that while
the players are transient, they—we,
the fans—are permanent. Attention must be
paid.
So, basically, we're scared to like the players and we
don't like the owners. But we do love the game. And that
means that we have somehow managed to find a way in our
minds to sue the owners of our team and disdain the players
on our team, but love the
team itself. It's tricky, but that's the way we are as fans
today.
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