On the Exhilarating Irrationality of Being a Fan

If you are a Blazer fan do you congratulate the Los Angeles L*kers on their most recent championship?  Only if you’re at a party or a family get-together and you run into a nice guy who’s a L*ker fan and you want to be invited back.  Or the guy who’s doing your prostate exam confesses to L*ker-liking mid-procedure.  Or it’s the parent of the love of your life.  At other times, it’s probably not a moral failing to congratulate a L*ker fan.  But the whole point of being a fan is arbitrary commitment to a specific team.  And you can do this precisely because sports’ competitions are not matters of life and death.  You are a conscientious fan because you are aware—as, say, a nationalists is not—that your choice of teams IS a choice, that you are choosing to indulge yourself, to bring meaning to leisure through purely subjective, somewhat capricious fealty to one group against others.  In making them your team, you make them like family.  And just as you cannot be entirely objective about your family, you cannot be, you should not be, entirely objective about your Blazers. 

To adopt the Blazers is to adopt their story, a story that predates any of the careers of the present players or management.  It is to enter into the mythos of the team.  Central to that myth is the place of the L*kers.  They represent Tinsel Town, the Megalopolis of freeways, relentless sun and publicity, celebrity and superficial dreams.  They are from a city that is, in the myth, the very antithesis of Portland: genuine, rainy, intimate, overlooked, condescended to.  The L*kers span the basketball world with a sense of entitlement, matched only by the Yankees in baseball and Norte Dame in football and rightfully deserving of our ire for that reason alone.  But they are worse than that.  Their outsized egos have often been matched by outsized talents.  And their talents have more often than not barred the path of our team—the good, hometown Blazers—from Conference Championships and greater NBA Glory.  It is the age-old tale of the big and powerful surpassing, again and again and again, the smaller town guys. 

Congratulating the L*kers on their victory is a gracious thing to do.  Were I an Orlando player, I would do so.  But I am not.  I am a Portland Trailblazer Fan since creation.  Los Angeles and Kobe do not need my congratulations.  And, in my irrational devotion to my own team, I feel no need to do so.  I relish instead the prospect of soon witnessing my beloved Blazers delivering them bitter defeat at the end of the season.  Again and again and again.

And that’s the truth.