What it Means to Be a Fan

Team Spirit, it’s what defines sports as we know them. It’s what allows teams to pay guys hundreds of millions of dollars to play games for a living. It’s hard to explain to somebody completely foreign to the concept but that doesn’t make it any less real.

We buy Yankees hats, Heat jerseys, spend years on a waiting list for Packers tickets and for what? To feel like we’re part of something.  But in the end we’re not the ones on the field pouring out our blood and sweat for our teammates. We’re not an owner whose coffers swell or bleed, not Mark Cuban meeting with his billionaire superclub to compare the franchises they own like us saps discuss our fantasy teams.  Often that player we’re cheering for one year we’ll be booing the next and our beloved coach could be on the opposing sideline trying to beat us. So why do we invest so much emotion, so much angst, so much time and money and energy for something that, in the direct sense of cause and effect, has nothing to do with us? Even more, in something as abstract and changing as a “team”?

It’s because in cheering for that team we’re part of something. It aligns us with other people in the communal support of a given cause. The argument can be made that our cheers on the sideline motivates our team to win and that our purchases of merchandise funds the team, essentially giving us all a little bit of unofficial ownership,  if only ownership is defined by the person who pays somebody else’s paycheck (and of course there’s the lucky bastards from Green Bay who actually do own their team). And maybe all our game rituals, all our cheering together from all over the country, in some cases all over the globe, collects in some ethereal pool of spirit that taps into the great magnet and sends the game in the direction of the team with the most passionate fans. Why not?

I think that finally for many people, life is something absent of passion.  We punch a clock every day at the same place, same time. We see the same people, walk the same walks, drive the same drive every day, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades. The standard American life is built on uniformity, 9-5 (now it’s more like 9-7) go home, watch a little TV, go to bed, wake up, go through our morning rituals, so on. Work 50 weeks so you can spend 2 weeks relaxing on a beach. HST’s ”Security” calls this a rut and it is. It’s an old and accepted concept that the work-a-day American life is a soul-sucking, passionless drive to the middle. Get a reliable job, get a pleasant wife, house in the suburbs, 2.5 kids, his and hers cars in the driveway, watch TV, go to movies, go on vacation, grow old, send kids to college, retire in Florida, die in peace.

But for fans – in my case, for a Ravens fan – one day a week I can feel completely irrational and therefore beautiful passion. I can scream my lungs out as physical specimens battle on a field thousands of miles away and know that my dad in Baltimore and my brother in Manhattan are watching the same thing, cheering for the same great plays and cursing for the same rotten fuck-ups. I feel solidarity with them in that way, a connection with family and friends scattered across the country, a shared cosmic passion and that passion is enough to carry me through the next few days of drudgery.

I went to a L.A. Ravens bar, The Parlor, this Sunday for Baltimore’s victory over the Bengals, a game of beautiful highs and disgusting lows, of a defense rallying to make up for the gaping hole that was the injured Ray Lewis. It was good to feel passion, to see the team spirit embodied by the Cali Ravens group, the West Wing, to feel, for a few brief, beautiful hours transmuted to the hometown which, if not part of my future, was certainly the whole of my past.

And it was fun. Nice big leather sofas. Ample room, lots of tables. Respectable drinking, rowdiness, we even booed a Steelers fan out of the bar. But nothing compares to Sidebar in NYC, an intoxicating little den overflowing with a mob of Ravens die-hards, a freakshow where corvid-minded Baltimorons can let their passion fly, let it swirl into the air, bouncing on the drops of cheap beer spilling across the room like the sweat of a rampaging Suggs; explode in cheers and screams with the the passion of a dirty-bird Ray Lewis; keep cheering through the bad plays and horrible calls, the ugly picks and defensive flubs with the determination of little man Ray Rice; to dance on the bar and drink straight out of the pitcher with the legendary prowess and epic intensity of Ed Reed; 50 or 60 Baltimore ex-pats filling the Manhattan sky outside with a wild, booze-filled frenzy to contrast the steely calm of Joe Flacco.  Just look below at the rampaging celebration that followed Flacco’s phenomenal TD pass to Torrey Smith:

If it’s true that all the cheers that erupt from fans pools together into a beam of spirit that tears into the ether, creating some divine power that lifts your team or crushes the other, than nowhere outside Baltimore does this beam glow brighter than at Sidebar in Manhattan.

A couple signs of true fanhood at Sidebar:

• All hook-up talk is suspended until after the game - keep focus on the players on the field, not on playing the field
• Drink. Boot. Come back to the bar and drink even more until the game's over.
• Shots at every touchdown - and even on some big defensive plays.
• Dancing on the slippery bar, threatening self and others with bodily injury in the name of team spirit.
• Not giving up until that last second's ticked off the clock. Even then at least finishing your drink.
• Sacrificing a whole day to the rotten emotional rollercoaster and boozey self-medication that is necessary to survive as a fan in today's NFL
• Leaving covered in beer, whiskey, and water from people throwing fluids all over the place like goddamn Jackson Pollock's painting the place with beverages instead of paint cans

Any other qualities, feel free to put them in the comments section. Either way, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more-committed crowd of Ravens Fans (and, fuck it, fans in general) than the rowdy bastards who make Sidebar into the superstar it is. But if you’re in L.A., at least it’s comforting to know you can make a good dent in that cosmic energy at The Parlor.

- Ryan