500 words on Superfans

I’ve been a football fan for fewer years than I’ve been SCUBA diving but I know the chants and songs of three NFL teams. Football came late for me. It wasn’t until my nephew took an interest in the sport at four or five years-old that I, his twenty-something uncle, started paying attention.

I went to my first few games in the Superdome when my brothers lived in Louisiana prior to Hurricane Katrina. These games really were my first professional football experiences, despite an adolescent foray into a Raider’s game in junior high school. Following the storm, I shared some season tickets to the San Diego Chargers when the nephew (and his family) moved out west. When SCUBA diving and football would compete for my attention, diving would typically win.

Today, I’d rather watch a New Orleans Saints game then do just about anything else on a Sunday. It’s in these last few years that I realized: I’m a novice Superfan.
While watching an early game with experienced-Superfan Amy, we sat next to two scraggly young men. Since clearly American Eagle Outfitters has yet to secure an NFL expansion team, their loyalties’ were harder to decipher. (Any Philadelphia Eagles fan would be decked from cap to socks, so they clearly weren’t being coy.) It wasn’t until the final moments of the Redskins-Lions game, in the mix of a number of games being broadcast in the bar, that we realized that these two young men were heartbroken Detroit Lions fans. It takes a superfan to hang in with the Lions, especially after their winless season last year (the only NFL team to ever spend an entire season losing) and 19-game losing streak. That Sunday, the greatest Sunday in 19 games and 18 months, these boys could hold their heads high and cheer for their winning team. Finally.

What makes a sportsfan a superfan? Is it when he books work trips around a team’s road schedule? Will postponing your wedding until February qualify? Does a family need to pass season tickets down for generations, or can you have never stepped foot in the home stadium?

We spend our lives looking for a tribe. When it’s easy, we find our tribe in the home. Some folks cling to religion, or their jobs. At church or at work they found their tribe. For millions of us, our tribe is easy to spot because we are wearing the same colors.

Sport is a tribute to our simplest origins. Football mimics the battlefield, basketball the hunt. Speed, agility, form, and strategy rarely fit into our modern, convenient lives. In sport, we find a place for our mind and our bodies. While not every individual can excel in sport, anyone with some poster board and an air horn can be a Superfan.

I find that there are very few things that make me scream out loud with joy in my thirties. Watching the Saints with friends and strangers; drinking beer and eating fried food: these things do.