Wednesday, April 5, 2017 // The Statement
6B
Sports is Art

It took me four seconds to spot Teddy in a 

line of 50 students outside Crisler Center. He 
stood tall in a bright-yellow Pikachu costume 
holding a small Tim Horton’s hot chocolate in 
his right hand.

As I approached him, he seemed to be talk-

ing a little bit to a lot of people. He told me we 
would be let inside the Crisler Center — home 
of the University of Michigan’s men’s and 
women’s basketball teams — in about 15 min-
utes. I settled into the back of the line, gearing 
up for the wait to be longer than what Teddy 
predicted. Looking around, I noticed how 
quiet this line of Michigan sports fans was.

Football Saturdays at the University are 

equated with Christmas morning by many 
of my friends — though, of course, instead 
of candy before breakfast, it’s shots. There 
really isn’t a time on this campus when you 
can’t find students in jerseys on front porch-
es, celebrating their team.

Needless to say, at 5 p.m. on a Thursday at 

Crisler Center, I was expecting a line full of 
rowdy kids. But instead, I was surrounded 
by peaceful, dedicated students waiting in 
not so visible anticipation for the basketball 
game. They stood as if it were their job, not 
their pleasure. Which, in a way, it was.

I was standing in line with Maize Rage, 

the golden T-shirt-wearing student section, 
for the Michigan vs. Wisconsin basketball 
game. Many students in line two hours early 
are a part of the Maize Rage Core — the 
smaller group of more dedicated students 
who have weekly meetings to plan cheers 
and sit at the front of the student section for 
every game.

LSA Engineering senior Teddy Tran is an 

icon of the group. He’s dedicated countless 
hours to the Maize Rage and many more to 
talking about basketball with his family and 
friends. He’s been following the Michigan 
basketball team since his senior year of high 
school. He’s been to 31 football games and 
almost 70 basketball games.

“I found a passion for the sport and I got 

invested,” Teddy said to me as we sit down in 
the first row of the bleachers.

***
As a student at the University, I feel iso-

lated from the exhilarating force of sports 
culture that reverberates between students. 
Students like Teddy, who make this men-
tal, emotional and monetary investment in 
sports.

Walking down East Hoover Avenue and 

then South Main Street for the first time 
my freshman year, it was as if I could taste 
the community. Shouting “Go Blue” can 
stand for the entire Michigan community 
anywhere else. But here, on this street, the 
phrase meant I supported a group of people 
playing a sport I do not care about.

My lack of interest in sports doesn’t stem 

from a lack of understanding: I was a cheer-
leader in high school — I had to learn the 
rules and watch football games closely to 
know when and what cheers to do.

Sitting in the Big House for the first time, 

I remember tasting it. I can still taste it. I 
understand there’s a powerful community 
at work on campus, but what I don’t under-
stand is the foundation that brings this com-
munity together. Extract the crowds, the 
multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry, 
and even the comradery. What I’m asking is: 
What is it that draws humans to sports?

***
Over Spring Break, I sat down next to my 

dad to watch the Chargers play the Kansas 
City Chiefs — something I never do. “The 
Chargers” is a term I heard growing up so 
often that I never actually thought about its 
meaning. I understood the word “Charger” 
as a sports team before I ever thought about 
the verb it was connected to, or the gold-
rimmed platter that sits under china din-
ner plates, or the type of horse or even the 
phone-charging device. To my family, “The 
Chargers” was a team, a dinner table conver-
sation go-to and a reason for my sister and I 
to get out of the house on Sunday afternoons.

I try to look for the box with the score and 

the elusive timestamp on it (a time that was 
incredibly deceiving to me as a child: Four 
minutes and three seconds never actually 
meant four minutes and three seconds). I 
feel a familiar ache in my stomach as I real-
ize the game won’t be over soon and an even 
larger ache for how incapable I feel when I 
try to connect with people who love sports. 
No matter how attentive I try to be, how 
much I listen and learn, how large of a Big-
Ten-sports-playing university I attend, I 
could never become a sports fan.

My dad hears me sigh. I turn my head 

toward him and smile skeptically. He reach-
es his arm towards me and pulls me next to 
him.

“I wish I could explain better to you what 

sports mean to me …” he trailed off. “Why I 
care about it just so much.”

I laugh softly and mostly to myself. It is 

the type of laugh that masks the irreproach-
able dearth of understanding between the 
two of us. He wishes he could explain, but 
could he? Could I? Could I find concrete 
answers to why he, and so many, love sports 
in a way I never could? Why I can list out my 
friends who are sports fans vs. non-sports 
fans? And why, to non-sports fans, caring 
about sports feels so irrational?

***
My father grew up playing sports: Foot-

ball, basketball and baseball for the small 
city on the even smaller island of Coronado, 
Calif., with a large sports community. I rea-
son to myself that watching the sports he 
once practiced and played is a form of study-
ing for him — it is useful and interesting to 
watch experts play the form you once or still 
work hard to play.

“Having played sports as a child there 

was a sense of ease and harmony between 
different parts of myself: body and mind 
primarily,” said Santiago Colas, an associ-

ate professor of comparative literature and 
arts, ideas and the humanities. “With that, 
a kind of absorption and a lack of self-con-
sciousness that felt like freedom. Freedom 
to exercise my capacities as a person, as a 
whole person.”

Teddy, who sits next to me at the basket-

ball game, didn’t play sports growing up.

“To be honest, I think I’m an anomaly,” 

Teddy told me. “I did robotics in high school, 
but no tennis, no football, no basketball or 
stuff like that. But for some reason, here I 
am, dressed like a Pikachu and all.”

However, Teddy is not an anomaly.
Andrei Markovits, a professor of politi-

cal science, Germanic studies and sociology, 
has been studying sports cultures since the 
1980s. Markovits and David Smith, a doc-
toral student at the time in the Political Sci-
ence Department, conducted a study about 
undergraduates at the University, report-
ing on how many students attend sporting 
events, how often they watch sports on TV, 
who their favorite teams and players are, 
and how they support teams in the state of 
Michigan.

“Crudely put, one need not have played 

one second of football in one’s life to have 
developed into a rabid and highly knowl-
edgeable football fan,” Markovits wrote.

When I told Markovits about how I 

attended a Michigan men’s gymnastics meet 
to try to engage in a sport I once played, 
unlike football or basketball, he laughed at 
me.

For sports like gymnastics, the follow-

ers of the sport tend to also be doers of the 
sports. However, for sports such as basket-
ball, football, baseball, hockey, soccer and 
cricket — sports Markovits defines as “hege-
monic sports” — the followers outnumber 
the doers immensely.

“Football is the most post-modern sport, 

because virtually no American has ever 
played football like these guys play football,” 
Markovits said. “Very few people under-
stand. In fact, very few people have actually 
been to an NFL game, and yet if you look at 
the NFL, it is the most successful sport of all 
time.”

“There are a group of almost all men who 

we call the ‘sports omnivores,’ ” Markov-
itz says. “They basically are guys who were 
actually awful athletes but who are obsessed 
with sports. For them it really is an intel-
lectual in devour. … What is going on in is a 
form of identity.”

***
I’m sitting in the basement of Ashley’s 

on State Street talking to LSA senior Matt 
Fisher. There is a basketball game playing on 
a screen behind me. I ask him the question 
I’ve been asking everyone I meet this semes-
ter: Why does you love sports so much?

“Sports were a big part of my childhood,” 

Fisher says. “I first really got into sports 
with the Cleveland Cavaliers when LeBron 
came to the team in 2003. I was 9 years old 

and as I progressed through elementary 
school, middle school and high school, that 
was the golden age of Cleveland sports and 
Cavs basketball.”

When I asked Business senior Rikki 

Miner the same question, she was eager to 
tell me the same thing.

“Being from Chicago, sports are every-

thing,” Miner sIS. “We have a lot of storied 
history and teams in all Big Four sports 
leagues. My family is third-generation Bears 
season ticket holders, so I’ve been going to 
those games since I was an infant. My fam-
ily is also a huge Michigan sports family, so 
every Saturday growing up I watched the 
Michigan football games on TV, and our 
weekends were planned around the time of 
the game.”

And yet again, when I asked LSA senior 

Joseph Evans.

“To me, Michigan football is the holiest 

of holy things,” Evans says. “I learned about 
Michigan football from my dad, he taught 
me about it — we would always be watching 
games together. Sports represent a genera-
tional bond. Because it is a strong part of my 
family, I can identify with it. It is a part of 
my identity even though I’ve never played 
for them, never made a contribution beyond 
being a fan. But this leaves me feeling a part 
of the team and that’s why I care about it.”

Even for students who claim they are 

“non-sports-watching fans,” family identity 
contributes to their watching habits.

I found Shirley Wang’s “Sports Com-

plex: The Science Behind Fanatic Behavior” 
report observing how a fan’s identification 
with a sports team is similar to how someone 
identifies with their nationality, ethnicity or 
even gender. In it, Daniel Wann, a profes-
sor of psychology at Murray State Univer-
sity, defines this team identification as “the 
extent to which a fan feels a psychological 
connection to a team and the team’s perfor-
mances are viewed as self-relevant.”

This identity is a form of attachment for 

fans, and like multiple concepts within the 
study of sports psychology, it dates back to 
the ancient world of sports. David Potter, a 
professor of Greek and Roman History at 
the University, describes this idea of collec-
tive identity as one of the largest reasons for 
humans developing intense attachment to 
sports.

“As populations were brought away from 

rural roots, deracinated, put into cities and 
are taking up industrial jobs, there was an 
anxiety about them, people started to ask: 
‘Who are you?’ ”

Potter told me that the University, and 

universities across the country, recognized 
this powerful sense of identity and tapped 
into it.

“In the late 19th century and early 20th 

century, universities began to support sports 
as a way of reaching out into communities 
and helping to build a connection between 
themselves and the community that just 

by Claire Bryan, Contributor