Fandom and the Self

Ask a Bororo tribesman: Who are you? He may reply: I am parakeet. 
(Ask an L.S.U. fan at a football game: Who are you? He may reply: I am a tiger.)

— Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

The ticket stub was worth $1.00 off one family-size pizza at all participating Shakey’s Pizza Parlors, but it’s a good thing I didn’t redeem it, or I’d be up one long-forgotten pizza and down a significant memory prompt. Flip the ticket over and you’ll see a graphic of the original Seahawks logo. They played the Los Angeles Rams on August 17, 1978, and this stub from that game represents one of the best birthday presents I’ve ever received. I must have lost the accompanying note my dad wrote decades ago, but I kept the stub, despite the fact that it provided admission to a mere preseason game and we sat in the 300 level of the Kingdome, just a few rows from the top.

Didn’t matter—for I, a native of the Pacific Northwest, was thrilled to not only be attending my first NFL game but to catch my favorite team: the visiting Rams. Why a team from L.A.? The formative years in my sports-fan psyche occurred before the NFL existed in Seattle. The same can be said for Major League Baseball, which found me following the Yankees in the early ’70s until the Mariners came along.

I had pledged my allegiance to the Rams in 1973 because they were good (12-2 that year) and because I liked their uniforms. I memorized the players by position, was a fan of their coach, Chuck Knox. I begged to be allowed to stay up until halftime of Monday Night Football to catch the highlights of that Sunday’s Ram game, to hear the halting diction of Howard Cosell as he described how a team’s comeback was “too little, too late.” If the Rams lost, I cried, which happened only twice that year until the playoffs. (Damn you, Dallas Cowboys and the horse you rode in on!)

After the Seahawks hatched in 1976, I certainly became a fan, but a fan with conditions. It took a while before I could recognize myself in that peering raptor’s eye. It took a few years before I stopped pretending to be Lawrence McCutcheon or Harold Jackson on the playground and identified with burgeoning local heroes such as Jim Zorn and Steve Largent.

I can recall the day my allegiance shifted for good. By 1979, my dad had purchased season tickets, and the Rams were back for a game on November 4 of that year. The teams had similar records, hovering around .500. We were now sitting in the corner of the end zone on the 200 level of the Kingdome, and the Rams proceeded to pummel the Seahawks 24-0. The most depressing stat? The Seahawks had -7 total yards, the worst offensive performance in NFL history.

The fact that I was so depressed belied my changing heart. How dare the Rams do that to us! To us! I could’ve stuck with the Rams, who went on to play in the Super Bowl that season, but I didn’t. (Yes, I still rooted for them when they lost to the Steelers in Super Bowl XIV, but the air had been leaking from my L.A. balloon for quite a while by the time Cheryl Ladd sang the national anthem and Up with People presented the halftime show, “A Salute to the Big Band Era.”)

And so I became a Seahawk through and through. At a certain point, I even started hating the Rams, who had become like a bad ex-girlfriend to me. They found new fans in St. Louis (until they abandoned those fans and returned to L.A.). And, more recently, they’ve been messing with my Seahawk heart like a faulty defibrillator: Think fake field goals and duplicitous punts and devious the-ball’s-over-here-no-it’s-over-there returns.

__________

When Chuck Knox became coach of the Seahawks in 1983 and delivered them to the playoff promised land, it only seemed fitting to me. Coach Knox, “Ground Chuck,” had made the transformation from Ram to Seahawk (by way of the Bills) just like me. We were shape-shifters of a sort, shedding old hide for new feathers. We had taken on new totems, joined new tribes. Such are the rights of passage in the American education system that most of us join new tribes as we matriculate from one school to another. I, for instance, have been a Cougar, a Wolverine, an Indian, a Fighting Missionary, and a Cavalier (or Wahoo). (Two of these mascots have either been changed since my graduation or come under scrutiny; I’ll let you guess which.) Add in Little League teams and miscellaneous intramural teams, and I’ve also been a Jet, a Cardinal, a Smasher, an Eagle, a Red, and a Mercenary, among others. It’s enough to give you an identity crisis.

Of course, sports tribalism doesn’t require you to be an actual attendee of a school or a player on a team or a resident of a team’s city. But it’s only natural to fall for your home squad, to nurture it, to wish it the best, to roar from the depths of your diaphragm when things go well and to weep like your nine-year-old self when things go poorly. The Greeks and Romans figured out long ago that the collective viewing of sports could displace some of the bloodlust of combat. (And often those events included just about as much blood and lust as actual fighting.) Sports can operate as a kind of civic release valve that allows for the tribal inclination toward warfare to be satisfied and settled under mostly safer, more controlled conditions.

What’s more, tribal identity in the sports world is a curious act of self-assimilation. The self becomes part of the collective—and sometimes at an elite level. In Seattle, where the “12th Man” has transmogrified into “12s,” (a somewhat irksome happenstance involving a Texas A&M trademark), fans are not just Seahawks but über-Seahawks. The field of play is not just restricted to the green gridiron. In the stands, Seahawks fans take pride in affecting the outcome of the game by creating so much noise that the opponent jumps offside and Guinness World Records are achieved. (Louder than a jackhammer! Louder than a turbine jet engine!—are the usual decibel-related ejaculations.) That’s not just a Seattle thing, of course, but the 12s seem to be especially good at it.

Still, tribal affiliation can be challenged as quickly as saying, “You’ve been cut.” That’s the business of sports, and sometimes it’s hard for fans to keep up. What, wait, Griffey’s been traded for Mike Cameron and a can of magic Hormel beans? It can be a shock to the system when your favorite player leaves. It can create a temporary displacement of your tribal identity if you really, really identify with the player as much as you do the team.

One solution is to have multiple affiliations, creating a kind of Venn diagram of who you are and whom you’ll root for: I hate the Oklahoma Thunder because they stole our Sonics, but damn if I’m not gonna cheer for Kevin Durant. Another solution is to excommunicate the player: You are nothing to me now. So long, A-Rod.

Selfhood, self-identity, within a collective enterprise is an odd phenomenon to think about (this self, this independent being that I am, is somehow defined by its associations?), but people do it all the time. We are Spartans or Trojans or Yankees or Southerners or Republicans or Democrats or Christians or Muslims or lawyers, journalists, developers, pipe fitters, baristas, magicians, musicians, monks. And usually we are many of these selves at once. Not only are we who we cheer for, but we are where we come from, what we believe, and what we do. It’s kind of like a stew—or maybe a can of mixed nuts.

Which raises a phenomenological question: Is the self an onion or a nut? A Shrek (“Ogres have layers. Onions have layers.”) or an Austin Powers (“This is me in a nutshell.”)? Is my “self” just a series of layers that can be peeled away until there’s nothing, or is there some me-kernel within an outer shell?

Is a 12 an onion or a nut?

I am not just a Seahawks fan, of course. (Nobody is.) I hesitate to even call myself a “12” because I don’t have the dedication that other fans possess. I don’t particularly care to join clubs, churches, or political parties. And yet I love that feeling of being part of a team, especially in an improvisational way. I like the loosely collaborative nature of pick-up games and jam sessions. I like working toward a common goal.

Perhaps I learned when I was a child that too much devotion to your team could lead to too much pain during a loss. So I adjusted my thinking, matured (perhaps), and developed a stoic approach to fandom. If I missed a game on TV and heard that my team lost, I told myself I didn’t want to see the game anyway and had more important things to do. If my team won (unless it was a championship finale), I told myself there’d be another game to watch. I learned to temper my seasonal frustrations by looking to the future. A lot of sports fans resort to this kind of emotional template when the season seems gone: No playoffs? Well, at least we got a high draft pick! “Suck for Luck!”

But there are dangers in cloaking yourself in a carapace of nonchalance. Focus too much on controlling your emotions and soon you realize how much they are controlling you. The self becomes its own battlefield, its own gridiron. The nut becomes mush. The onion diced and confused.

I can never be the childhood fan I was because I can’t truly be a child again. There have been too many seasons for me to feel the newness of it all, the puppy love of being a fan. But I do have the memory of that feeling. I do remember crushing on my team, and every now and then that sense of exhilaration returns (the Seahawks win the Super Bowl in a dominating performance!) as well as that sense of utter despair (the Seahawks return to the Super Bowl and lose on a heartbreaking interception at the goal line!). 

And thinking back on it, I take an odd pride in the Seahawks’ ineptitude during that 1979 game against the Rams. Negative seven yards? Really? Nobody can top that! It’s the self that experiences ineptitude which better understands greatness when greatness arrives. Just ask Cubs fans.

Maybe a fuller version of the self is accessed via an artifact like my ticket stub, stowed away for nearly 40 years, that’s no longer redeemable for its original purpose but capable of being redeemed in another way. Half that torn ticket left my possession on the very day of its use, but the other half is what I keep with me in the field of memory, providing admission to an earlier version of who I am. 

But the Sun is Eclipsed by the Moon

When I read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in high school, I was delighted by Mark Twain’s use of a solar eclipse as a plot fulcrum. Hank Morgan, bonked on the head and woken up in sixth-century Camelot, leverages his 19th-century, American-bred knowhow to fend off superstitious Englishmen who would've had him burned at the stake. Not only that, his ability to magically blot out the sun convinces Arthur and his courtiers to make Morgan the king’s right-hand man.

Twain wrote the book as a satire of chivalric romance, and he shows Hank Morgan’s good side in his attempts to democratize Arthurian England and end slavery. But we also find in Morgan, who dubs himself “The Boss,” the mixed seeds of the flimflam man, carnival magician, and Gilded Age entrepreneur—much like the character played by Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz.

Four years before Twain’s book was published, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines came out, using a lunar eclipse as a plot twist to the benefit of adventuring Victorian Englishmen. Twain might have been one-upping the British author, but both may have taken their cue from Christopher Columbus, who not only stumbled upon America but also set the tone for a certain strain of flimflammery that continues to this day. Upset that the local inhabitants of Jamaica had stopped providing food to his men (after his men had plundered their villages), Columbus used a lunar eclipse to convince the locals that his god was angry. Now, some might argue that Columbus was only being shrewd in using his greater cosmic knowledge to gain provisions, that the local tribe members on this island were simply being outwitted and outplayed as if they were contestants in an episode of Survivor. But we should remind ourselves that, if knowledge is power, then with great power comes great responsibility. Or so saith Stan Lee.

Know-nothingism is not the alternative, of course. Few people could spot a good flimflam man like Mark Twain, and few people made more fun of gullible mobs than Twain did. To rise above the mob, Twain suggests, we could use more empirical evidence and less romanticized superstition. We need scientific inquiry. Consider, for instance, that it took the study of solar eclipses to discover helium and prove Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. 

________

I recall two partial solar eclipses from my childhood in the Pacific Northwest. The first was probably the one that occurred on March 7, 1970, when I was in kindergarten. My class marched out of its portable at Sunny Hills Elementary to the playground and lined up to look into pinhole boxes so that we wouldn’t go blind. I felt a bit perturbed that I had to watch at a remove, that what I was witnessing was a representation of the actual thing—a shadow puppet on a wall. Seeing the moon partially fill in the dot of sunlight on the piece of paper was sort of like watching a hesitant student take a multiple-choice test. Of course, today I’m appreciative of the precautions our teachers took in preserving our five-year-old retinas. My middle-aged retinas thank them profusely.

The second partial solar eclipse likely was when I was sitting in 7th-grade math class at Pine Lake Junior High, just across the road from Sunny Hills. The teacher might have made a reference to the eclipse as he taught us how to calculate the area of a rhombus, but for the most part we just sat in our hard plastic chairs as day outside turned to not-really-night and the buzzing fluorescent lights became increasingly annoying. It’s possible that this moment marks the beginning of the end of my mathematical aptitude, but I’m not certain.

If I lost interest in math, however, I did not lose interest in the larger scientific questions that math could help solve—I just didn’t want to be the one performing the equations. What I liked most, and still like most, are the stories related to cosmic events and how people have tried to explain them, use them to their advantage, or simply give in and feel the awe of the moment. Herodotus writes of an eclipse that ended a six-year war between the Lydians and the Medes. Like the stadium lights going out at on a Friday-night football game, the lack of illumination put an end to hostilities. During the Peloponnesian War, Athenian general Nicias (with a little help from his priests) took a lunar eclipse as an omen to tarry around the harbor of Syracuse, only to be routed by the Syracusan fleet. So saith Thucydides.

Even in modern times, people get weird about eclipses. Annie Dillard, writing about a total eclipse in my home state of Washington (one that I have no recollection of but which occurred when I was still in junior high), notes the near hysteria: “From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching.” Dillard was in the Yakima Valley at the time, standing on a hill of wild barley, but where was I on that Monday morning in 1979? Learning to square dance in P.E.? Snoozing, open-lidded, through another math class? Why did this particular eclipse escape me?

Well, I had no choice but to be in school, learning, learning, learning. And maybe I didn’t even care at the time. It wasn’t the sun and the moon that concerned me most that year so much as sports, girls, and hobbits.

The following year I read about Hank Morgan and his exploits among the Knights of the Round Table (probably about the same time that I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Such spoofery helped loosen some of the cataracts of childhood gullibility from my eyes. I was probably also listening to Pink Floyd and The Who at the time and thinking: The Boss? Hmmm. Same as the old boss? . . . We don’t need no thought control. I was, at least internally, starting to question authority.

Fortunately, some authorities have the ability to inspire. My youngest daughter, who had a fantastic 8th-grade science teacher last year, is excited to see the upcoming eclipse, so much so that she’s incredibly disappointed that we can’t travel one state south to experience totality. Marching band camp at the high school has precluded that option. (“Trouble with a capital T!” I can hear a certain flimflam artist singing in The Music Man.) So we will instead head somewhere local on Monday morning, perhaps even our own yard, to see if the world as we know it will end.

Based on what I’ve learned so far, I don’t think it will—but there might be screaming.

And a Rock Feels No Pain

Some distance off the southern shoreline of Pine Lake, about five feet beneath the surface, there’s a rock. It’s a good-sized rock, you might even call it a boulder, but in the grand scheme of things it’s an inconsequential rock, likely one of many glacial erratics deposited here when the Cordilleran Ice Sheet extended down from British Columbia into Washington state during the Pleistocene epoch. When the ice retreated roughly 12,000 years ago, the Puget Sound region was left with a number of lakes, including Pine Lake and its neighbor, Beaver Lake, both now located in the city of Sammamish.

I say “now” because the area used to be rural, unincorporated King County, and back then the name “Sammamish” referred most specifically to the much larger lake down the hill and to the west of Pine Lake. The eponymous Sammamish High School, which is not one of the four high schools located within the city limits of Sammamish, is located many miles to the west in the city of Bellevue.

Well, the names may change, but the stone remains the same. From my family’s dock on Pine Lake, it would take half a minute to swim out to the rock and an area that my three brothers and I referred to as “The Island,” which was not an island so much as a shallow spot beneath the surface. It was amusing to swim out there and stand on the island, water at your armpits, and watch the boaters do double takes. It was even more fun to locate the rock, which by the end of a hot summer could elevate you until the water was at your waist.

One of my favorite times to search for the rock was at night, when the mysteries beneath the lake’s surface became even more pronounced. Who knew what lurked down there when the stars clicked on and the water turned as dark as ink? The lake bottom, coated by a soft, sedimentary muck, never quite prepared you for encountering the rock’s hardness. You’d swim out to the island and walk around, feeling tentatively with your toes. Sometimes you’d find it, sometimes not. Sometimes a fish would brush against your calf. I’m sure there were times when I came within inches of my goal before giving up and heading back to shore.

When I was younger, my dad swam out to the island with us, but he generally preferred to stay on the dock. An avid golfer, he brought home floating golf balls one year, along with a patch of Astroturf. Early in the evening, when most people had gone in for supper, our family took turns whacking balls toward the opposite shore while one of us puttered around in the boat with a fishing net as a scoop. My dad would give us tips on how to swing a club and then stand back to puff on his cigar. When he died in November of 2013, I walked out onto the dock and surveyed the calm, mist-laden water as the sun rose over the trees. Ice crystals had formed on the dock, and they crunched audibly underfoot. Not knowing what else to do, not knowing yet how to process the moment, I took out my phone and memorialized the crystals on the boards and the shroud of mist cloaking the neighboring docks. I needed something to mark the day, a picture of a natural occurrence that would freeze time like those crystals before it melted away. Back in the house, my dad’s cooling body lay waiting for the rest of the family to arrive, and after that, the stoic attendants from Flintoft’s Funeral Home.

_________

During this hot summer of 2017, when smoke comes down from Canada instead of sheets of ice, I find myself comforted by the rock’s presence. Just the other day, while visiting my mom, I located the solitary boulder—not once, not twice, but three times because, well, it’s easy to lose your coordinates underwater. Swim far enough away, and it can take a while to regain your bearings. Every summer day that I visit my mom, now, I wonder if it might be my last chance to find this personal monument to endurance (meaning both the rock’s permanence and the amount of time it can take to find the thing). And I think of all the friends and classmates who used to live on the lake or nearby and whose families may have long since departed, their houses sold, torn down, and replaced by swankier homes with pristine lawns and strong, fortress-like bulkheads along the waterfront.

The shoreline didn’t used to be this way. It used to harbor snakes and frogs. I have not seen tadpoles near the dock in decades. Before I could swim, I used to dig my fingers into the gray clay along the shore, beneath the roots of a fir tree that had been clinging there for generations.

It’s hard not to be sentimental about your childhood home, about summer days spent playing rag tag between docks or winter afternoons playing touch football on the ice when the lake froze over (a rare occurence). The lake was a commons, a byway, a runway, a theater. One of my brothers used to stuff his clothes into a plastic bag and swim to the park at the east end, where he’d meet up with his girlfriend. Somebody at the far corner of the lake owned a floatplane, which would come propelling toward us until it gained lift and cleared a flotilla of mallards. On the Fourth of July, most everyone who had a dock set off fireworks late into the evening, and the next day you’d see the torn, soggy carcasses of Roman candles and Whistling Petes bobbing in the water.

Memories can become nostalgia in a heartbeat, and nostalgia can become a playground for stubborn minds stuck in a halcyon glow. “You can’t go home again,” Thomas Wolfe reminds us. Times change. Municipalities enact laws to help make such changes sustainable, and as a result you’ll no longer see people speeding along Pine Lake in floatplanes or boats with gas-powered outboard motors. I miss those days for nostalgic reasons, but I know the lake’s speed limit was adopted out of ecological necessity. The waves ate at the shoreline, which is why a lot of those bulkheads were first built. Fireworks are no longer permitted on the Fourth for what seems to be an obvious reason.

If I’m being honest, I’m saddened by the changes around the lake less because the big homes and big lawns are an affront to some sense of aesthetic proportion than because these dwellings—most of them—are simply not the ones I remember from my youth. There used to be shacks and cabins, some with wild, unkempt growth along the shoreline. A few of the older homes remain, including my mom’s (once “my parent’s,” once “mine”), but I have to remind myself that today’s lake will be tomorrow’s nostalgia for somebody else.

At nearly 87, my mom is still healthy enough to spend much of her day tending her garden. But I don’t like to think about the day when I can no longer return to Pine Lake as a resident or as the son of a resident. Certainly, I could go to the park, put in a kayak, and paddle around, but it wouldn’t be the same. Somebody else will live in that house, or, more likely, somebody else will tear it down and build a new one.

I’m pretty certain, however, that unless a new ice age arrives the rock will still be in its place, unseen by those on the surface but available to anyone who wants to search long enough to find it.