I love sports. I love the drama and the intrigue. I love the camaraderie. I appreciate (and disdain) the atmosphere of fanship. We fans decide what team we love and … some of us… stick to that. Others are more like me and love certain organizations and place whatever we want to deem as our ‘loyalty’ on a franchise while holding secondarily to certain players. I enjoy who and what I enjoy and my team loyalties largely boil down to childhood affiliations. I feel, like most of us I think, I relate those connections to my childhood where my primary allegiances were formed. I, for example, still consider myself a New Yorker though I no longer live there. As such, I am given to love the New York Giants, Mets, Yankees, Jets, and yes, Knicks.
So, let us talk about some of these lesser affiliations. I am a Knicks and a Jets fan and I do not like where these franchises are headed. I do not like it at all. As a result I am inclined not to be a fan of these things, but I am ‘locked in’ in a sense, because I feel like I am doing them and my city an injustice if I choose not to like them. I don’t quite fully understand why this is beyond some linkage to a childhood love that I am betraying. That is the word there–betrayal. It is as if I tell people I’m out on the Knicks and the Jets they’ll see me as a lesser and disloyal human. Yet I am out.
I feel like this tug of false loyalty that is most prevalent in sports also appears in politics. It is why people who voted for Trump in the last election dig in so hard and choose to overlook so much in order to maintain their allegiance and thus their belief in the choices they made and the properness/rightness of such choices.
Nobody wants to be wrong. Nobody wants to be a loser. When we stick with these choices that become soured we too become soured by choosing baseless loyalty over common sense. I do not need to haunt the new factory of sadness (read: Madison Square Garden) in order to feel joy when the Knicks finally turn things around. In fact, shunning them now is probably a clearer path to helping them realize that they are not doing the right thing.