I can still remember how wrecked and haunted I was when the Green Bay Packers blew a seemingly insurmountable lead to the Seattle Seahawks in the AFC Championship Game in 2015. I’m not even a Packers fan, but I detested the Seahawks of that era—the Legion of Boom—and didn’t want them to go back to the Super Bowl. Through the rest of the day and probably the rest of that week, I kept playing out scenarios in my head that would have led to a Packers win. That’s how much the NFL in general, and not just your own team, can mean to a fan of the sport. That’s how much you can get swept up in the primal, tribal, social emotion that football calls up.
I’m guessing my fellow tennis fans know all about reliving matches for days, and making up scenarios in your mind where your favorite player wins instead of loses. I’ve done it myself for years. Our sport has its moments of maximum tension, too—most obviously the Grand Slam finals. But that emotion is expressed differently. Tennis is part sport, part theater; you’re supposed to be quiet and let the players perform, the way we let actors and dancers perform in silence. In football, it’s perfectly normal for a crowd to try to make so much noise that the opposing offense can’t hear what its quarterback is screaming at them at the line of scrimmage.
Ed, I was rooting for your Bills against the Chiefs last Sunday. Like a lot of people, I’m over the Chiefs and their reign, the same way I once was with the New England Patriots’. But as an Eagles fan, there was a tiny part of me that wasn’t upset that the Chiefs won. It might sound perverse, but I like the fact that the Eagles will be slight underdogs in the Super Bowl, which might not have been the case if they’d played the Bills. It will be easier to take a loss to the Chiefs than it would have been to take a loss to the Bills.
Only a true fan, or a fan of a tough-luck team like the Bills or Eagles, can understand that type of self-protective “logic.”
How do you compare your experiences as a tennis fan and a football fan, Ed?—Steve
