sports fans! how do you choose your cheering interest?

just curious about how and why people choose to root for the teams/players that they do. my dad was a massive orioles fan, still is i guess, and i absorbed that when i was a kid and ended up following the orioles just as religiously despite never living in or near balitmore. ive always been vaguely interested in the fortunes of the mlb teams in the places i have lived (i even went to a mets game :/) but i still think of the orioles as 'my' team, always check how theyre doing when i look at the sports pages &c &c

the only other sport ive been that intense about following is tennis and there its easier i always end up rooting for the player whos style of play or personality i can identity with, that speaks to something about how i imagine myself. like fed's ruthless elegance when hes on his game just resonates with me, with an idea of stylish efficiency i really respond to

mine was pretty easy - grew up in Wisconsin, so bingo, and no matter what I don't think it'll change. I feel like whatever team you root for throughout your teens is going to always be your team.

I also root for the Royals, b/c when I was 12 I wanted to root for an AL team, but instead of picking a good one I didn't feel right unless I picked a team as hopeless as the Brewers were then!

I grew up in socal but never really clicked w/ the dodgers and the nfl teams had already left LA so I don't have any from-birth type loyalties plus I was a nerd who wasn't really into sports.

when I got older I jumped on board w/ the packers despite never having been to wisconsin cause its the best way to be a socialist football fan mostly. but despite watching a decent amount of sports I can't really form a 'true bond' w/ any major league team, at this point it's like trying to form a personal bond w/ pepsi or something. I root for certain players or narratives, I have fantasy-related-interests and most importantly I root against teams in places where I want people to be unhappy.

most importantly I root against teams in places where I want people to be unhappy

this is basically the way the NBA finals play out for me every year

soccerball answers here fwiw

itt you explain why you support club x (are "support" and "club" are the right terms? i have no idea)

Support Your Local Team (or don't, whatever)

I am from NY and the first games I ever went to were yankees games buy I have lived in Boston long enough now so that I support the red sox. That said, I am secretly not that unhappy with Yankee wins tho. Didn't get into any other sports until living here so Boston/NE for everything else.

i grew up in NJ and my dad was/is a huuuuge yankees and giants fan, so those were easy. dont think thatd change, no matter where i moved.

but hes a knicks fan and i guess im a nets fan, which probably has as much to do w/ the fairly good 00s nets as it does w/ an abiding NJ pride.

i am a devils fan but my dad doesnt like hockey.

if id grown up somewhere than NJ i mightve ended up as a fan of the local baseball/football teams despite my dad, but who knows.

oh yeah I also do the 'root for teams wherever I live atm' but that stopped happening when I moved to nyc where it's hard to do outside of the mets

My parents didn't care about sports so I had no family influence.

i grew up in oklahoma watching the cubs on wgn, mainly for harry caray, but i loved that team so much. in high school i ignored sports, partly as rebellion against my father. i went to college in boston and was kind of swept away by the local fervor for the red sox, especially among friends of mine who were, say, in hardcore bands, but still followed them very closely.

more recently i became a fan of tottenham hotspur football club. after a long period of vague interest in soccer, they won me over with their white uniforms and some of the specific players around 05/06.

i now root for, but don't really care that much about, the penguins, pirates and steelers cause my wife is from pittsburgh and i really like black and yellow uniforms.

My grandmother was a massive, massive Cubs fan and never missed a game. So much of a fan that when her and my grandfather finally were able to build their own house, the garage wall that faced the street was brick of a color that matched Wrigley's outfield wall and planted ivy over it. I spent a lot of time there over the summers, so Harry Caray was like a default babysitter. The summer I most vividly remember was the 84 season. I was eight, and they were actually good that year - Rick Sutcliffe, Bob Dernier, Ryne Sandberg (my favorite athlete when I was a kid), Gary Matthews, so many good memories. I've been a fan ever since, although I've been so despondent as to think about abandoning them time and again, but by Spring Training time I'm pulled back in.

My other teams are mostly just due to 1) where I live(d) and 2) seeing really great performances at impressionable ages - i.e. Super Bowl XX for the Bears, Jordan's magnificent run in high school, etc.

I'm also a big Manchester United fan because I had a roommate my sophmore year at college from somewhere near Manchester and he was a huge, huge fan. His girlfriend, who was at a school in Pittsburgh, had access to satellite so she would record games and mail the VHS tapes to him to watch, so I got sucked in.

i've lived in nyc for 10 years and hate all ny sports teams except the knicks, who i watched a lot when i first moved back here and was unemployed and they were really terrible, but i formed some sort of misery bond with them.

I loved Ryne Sandberg too, but I think my favorite back then was Shawon Dunston.

he was a close runner-up, for sure. i liked him a lot too.

haha, actually don zimmer was probably my favorite, i had a don zimmer tshirt.

mixture of playing style, personality and wacky indulgences like how fun their name is to say out loud and whether they come from an obscure country (both of which are why i cheer on akgul amanmuradova even though her tennis game is horribly rudimentary).

in tennis i favour creative tacticians and variety/finesse players like justine henin, but i can be wowed by a straight-up power game à la petra kvitova too. i love clean-sounding strokes that don't look effortful, like novak djokovic or vera zvonareva possess.

obv for male tennis players their looks are very important. marat safin come 2 me. (inone of your periods of decent hair only, obv.)

hate ace machine big servers, brainless ballbashers and the assorted shriekers and grunters (unless, like francesca schiavone, they compensate with their game and personality). cannot abide intolerable corporate/nationalistic/media hype, from sharapova to henman, and cheer vociferously against players who receive it. god, the way james blake was talked up by the media as a slam threat while the same media tried to pretend nikolay davydenko didn't exist! ughhh.

re: personalities - realness all the way, whether that's eg henin's anxious thoughtfulness (she never gave a shit about playing up to the media) or safin's ultra-lazy/ultra-talented combo or the assorted psychotic meltdowns of novotna, zvonareva and so on. can't stand bland mediafriendliness à la nikebot sharapova, can't stand fakey-fake st kim clijsters of niceness, can't stand serena williams' out-of-control sense of entitlement, couldn't stand sampras (less because he was dull and more because he was a huge douche).

i've never been able to figure out how people can support "teams" regardless of which individual players are in that team at any given time. what do you do if someone from a rival team joins your team? or just someone whose playing style/personality you dislike? or if someone you love watching plays for a rival team? literally makes no sense.

cognitive dissonance mostly but otoh getting really excited about people playing goofy games w/ arbitrary rules makes no sense either so it's not that big a jump

investing yourself in something that makes no sense and that you have no control over is the whole point of being a sports fan, imo

my parents don't care about sports, i'm a latecomer to sports fandom. followed basketball for a while in high school but lapsed in college, didn't really start up again with sports at all until moving to chicago in 2004, the white sox world series victory in '05 was kind of the big push. for me it's mainly geographic, i root for the chicago teams across the board and i tend to favor midwestern teams in general as part of a totally unfounded underdog favoritism.

to lex's last point, you can support individuals separately from teams and vice-versa

for a couple of years in the mid 90s channel 4 in the uk made a big push into nba (live games, a highlights show, and this brilliant lifestyle music magazine that was like manna direct from heaven back then) and so i ended up taking a liking to the seattle supersonics for a bit. payton, motherfucking shawn kemp, and detlef schrempf whose name randomly still pops into my head sometimes. i wasnt a super die hard though or anything, i liked the shaq/penny magic too. and toni kukoc!

tbh i'm not sure i ever really grasped the game in its full entirety, but the genius of the shows never talking down to you, just cool america beamed right into your home, made it intoxicating

Supporting a team is a bit like being a member of a family. Those players you dislike are like your sister's unsuitable boyfriend. You tolerate them, hope they don't fuck things up and sometimes they pleasantly surprise you. As iatee and mizzell said above, logic doesn't really come into it.

I think I follow sports as much to root against teams as root for them.

there really is more joy in watching a team lose the super bowl than watching one win

Red Sox - Green Monster, my grandfather had an autographed Dom DiMaggio ball from when they played games together during WWII, Ted Williams was a badass
Giants - my dad was from San Francisco (tho he's a Dodgers fan, since he started listening to baseball before they moved to California)
but really I don't get emotionally invested with either, I'm more apt to root for players than teams and then teams that (IMO) are playing smart - if you start bunting all over the place or putting a fast guy who can't get on base at leadoff I root against you.

Mavericks - they were absolutely awful when I was a kid, got into basketball when Finley/Nash/Dirk were getting the team competitive again

49ers - Joe Montana was my idol as a kid, but I don't really give much of a shit about the NFL now

Giants also now my favorite city to visit and the nicest ballpark I've ever been to

I think I follow sports as much to root against teams as root for them.

i root against players from a distance - like fundamentally the reason i dislike eg sharapova and roddick is that i dislike watching them play, so if they're playing someone i don't care about i won't tune in but i'll DEFINITELY be given life if they lose.

also, that thing of giving and withdrawing support based on wider ramifications? like "if x wins, that means an easier path to the final for y" or "if y is to reach a career high ranking, x needs to lose". that kind of thing. i do that all the time.

often though i'll want a certain player to win in my head, but if i end up actually watching the match all those rational reasons go out of the window.

ha my family didn't care at all about sports, didn't grow up playing anything, so all of them are still mostly a mystery to me tbh. i've thought about starting a 'tell me about sports' thread at times, but that seems a little too much.

like, that lex post is great, i wouldn't even know how to begin gathering enough knowledge about a given sport to put out that kind of characterological analysis.

another thing is that i'm first and foremost a tennis fan rather than a player fan - i'll cheer vociferously for my favs but i don't have it in me to stan for them relentlessly. so one of the easiest ways to get on my shit list is to act like the sport is beneath you, à la serena williams. (conversely venus williams has really won me over to her personality, if not her game, with her above-and-beyond commitment to furthering women's tennis in recent years.)

this is a really complex question ime. there's the obvious i'm from buffalo, i root for the bills and the added allure that they're tragic, and that when i was a kid they lost the superbowl 4 times in a row, all of which fits my inclination to root for sad losers. all the other nfl teams, though, i have an orientation toward or against. in a lot of cases i can't remember where it came from, and then later it might change because the initial antipathy got overlaid with something else, like j0rdan s existing and making me like the miami dolphins, or peyton manning going to play for the denver fucking broncos jesus christ what am i going to do?

but anyway this whole arena of irrational identification is pretty much my favorite thing about sports.

i like to root for rust-belty teams because buffalo, but that initial inclination might be counteracted by a rapist quarterback.

also yeah, the whole dad thing. my dad and i used to watch bills games together. he doesn't have any sons, so.

i've never been able to figure out how people can support "teams" regardless of which individual players are in that team at any given time. what do you do if someone from a rival team joins your team? or just someone whose playing style/personality you dislike? or if someone you love watching plays for a rival team? literally makes no sense.

― liberté, égalité, beyoncé (lex pretend), Wednesday, April 18, 2012 1:15 PM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in this instance you absorb the player you dislike into your intense identification with the team. this is one of the best things, like when t.o. came to play for the bills and now i love him forever.

and someone you love going off to play for another team leads to the other awesome thing, like that viking fan who would show up at all the pats games because of randy moss.

my loyalties are strictly geographic so i'm interested in ppl who use other criteria

i didn't even grow up in an area with big pro sports so the 'geographic' thing always seemed really stretched and arbitrary to me anyway. some people were cubs fans because of the iowa cubs. or ppl just picked another midwest city for some reason or other.

or they were cowboys fans.

one of the best things about individual sports for me is that you're pretty free of nationalistic or local bs reasons for supporting teams. people who get patriotic about tennis players are just o_0

in that case, i think if i watched enough of a sport i'd start to develop irrational identifications based on, like players' faces or things like that. keep meaning to do this with the nba.

xp yeah my way is definitely scary and fascist at a certain level.

but that's team sports

i think being a cowboys fan is more fascist, this has to be some element truth

elemental

like "if x wins, that means an easier path to the final for y" or "if y is to reach a career high ranking, x needs to lose".

This gets even more fun in sports like soccer where you can wish for a head-to-head draw between two teams you loathe and don't want to do well.

I was so young when I determined my sports allegiances, I can't remember the exact reasoning. College basketball I chose Duke at a very young age, because you go to Kindergarten in NC and you have to be ready to talk about that shit and who your team is. I think I picked Duke to be purely contrary since my county was full of Carolina fans. I also prefer the darker shade of blue.

A priori I don't mind Cowboys fans from Dallas but anybody else fills me with insuperable disgust since the age of about 10.

you're pretty free of nationalistic or local bs reasons for

well, to be fair, i think for a lot of people they root for their local team not out of some weird sense of regional patriotism, but because they are in said team's market and get to see tons of media coverage. its really not that hard to understand.

I tend to root for MN teams because I grew up there. I always hated MA/New England teams growing up so I never root for them. I have irrational hatred for the Dallas Stars because they used to be the MN North Stars and I felt their move was a betrayal and I have irrational love for the Los Angeles Lakers because, when I was young, my dad told me they used to be the MN Lakers.

I rooted against the Knicks for years and years and years because I hated Patrick Ewing as a college player.

I like rooting for American tennis players but have no real problem shifting allegiance to others whose story/play catch my fancy (TEAM RADWANSKA/TEAM CIBULKOVA/TEAM SCHIAVONE/TEAM FERRER)

you develop a weird sense of regional patriotism in the process of rooting for the team you have most access to, surely? also, it's not that weird, is it?

yeah i don't have cable or mlb.tv so i'm pretty much limited to watching cubs or white sox games on tv. tbf this isn't an issue with u.s. football and i still root for the bears.

the northstars --> stars move is the only one i can think of where the name worked out on both ends

TEAM RADWANSKA 4EVER

esp when driving Sharapova nuts by beating her in finals

haha radwanska is the petulant best

I refuse to root for American distance runners.

the northstars --> stars move is the only one i can think of where the name worked out on both ends

― goole, Wednesday, April 18, 2012 2:28 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but it's still the worst move ever. unthinkable to take a hockey team away from MN and move it to TX (i know it's similar to most moves in the NHL, but it still bums me out). And the North Stars name/logo was rad.

THERE ARE NO LAKES IN LOS ANGELES COME ON

silver lake

I watch a lot of pro sports but I like not having a cheering interest anymore (used to be a diehard Cubs fan, then added Braves fandom when I moved to Atlanta; then the baseball strike in 1994 killed my fandom for both permanently). I root-ish for pro teams where I live but I don't care much & tbh it makes watching games more fun for me if nothing's riding emotionally on what happens. I just want to see good games.

In college sports I root for the universities I've attended / worked for.

i root for the imminent arrest of everyone involved in a college sport

even the MIT Engineers?

but anyway this whole arena of irrational identification is pretty much my favorite thing about sports.

i root for the imminent arrest of everyone involved in a college sport

My hatred for American college sports culture is beyond irrational and I don't even bother mentioning it during March or football season 'cause so many of my friends would probably disown me.

i grew up in pittsburgh, so. issues do arise when one's football team has a rapey quarterback or one's baseball team is terrible for 20 years or one's hockey team completely loses it's shit like it did on sunday.

why i hate certain teams is probably more interesting. hate all dc teams after living there, hate all nyc teams (weirdly not the giants, tho, and the mets are too hapless to hate) because that's what one does. hate philly teams because of penn rivalry/my aunt and uncle are fans. texas teams, because texas and that my real father lives there.

i never hated the browns, tho.

other things being equal, i tend to root for the hockey team that is furthest north and in general teams that are not from flashy coastal cities (miami, la, whatever).

^ it's cool, even Clevelanders hate the Browns now