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Who Is a Fan?
Do you know what a âfanâ is? A crank. A fiend. An enthusiast.
CINCINNATI TIMES-STAR, April 18, 1888 (quoted in Shulman 1996)
In 8th grade, this boy Alex said he was going to the Mets game that nightâI was too. I said I was a huge Mets fan and was so excited. He said (and I quote), âI hate it when girls say they are fans of a team. They donât know anything about it.â I said, âOf course, I know about the Mets.â He told me to prove it and asked me to name three players on the teamâI named the entire 40-man roster.â
JILLIAN, Mets fan (quoted in Markovits and Albertson 2012, 206)
[The sports purist]âs support for the team that he judges to be most excellent is so contingent and tenuous that he barely qualifies as a fan at all.
NICHOLAS DIXON (2001, 153)
The term âfanâ is shot through with values. Although this might come as a surprise to people who are not particularly interested in sports, or to sports fans who have not spent much time reflecting philosophically on their fandom, the conceptâs value-laden nature is apparent as soon as we attempt to answer this chapterâs question, âWho is a fan?â The mere act of defining our terms, crucial in any philosophical analysis, quickly requires us to stake out the limits of fandomâto make calls on who is in and who is outside of the âfanâ communityâwhich, as most sports fans will tell you, is a necessarily controversial bit of business. Proving that someone is or is not a fan often involves parsing the smallest details of a spectatorâs knowledge, behavior, or feeling, analyzing their claim to fandom with the rigor of a tax attorney investigating whether a particular lunch truly satisfies the criteria for a business-expense deduction. Making matters more complicated is the fact that standards for the application of the term âfanâ are as unclear as they are frequently invoked. Claims about who counts as a âreal fanâ are common among fan groups, but those claims are far from univocal in their content. Fans tend to be particularly interested in, as reception theorist Daniel Cavicchi puts it, âdistinguish[ing] themselves from ânonfanâ audience membersâ (2014, 56), an end that is accomplished through a wide variety of practicesâincluding speech, dress, collections, and travel, just to name a few. In its most exacting forms, fandom prescribes a thickly normative testing regimen: repeated demands by oneâs peers for proof that one is a âreal fan,â distinct from a poseur, or worse, a mere rider on the âbandwagon.â Implicit in the âfanâ concept, then, is a set of expectations about how one ought to behave as a sporting enthusiast.
The normative quality of the âfanâ concept thus goes beyond the sort of normativity that is implicit in any philosophical definition. It is undoubtedly true that, as poststructuralist thinkers such as Judith Butler (1990) have pointed out, conceptual clarification always requires the assertion of some normâas soon as I specify the referent of the term âwoman,â for example, I involve myself in claims about what one âmustâ be in order to count as a woman and the exclusion of some persons from that category. Likewise, defining even less contested terms always requires some degree of world-chopping: to define a circle is to specify the ideal type of that shape and simultaneously to say that it is not a square, triangle, etc. But âfanâ is normatively loaded not only by virtue of the nature of linguistic distinctions or the inherently limiting character of definitions; its specific content is normative. âFanâ denotes a kind of spectator who is marked out from othersâwhose status exceeds, somehow, that of a mere audience member, whether for good or ill. It is a concept with a history, an âextraordinary form of audiencingâ (Cavicchi 2014, 52) whose very name makes explicit its excesses; the term itself exists to mark the advent of a newâand, at least at its inception, aberrantâform of interaction with sport. As we will see, though, the implicit normative claim involved in calling someone a âfanâ shifts over time, evolving from derision to legitimation; the application of the term almost always relies on a set of assumptions about respectable spectator engagement.
âFanâ is, in other words, a concept that is not value-neutral. Whereas âcircleâ carries norms for its application that make no prescriptions beyond how the word should be used, âfanâ not only carries norms for its application but also makes implicit claims about standards of behavior. Those claims can be more or less prescriptive, depending on the extent to which one understands ânormâ to indicate, on the one hand, âthat which is typicalâ or, on the other, âthat to which one ought to conform.â As feminists have pointed out, however, the lines between the two senses of the word ânormâ tend to be blurred in the case of human behavior, as âthe typicalâ frequently becomes imbued with prescriptive force. For evidence of this claim, we need only reflect on the previously widespread practice of forcing all children to be right-handed because most are, the enforcement of heterosexuality on the grounds that it is ânatural,â or the subjection of perfectly healthy intersex children to genital surgeries simply because their genitals do not resemble those of âtypicalâ boys or girls. Because the suspicion of abnormality is such a powerful tool of socialization, one might have expected that sports fandom would remain the domain of social outcasts and the generally weird, given its initial association with abnormally obsessed baseball enthusiasts. Yet as âfansâ grow their numbers and sports fandom becomes more widespread, the term gains its own prescriptive force, whose implicit claims about how sporting enthusiasts ought to behave are evident in the epigraphs to this chapter.
With such normativity built into the concept, it is perhaps unsurprising that virtually all of the literature in the philosophy of sport dealing explicitly with fans is concerned with fan ethicsâwith what makes one a good fan, whether it is ethical to support one team over another, and so on. The latter questionâwhether it is more virtuous to be a âpartisanâ fan or, on the other hand, a âpuristâ who values athletic excellence over arbitrary team loyaltyâhas, in fact, consumed most of the existing philosophical discussion of sports fans. While the interest in the ethics of fan loyalty is a reasonable one, it is curious that philosophers have for the most part undertaken answers to this question without devoting much attention to the notion of fandom as suchâwithout, that is, understanding what makes fans fans, what they do, and why they do it. My interest here is in investigating these questions by philosophically analyzing the meaning of sports fandom, both for the sake of philosophical clarity and for the sake of showing the gravity of the ethical questions that sports fandom ought to raise. Indeed, my view is that when we attend to the details, meanings, and effects of sports fandom in the contemporary United States, we will find that its normative effectsâthat is, the myriad ways in which sports fandom reinforces particular judgments of value, standards of behavior, and so onâfar exceed worries about whether fans should be partisans or purists. As I will argue in later chapters, these normative effects move well beyond the world of sports.
For now, though, I am concerned with defining my terms, and with clarifying the object (and limitations) of my investigation. Contrary to a particularly popular social scientific taxonomy of sports fans (Giulianotti 2002), I will not claim that fansâ practices or emotional lives must occur along specific lines or according to particular patterns; neither will I take a stand on whether fans must be partisans or purists. Sports fandom is discernible in a wide range of persons, activities, and practices and can be characterized by affective states ranging from religious devotion to jingoistic pride or a simple desire for positive feelings. My argument will proceed in two parts: historical and contemporary. First, I will offer an analysis of the history of the term âfan,â tracing its emergence and development in relation to sport in the late nineteenth-century United States. Second, I will, through consideration of the contemporary theoretical discussion of sports fans and partisanship, argue for a two-pronged, broad definition of âsports fan,â which is characterized by a combination of care (that is, emotional investment) and practice (that is, some form of active engagement with the sport one watches). In my definition of âfans,â not even âpuristâ fans are emotionally unattached, for we can see the same patterns of affective investment and semiritualized practice even in cases of fans who lack team loyalties. So, although philosophers might generally be inclined to favor âpuristâ sports fandom on the grounds that it is less irrational, we should note that no form of sports fandom escapes passionate involvement. Moreover, all forms of sports fandom involve some degree of repetitive practice that is worth further examination; these practices will be addressed more thoroughly later in the book. Although sports fandom is a normatively loaded concept, then, I argue in what follows for an understanding of the term that is not thickly normative or overly restrictive in its application. I employ a broader meaning of the term in order to carefully observe both its evolution and its wide-ranging contemporary social effects.
From Fanatics to Fans
âFanâ is so common in contemporary lifeâboth as a term and a cultural phenomenonâthat it is easy to forget that it has comparatively recent origins. Although it is difficult to mark the precise moment in which sporting enthusiasts became sports âfans,â scholars generally agree that the term came into popular usage in the late nineteenth century, specifically with reference to baseball fans. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), along with a few other dictionaries of etymology (Barnhart 2002; Hendrickson 1987), cites an 1889 issue of the Kansas City Times and Star as the first print usage of the word when used to refer to âa keen and regular spectator of a (professional) sport,â noting that it is an abbreviation of the word âfanaticâ (OED Online 2015a). The 1889 article cited by the OED, chronicling the reaction to the ouster of Kansas City Cowboys manager Dave Rowe reads as follows: âKansas City base ball fans are glad theyâre through with Dave Rowe as a ball club manager.â Rowe had not lasted long in Kansas City, completing only two seasons at the helm, winning only 30 percent of his games in each.1 The âfanâ reaction described in the Times and Star article is a familiar one: relief that team change is coming and hope for the future.
Yet the claim that this is the first recorded usage of âfansâ to refer to sports enthusiasts rings false. The âfansâ referenced here are devotees of the Cowboys, but they hardly seem âfanatical.â Given the vociferousness with which baseball enthusiasts supported their teams in years prior to this referenceâspectators at an 1883 game in Cincinnati, for example, became so furious with an umpire that the game was stopped and police called in to curtail the ârowdies [who did] not agree with all of the umpireâs decisionsâ (Cincinnati Commercial Gazette 1883)âit is surprising that the paper would refer to the comparatively tame reaction of relief at the departure of a losing manager as an expression of fanaticism. Moreover, it is worth considering the quickness of the sentence above: the word âfansâ does not appear in quotation marks, nor does the article offer any explanation of what it means by the supposedly novel term. It appears, in other words, that the author of the 1889 article expects his audience to know the term already and does not take himself to be abbreviating âfanatics.â It appears, instead, that the author is using a term already in circulation to refer to the followers of a particular sports team.
In fact, the OED misses several earlier usages of âfanâ in American newspapers and periodicals. At least twice in 1887, articles appear in sporting publications that demonstrate the beginnings of a move to use âfansâ to describe baseball enthusiastsâas opposed to âcranks,â the term that had previously been most popular. In their Comments on Etymology article, Popik and Cohen note that in June of 1887, the following lines appeared in an article in The Sporting News: âWhat a pleasure Billy must derive when talking to those cranks and fans who continually harped upon his managerial qualitiesâ (1996, 3). Similarly, David Shulman cites a more thoroughly explained usage in the November 1887 issue of Sporting Life, which offers an account of the origins of the term:
âIt was Ted who gave the nick-name of âfansâ to baseball cranks. You never hear a man called a âfiendâ out in the Western League cities. âFanâ is the word that is invariably used. It is a quick way of saying âfanatic,ââ explained Tom Sullivan. (âMemories of Ted Sullivan,â Sporting Life, November 23, 1887, quoted in Shulman 1996, 328)
It is unclear, however, that âfanâ was widely in usage beyond the Midwest. As Shulman notes, the 1888 book on baseball terminology, The Krank, His Language and What It Means, âdid not include fan,â (329) and all of the 1888 newspaper usages of âfanâ appear to be confined to Kansas City, St. Louis, and Cincinnati.
This geographical confinement is consistent with the myth of the origin of âfan,â circulated in various forms by former manager of the St. Louis Browns Ted Sullivan. In three different versions of the same story (told in 1896, 1898, and 1903) Sullivan claimed to have coined the term âfanâ in 1883 to refer to those âcranksâ who had the particularly annoying habit of behaving as though they knew more than he did and offering unsolicited advice on the management of the team (Popik and Cohen 1996, 5â6; Shulman 1996, 330). Sullivanâs 1898 telling of the origin myth is particularly striking:
The word or term âfanâ has passed into baseball literature and is as current in baseball phraseology as the purest word within the pages of Webster or Johnston. The technical definition of the word fan is âa person that is heavily burdened with baseball knowledge, or so permeated is he with it that it oozes out of the crevices of his anatomy as does steam out of the pipes of a boiler.â That is one definition, and that definition was prompted by and applied to the person that was responsible for the origin of the term.
. . . A man came into my place one day and in the presence of three or four of the Browns commenced to ply me with questions about baseball in general. He knew every player in the country with a record of 90 in the shade to 100 in the sun. He gave his opinion on all matters pertaining to ball. . . . He kept up this onslaught on me until someone came to my assistance and called him outside.
I turned to some of my players and said: âWhat name could you apply to such a fiend as that?â
Charley Comiskey replied: âHe is a fanatic.â I responded: âI will abbreviate that word and call him a âfan.ââ So when he was ever seen around headquarters, the boys would say, âthe fanâ was around again. (quoted in Popik and Cohen 1996, 6; emphasis mine)
By 1898, Sullivanâs description of the fan is extraordinarily vivid and literary; the image he draws is one of a man possessed of encyclopedic knowledge, who is obsessive and uncontrollable. The enthusiasm of the fan is palpable and perhaps a bit dangerous, like steam from the leaky pipes of a boiler, portending explosion. Notably, Sullivanâs 1896 telling of the origin myth is rather different, not only in terms of the personages involvedâhis interlocutor this time is Browns owner Chris Von der Ahe, not Charlie Comiskeyâbut also in terms of his description of the âfanâ behavior: âChris had a board of directors made up of cranks who had baseball on the brain, and they were always interfering with me and telling Chris how the team ought to be run. I told Chris that I didnât propose to be advised by a lot of fanatics . . . fans for shortâ (5â6). In this telling of the story, fans still exhibit a propensity for know-it-all-ness, but they are less unpredictableâmeddling board members, rather than feverishly obsessive âfiends.â In each case, however, what is striking is that âfanâ is used at least somewhat derisively, the shortened form of the word lending an air of lighthearted joking to the underlying claim of disturbingly excessive involvement.
The ambivalence here expressedâanxious amusement at fansâ investment in a gameâwas articulated even before the advent of the word âfan.â The 1876 song âThe Base Ball Feverâ makes use of similarly lighthearted lyrics that describe baseball enthusiastsâ love of the game as a form of contagious disease. The songâs lyrics prefigure Sullivanâs image of the obsessive âfanâ: a person of near-frenzied enthusiasm for the game, whose inability to contain their irrational need to see matches interferes with everyday life. The irrationality of crazed fans reaches its climax in the final lines of the song, in which the narrator offers to âbet [his] Beaverâ that his skills are as great as any of the ballplayers he watches on the field, his judgment having presumably been clouded by âthe feverâ (Angelo 1876). The puns, rhyme scheme, and piano melody lighten the mood, but the coupling of these comedic elements with a vaguely disturbing image of its narrator as feverishly delusional suggests a decided ambivalence toward this new class of sports enthusiasts, who are, for better or worse, outside the norm of previously acceptable spectatorship.
By 1888, the concern about this form of spectatorship begins to die down slightly, at least as regards typical âfans.â There are still reports of fans behaving irrationally, but the indications of uncontrollable passion are somewhat less prevalent. Several innocuous uses of âfansâ appeared that year: âSome Boston base ball fans gave Kelly a banquet the other night at Clarkâs hotelâ (Kansas City Star 1888a); and â[The Athletics] play the neatest game in the association, and many âfansâ name them as sure pennant winnersâ (Kansas City Star 1888b). Yet, usage of âfanâ is not consistent in this period. The Sporting News still used âfanâ derisively as late as 1889, and the San Francisco Evening Bulletin that year observed that fans âabuse the umpire even when he is in the rightâ (Dickson 2011, 304). Obnoxious and even threatening behavior toward umpires was well documented as a problem during the 1880s, which was eventually remedied through the institutionalization of police presence during games. Whether âfanâ was truly an abbreviation for âfanaticââor, alternatively, a colorful way of suggesting that a particular spectator is a âwindbagâ (Morris 2003)âthe term itself, at least in the early years of its usage, suggested an abnormal, deviant (or worse) mode of sporting engagement.
Yet by the late 1890s, we find Ted Sullivan eager to publicly claim credit for coining the term in publications read by fans, and by the early twentieth century, its meaning is broad enough that it is sometimes used as a form of self-identification. By the twenty-first century, of course, the term is extremely widely used as a self-identifier, with fully 57 percent of adult Americans claiming to be football fans (Quinn 2009, 5). The transition in the usage of âfanâ from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth is importantânot because learning what âfanâ originally meant will clarify the question of who âreal fansâ are today, but because attention to the implicit normative claims about audience behavior through the history of spectator sport highlights the extent to which the norms of sports fandom are contingent and changeable. More importantly, it also illustrates a significant shift in individualsâ relations to spectator sport: fanatical concern with the outcome of games played by others comes to be associated not with mental illness or deviant behavior but with typical sporting enthusiasts. Who are we, such that we could become, or desire identification as, âfansâ?
Fandom, Care, and Action
Contemporary theoretical literature on fandom is almost always concerned with fans of teams, rat...