Another way I like to feel connected to other people is to root for a sports team. Being a fan means sometimes giving yourself over to ecstatic celebration, other times sharing in a collective sorrow. If you do it right, you care inordinately about a game defined by arbitrary rules, played by people you’ll likely never meet. The key is doing it together.
As a fan of the Golden State Warriors, the past decade has given me plenty of sports nirvana (four rings!) but also some gutting setbacks (Durant’s Achilles tear, Klay’s ACL tear, Draymond’s nut-shot and punch, James Wiseman, etc.). I’ve shared all of these ups and downs with my brother, with my partner, and also with the writers and commenters on the many fan-blogs I follow. Whenever a big piece of Warriors news comes out, I’m immediately curious how other people reacted, what they thought, how they felt.
Two weeks ago, our second superstar, Jimmy Butler, (for whom I was ecstatic that the Warriors traded) tore his ACL. This has mostly sunk our chances to make the playoffs, let alone win a championship, this season. And with Greatest Warrior of All Time Steph Curry now 37 years old, it may mean the end of what has been a glorious run.
To process this, I of course turned to my two favorite blogs: Golden State of Mind and Dub Nation HQ. There was plenty of openhearted, thoughtful writing in both the blog posts and the comments. I especially appreciated this meditation by a guest blogger named Riley Gaucher. Gaucher writes openly about their own tendency to be a fair-weather fan, riveted when the team is winning and tuning out when they suck. (Honestly, same.) This leads them to some deep places:
Mortality. For me, watching athletes get injured always makes me confront my mortality. If this whimsical escapism with wholly artificial meaning can be threatened by reality, what does that say about my real-world life? And what is the point of giving so much of my time and energy and hope to something that hurts so bad and now seems so hopeless? Without any realistic chance to compete, how do I keep the same passion for this team and sport? Will I be able to defeat my fair-weather tendencies or will I let the Warriors be a smaller part of my life now?
A week after Butler’s injury, the Warriors’ plans were again thrown in disarray—but this time it was because of our increasingly fascist moment. They were scheduled to play an away game against the Minnesota Timberwolves the same day that federal agents murdered Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. The league ended up postponing the game by a day.
This was a small disruption, in the scheme of things. But not knowing what else to do, I checked the sports blogs. And I found that the post about the postponement was offering a vital space for the site’s regular commenters to share their grief and fear.
One comment in particular struck me as one of the smartest, and scariest, warnings I’ve seen about the wave of authoritarianism that’s currently breaking against our political system and communities and neighbors’ bodies. It came from the commenter ScottWarrior, whose comments I’m very familiar with. ScottWarrior posts on Golden State of Mind after almost every game. He’s opinionated, informed, and verbose. He often engages in back-and-forths with other commenters, engaging in spirited conversations about which players deserve more or less playing time, coaching decisions, moments that swung the game, etc. I always appreciate reading what he has to say. So I was interested to know what he would say here.
The whole comment is worth reading. It offers the perspective of an emigré from an authoritarian state—Belarus—discussing how that regime operates and answering the question “How does it work so that the people of Belarus can’t get rid of him for so long?” The part that most interested me was about how the security services work:
At 18, the male half ends up going to the army instead. All male population has a compulsory 2 year army service. What do they do after that? The options are going back home, stay in the army in some capacity or get a job with police. Police and army are the top priorities by the dictator. He builds free accommodation for them in the cities (get a job - get a flat in the capital), pays top salaries, have their retirement age at 45 y.o., etc. No special skills is needed and any village boy can have an above average life in a city. But the most important thing is that no matter what the policemen do, the dictator never throws them under the bus. They kill opposition leaders on his behalf, kill protesters on streets or torture thousands of them in prisons, but they know one thing for sure - as long as he is in power, they won’t be ever brought to justice (the court is under his control too, obviously). Per capita, we have 10 times more police than the neighbouring Poland. Dictatorship always needs armed protection by loyal forces.
Protests have no chance because it is always unarmed people, a lot of them, against armed police and sometimes army. For the protest to have a chance, one needs at least a small part of armed people, police or army, to change sides or at least refuse shooting people, but it doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen because the police is part of the regime. You overthrow the regime and 90% of them would lose their jobs. They know it and they also know that they don’t know how to do anything else to get another job. For some, mostly the top officers, the situation is even worse as they would get to prison for what they have previously done as part of the system.
This is bleak stuff, and I feel real sorrow especially for the people of Belarus. It also feels crazy to find some of the more coherent political analysis going down in the comments of a basketball fan blog. But then why would that be so crazy? Community is where you find it, and we can find our best comrades in our regular haunts.
