3/19/24, 12:47 PM The Liberation of Being a Fair-Weather Fan - The New York Times

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LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION

The Liberation of Being a Fair-Weather Fan

Dumping your sports team sounds blasphemous. But sometimes you have to
prioritize a different kind of loyalty.

By Steven Leckart
Published March 5, 2024 Updated March 7, 2024

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My 4-year-old son was climbing into our station wagon when he hit me with two
words that rattled me to my core: “Dodgers rule!” Next came the death blow:
“Giants drool!” We had only just moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco, but
somehow my kid’s allegiance to my favorite baseball team had already faltered.
When I shared my dismay with a friend (a die-hard Giants fan), I expected
sympathy. Instead, he expressed envy. Neither of his kids shared his love for
America’s pastime. “At least you have a fan of baseball,” he said. “Be grateful for
that.”

And yet, I fixated on how my son’s team was not my team. Even worse, our teams
are bitter enemies. So when we attended games, the kiddo would cheer for his
squad while I’d awkwardly grimace and not-so-quietly root for mine.

I had always felt that it’s sacrilegious to be a “fair-weather fan,” someone who only
supports a team when it’s winning. True fans are die-hards — they experience, in
equal measure, the grief of losing and the euphoria of winning. I believed that
committing to a team would be forever, which meant you would remain pitted

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against the same foes for a lifetime. (Opposition is the yin to fandom’s yang.) But I
never expected that my own flesh and blood would become a fair-weather fan — or
my rival.

Owners move teams to new cities to maximize profits. If their

loyalties are malleable, why should fans be held to a different
standard?
After seven years of a sports schism in our family, though, I started to wonder what
I was holding onto. Could I somehow become a fan of both teams? If not, what
would betraying my beloved Giants say about me? With whose opinion was I
concerned?

I was born in Los Angeles and grew up a Dodgers fan, which made this turn of
events all the more confusing. Back in 1988, my bedroom was covered with
newspaper clippings of the Dodgers and the Lakers. My favorite baseball and
basketball teams each won championships in the same year, and that success
supersized my fandom. I always preferred basketball, because baseball seemed
slow and boring. This made it easier to ditch the Dodgers when I left Los Angeles
at age 25, seven years before my son was born.

When I moved to San Francisco in 2005, the Giants had just endured a steroid
scandal and were middling. Choosing to root for a tarnished underdog felt almost
punk rock. Adopting a new fandom also helped cement local pride and friendships,
including a buddy who taught me to love baseball’s brooding pace. As we brewed
beer in his kitchen, we would listen to games on the radio, and he’d school me:
“Pitching is one of the most intense and repetitively stressful positions in all of
sports,” he’d say, dispensing all kinds of specialized knowledge. Given years of
disastrous bad luck and botched opportunities, San Franciscans had started to
refer to Giants fandom as its own distinct form of torture. In time, I found myself

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yelling at the TV from my couch — and at the field from my seat in Oracle Park.
The Giants would soon win a historic three World Series championships in five
years, and that streak felt like our reward for weathering the storm.

By 2010, I had traded yet another fandom. That call wasn’t arbitrary or impulsive.
Years earlier, when my favorite N.F.L. franchise, the Raiders, left Los Angeles and
returned to Oakland (where they were originally based), what was I to do but hold
a grudge? I went all in on the San Francisco 49ers. During the Super Bowl in 2013, I
rooted for the Niners while decked out in no less than three pieces of team merch.
But within two years, when the franchise pushed out the coach who had gotten
them there, I sensed cracks in my loyalty. By the time that the San Francisco
quarterback Colin Kaepernick took his stand against police brutality and the
owners decided to release him, prompting him to opt out of his contract, I retired
my gear.

My own history as a fair-weather fan, I now realize, was liberating. I was nimble in
my love, justified when my loyalty faltered. In short, it felt like my teams needed to
earn, and keep, my fandom — which, in a lot of ways, is appropriate. After all, a
fan’s dedication isn’t always reciprocated. Athletes now rarely spend their entire
careers with one team. Owners move teams to new cities to maximize profits. If
their loyalties are malleable, why should fans be held to a different standard?
Given our wallets and our attention, fans hold a lot of power in this relationship.
Football has challenged baseball’s standing as “America’s pastime”; it’s as if the
whole country not only switched teams but sports altogether.

Despite these revelations, I still love watching baseball. My friend was right. It’s a
gift when your kids appreciate anything as much as you do. But by stubbornly
resisting a switch, I was robbing myself of something far more precious than fan
devotion. I was depriving myself of feeling camaraderie and joy with my son. So
last summer, after significant hand-wringing, I gave myself permission to root for
his team. From the moment we donned matching Dodgers caps, it was magical.
(And this was months before the team signed the most coveted free agent in

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baseball history, Shohei Ohtani.) As my son enters his teenage years, our shared
fandom might save our relationship from splintering the way many do. Either way,
I’ll be grateful we have something in common.

Steven Leckart is an Emmy-winning filmmaker currently directing a documentary about superfandom.

A version of this article appears in print on , Page 16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Fair-Weather Fandom

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