New Yorker sportswriter John Tunis made a compelling argument in his 1928 book $port$: Heroics and Hysterics that America’s sporting institutions were powered by something he called The Great Sports Myth. As Tunis conceives the myth, we see superstar athletes, the Babe Ruths and Jack Dempseys of the sports world, as “cleansed (and so sanctified) in the great white heat of competition,” and that young Americans, through participation in organized sport, can achieve the same. This myth is responsible for the uniquely American system of interscholastic sports and has given sports an outsized importance all across the nation, from the publicly subsidized stadia for professional teams in the cities to the rabid enthusiasm for high school football in America’s rural areas.
This myth was easy enough to maintain when most of the professional sporting world’s activities took place behind the curtain, available to the general public largely through radio or newspaper accounts. However, as the sports industry grew, boosted by the growth of televised sports in the 1960s, the contradictions of the Great Sports Myth were laid bare. The crucible of organized sports spits out millions of nobodies for every Ruth it creates. The sportsman experience for the vast majority of American youth isn’t the continued pursuit of athletic improvement, but rather learning that dreams of a life participating in sports won’t be realized, and that most will be left with little but the reminiscing over the glory days.
The Great Sports Myth isn’t dead by any means – the constant fervor over athletics in America proves it still holds power. But the individual’s place within the myth has changed. The sportsman, obsolete in a late-20th century sports world reserved for professionals and champions, has been replaced with the sports fan. As the prospect of Americans identifying with the professional athlete became untenable as they became increasingly rich and internationally famous, the identity of the “sports fan” became necessary to maintain the relationship between sports organizations and their spectators – and particularly the middle-to-upper class white male spectators whose dollars have historically funded the American sports industry.
While fanatics of individual sports have existed as long have, the concept of the “sports fan” – somebody with a broad interest in professional and high-level amateur athletic competitions – didn’t exist in Tunis’s time. The phrase “sports fan” almost never appears in the American lexicon prior to 1930; by 1960, its use becomes far more common and has only become more widespread as the years have passed.
Dr. Harry Edwards, a UCLA sociologist, published a detailed study of the fan’s place in sports in his 1973 work Sociology of Sport. Edwards discusses the very early socialization of children into the sports institution – from gifts of branded sports toys as a kid to watching televised sports with parents or other family members to the participation in youth sports. Critically, Edwards notes, “The overwhelming majority of the children so socialized, however, become fans rather than athletes.”
The sports fan still grows up imbued with they typical lessons of athletic participation – the values of character, discipline, teamwork, and so on. Those values, previously reinforced by a continued lifetime of participation in sports, are now reinforced through fan participation in organized sports. As Edwards writes, “By involvement in sports, then, the athlete is ostensibly infused with values necessary to function successfully in society, while in the case of the fan, values already internalized are reaffirmed and sustained.”
But this doesn’t explain completely why the sports fan identity has so successfully caught on. Gallup first started asking if Americans consider themselves sports fans in 2000, and since then, the percentage of Americans responding in the affirmative has hovered between 56% and 66% – a clear majority. For a better window into what has made the sports fan identity so appealing, it’s worth looking into what was happening in American workplaces in the 1950s and 1960s, just as televised sport was taking off and the sports fan identity was forming.
The authors of the 1956 book The American Business Creed, a sociological examination of the ideology of American businessmen, find two distinct strands of business thinking in the country. The first is called the “classical” creed, seen in the mythical American entrepreneur who has worked his way up from the bottom to own his own business, centered around “the model of a decentralized, private, competitive capitalism.” And then there is the managerial creed, which shifts emphasis away from the “invisible hand” and towards professional managers “who consciously direct economic forces for the common good.”
As the large corporations grew in prevalence throughout the 1900s, it became clear the structure of these firms stifle the individualistic entrepreneurial spirit. The worker becomes a cog in the machine, his decisions made for him by management. Even the manager finds himself facing certain strains, as performance standards are often unclear and promotion can rest on the luck of the draw. The result is a work environment in which no level of effort can truly guarantee success.
It’s a frustrating environment for anybody. It’s particularly grating for those who grew up steeped in the meritocratic values espoused by business leaders and coaches alike. Faced with this world on a daily basis, sports fandom becomes very appealing. Of course, people are sports fans for a number of much more positive reasons – family traditions, love of the game from a playing career, appreciation for athletic skill, power and grace, and so on. But sports fandom works on such a universal level because it offers both an outlet for frustrations with the working world and an arena in which familiar values of merit are rewarded.
Sports marketers seize on this desire for community and identity to create anxiety and competition amongst fans. The “real fan” can only prove authenticity through purchasing tickets and team apparel and otherwise keeping up with the team – something that often requires expensive subscriptions to cable packages or online streaming services on top of a substantial time investment. Viewers of this year’s NBA playoffs, for instance have been hammered with ads for BBVA Compass’s NBA Banking program, which offers a $100 gift card to the league’s online shop as incentive to sign up for an account, and similar promotions are used constantly by businesses from gas stations to credit card companies and everything in between.
The notion of the “real fan” is only stoked by sports media. Early in his Page 2 career at ESPN, “The Sports Guy” Bill Simmons wrote a 20-item list titled“Rules for being a true fan. It includes the rules “Don’t wear cheap-looking replica jerseys or flimsy-looking bargain-basement hats,” and “When your team wins a championship, it’s your civic duty to purchase as much paraphernalia as possible… Hats, T-shirts, sweatshirts, videos, cards, magazines, books … there’s no limit. Gorge yourself.”
Simmons was known for his “everyman” persona and his ability to connect with readers across the country. Will Leitch wrote at Sports on Earth, “the notion that the world of sportswriting was available to you and me, and everybody else, was an entire foreign one on a national level before Simmons … Simmons invited you in.” Except he didn’t – not if you weren’t willing to buy into the competitive notion of fandom. If you didn’t have the money to keep up – which not only skews sports fans to the upper class, but also white and male – and not if you weren’t willing to tolerate Simmons’s regular casual sexism.
This is the power of The Great Sports Myth. We not only want to believe in the greatness of our star athletes, but we want to believe their greatness is a product of their participation in sports, and that through our own participation – however tangential or superficial it may be – we can be a part of it. That power isn’t going away anytime soon – not as long as men like Steph Curry and LeBron James enrapture crowds with their play, or as long as women like Abby Wambach and Megan Rapinoe inspire us on the pitch. It seizes on the very real power and beauty of athletics and the awesome spectacle that occurs when the whole world is watching.
But this identity of the “sports fan” only serves to manipulate. Rather than creating an open and exclusive community, the branded sports fan acts as a gatekeeper, preventing access to the larger group until new members can prove their worth through a properly competitive and exclusionary attitude and an open wallet. It’s an endless competition, and one fans can only engage in through paying more and more money to the teams and leagues they watch. It leaves sports fandom without diversity – whether class diversity, racial diversity or gender diversity – and forces the fans who do manage to break into the club to constantly re-prove themselves. Sports fandom is often perceived as an escape from the pressures of the real world, but in reality, it does more to recreate those pressures and profit off them than to provide a real sanctuary.
