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It was 1989, my grandmother sat next to my father and me on the couch, her nice couch, the one that still had the plastic cover on it even though she’d had it for more than a year. She was screaming “Rebound!” with a force I would have thought her incapable of. Our beloved Illini, with a campus just 45 minutes north on I-57 from our rural hometown of Mattoon, Illinois, were playing Syracuse for their first Final Four slot since my father was 3. I can still hear that couch cover crinkling and squeaking every time we jumped up after a Kendall Gill basket. The Illini won. We all had ice cream afterward. It was a moment I’ll never forget.
It was 2005, I was on a different couch, with two fellow underemployed 20-something writers in New York, watching my Illini play Arizona for their first trip back to the Final Four since that day in 1989. Illinois fell behind Arizona with three minutes left. I called my dad in Mattoon, lamenting the end of an otherwise glorious season. “Keep hope,” he told me. “This ain’t over.” And, somehow, the Illini pulled off an incredible comeback. I called my dad again afterward. “Told ya,” he said. “You always gotta have hope.” I told this story at my wedding five years later. It was a moment I’ll never forget.
It was Sunday, I sat on my parents’ couch in Winterville, Georgia, where they moved to be close to their grandchildren in Athens, where I now live. My father sat next to the 14-year-old grandson who shares his name. And when point guard Keaton Wagler — who wasn’t even alive in 2005 let alone 1989 — hit a jaw-dropping step-back three to clinch the third Illini Final Four berth of my lifetime, I watched the two of them embrace and scream into the sky. Then I joined them. It was a moment I’ll never forget.
Sports are about winners and losers, about players and coaches, and of course about television and money. But the reason all of it exists — the reason all those colleges and athletes and owners and executives and broadcasters have all that money coming in — is because of fans, who, after all, are the ones paying for it.
Sports fandom is inherently irrational. Logically speaking, we cheer for a corporation (yes, most colleges and universities are corporations), one that considers us (rightly) to merely be customers, that employs people with whom we have little to nothing in common and will almost certainly never meet in real life. These organizations treat us as corporations generally treat their customers: They act out of their own self-interest. At the professional level, they will uproot and move away from generations of loyal fans if it’s good for their bottom lines. They will slap advertisements over the most sacred monuments of our sporting landscape. They charge way too much for beer. They take us for granted because they can: They know we’re not going anywhere.
But the reason they know we aren’t going anywhere is because, deep down, it’s not about them — not really. The teams we cheer for are just public trusts, physical representations of what fandom is, but not actual fandom itself. I have no connection to the actual Illinois men’s basketball team. I’m not a college trustee, or a player, or an administrator; if I ran into a player in public, outside the context of the game, they’d just be a college kid with a life that couldn’t possibly be more dissimilar to the one I live as a middle-aged man. They just play for a team that I have cheered for since long before they were born, long before their coach was employed by the team, long before the television executives making money off of all of us ever came to town. The enjoyment — and the sadness — I get from them is thus entirely mine, something that I share with my friends and family and fellow fans of the team … but not the team itself. This sounds cynical, but it isn’t. It’s empowering. The team is ours. Not theirs.
When I watch my Illini in the Final Four this weekend — and when Connecticut, Michigan and Arizona fans watch their teams in the men’s tournament, and Connecticut, UCLA, South Carolina and Texas fans watch their teams in the women’s tournament — they are not just watching humans dribbling and shooting a ball. They’re living their own stories, their own histories, their own memories — and of course creating new ones. They’re watching Keaton Wagler and Yaxel Lendeborg and Azzi Fudd and Joyce Edwards, but they’re also watching Kenny Battle and Glen Rice and Breanna Stewart and A’ja Wilson, all the players they’ve watched throughout the years, all the games they’ll never forget, all the people they watched those games with — especially the people who are now gone.
When I watch the Illini this weekend, I will be right there with my grandmother, who left us 20 years ago, and she and her couch will be as vivid as they were in 1989. In 35 years, when my son is my age, he will watch the Illini, perhaps with people not yet born, and remember Sunday, and his grandfather, and his couch. And on it will go. That’s what sports is. It’s a single, straightforward, instantly understandable story of our lives: who we spent them with, what we shared with them, why they brought us together. Keaton Wagler doesn’t know who I am, or who my son is, or who my dad is. He doesn’t need to. He’ll still be a part of our lives forever. All of it is. That’s why we watch.
The post My team is back in the Final Four. So is my whole family. appeared first on Washington Post.
