Why we need bandwagon fans

Jun 20, 2013; Miami, FL, USA; Miami Heat fans celebrate outside the arena following game seven in the 2013 NBA Finals at American Airlines Arena. Miami defeated the San Antonio Spurs 95-88 to win the NBA Championship. Mandatory Credit: Robert Mayer-USA TODAY Sports

There are few people that celebrate trend-hoppers; nobody especially likes those Johnny-come-latelies that only embrace an activity or event or lifestyle after it has been given the proverbial thumbs-up from the cultural taste-makers. They are like the teammates who sit out an entire practice nursing a stomachache only to miraculously recover when all the conditioning drills are done and it’s time to scrimmage, wanting to be participants in the fun without having to endure any of the undesirable moments that precede said fun. It’s not a personal characteristic you want to be known as embodying.

Nowhere is this abhorrence of undeserving newcomers more prevalent than in sports and the concept of the bandwagon fan.

Bandwagon fans are simultaneously despised, feared, mocked and pitied. To say they are disliked by so called true fans would not only be an understatement but also an obvious and banal one. Clearly, the relationship between true, dedicated, real fans and fraudulent, inconstant, fake fans is aggressively opposition — that doesn’t require explication. However, the underlying reasoning of why true fans despise fake fans is less self-evident. It is an animosity based on psychological necessity, an act of social creation meant to mitigate the true fans’ sub-surface insecurities.

See, a crucial facet of true fans’ antipathy towards bandwagon fans has to do the sense that the bandwagon fans’ enjoyment of a team’s success is somehow “unearned” or “underappreciated”; without the seasons of losing to provide emotional juxtaposition, what the bandwagon fan experiences is perceived by true fans as being hollow. Bandwagon fans revel in the success without having any context; a team’s first championship in twenty years means little if you’ve only been following the team for eight months.

While there is a definite kernel of truth to this criticism of bandwagon fans, it also reveals something about the way so-called true fans need to validate their own experience. To be blunt, following spots obsessively–and obsessiveness, be it manifested in statistical knowledge or unwavering loyalty, is an often self-identified trait true fans love to flaunt–is silly. It isn’t pointless, that would be too nihilistic and dramatic, but it certainly isn’t a necessary condition for enjoying life, only a (sadly) sufficient one. It’s a choice, an embrace of something ultimately childish and frivolous. To follow sports obsessively is to demonstrate unabashed love directed at something that doesn’t need your love, to whom/which (depending on your needs regarding personification) you as a fan are at best a dollar sign and at worst insignificant.

This is a relationship that by its very lopsided and dependent nature requires justification. Even if it is possible to call following sports silly, that doesn’t imply sports can’t elicit real and powerful emotions. Sports are evocative, bordering on viscerally manipulative. True fans experience true despondency; some losses can be hard to swallow even years later. Yet even the most obsessive of fans has some small inkling, perhaps a barely-above-sub- conscious understanding, that his or her obsession is unnecessary, that the emotional lows and fits of fury experienced are voluntary endeavors. This idea may be suppressed most of the time, but it exists, bubbling up at the darkest existential hours of despair. It’s not radical to imagine that while 100% resolute in their loyalty to their preferred team, true fans may be less than 100% resolute in their willingness to uncritically participate in said loyalty.

Of course, to doubt if something you love is truly worth loving is no cakewalk of an internal crisis. It involves self-assessment and the reorganization of priorities and a lot of other Inner You work that isn’t exactly pleasant. In the end, it is far easier to allow your love, your obsession, to sort of buoyantly self-justify, to reach a state of acceptance of “rightness” as to render questioning it inconceivable. The true fan must see his or her obsession as having an inherent state of quality; to love a team fully and crazily and continuously simply must, to stave off potentially soul-reorienting doubt, be morally and intellectually better than something.

Enter bandwagon fans.

Bandwagon fans allow true fans to feel secure in their silly obsessiveness. The disdain for bandwagon fans is so ubiquitous and unanalyzed that the label is wholly connotatively “bad.” There’s no use of the term that is not pejorative. It is to the direct psychological and emotional benefit of so-called true fans to agree that bandwagon fans should always be viewed as lesser (I was going to say Other, but that brought back too many nightmarish remembrances of liberal arts classes). Hey, we all may potentially be adults indulging in childish vicarious pleasures, but at least we’re doing it RIGHT. While bandwagon fans are indeed real people that may have certain stereotypical habits–wearing certain jerseys, buying certain seats, referencing or failing to reference certain past players–their offensiveness is entirely constructed. They are perpetrators of no crime yet true fans must perceive them as being oppressive, which allows the true fans the satisfying position of being simultaneously victimized and empowered, burdened yet superior.

There’s an interesting analog here between the true fans/bandwagon fans dichotomy and the schism between “real” and “fake” geeks in the world of ___Cons. As has been documented, the term “geek” has been reclaimed by the crowd it was once used to deride; as the tech industry has made “nerdy” pursuits lucrative, geekery has become more widely adopted self-identifier, a badge of pride and a signifier of some sort of eccentric or techno-practical (it doesn’t matter which) prowess. However, to the disappointment of the long-suffering ostracized geeks, geekery becoming mainstream has led to an influx of so called “fake geeks,” a term especially directed at girls.

At San Diego’s Comic Con last week, two patrons started a controversy when they decided to go around slapping “fake geek” stickers on some of the girls attending the convention, a display meant to question the credibility of these female participants (or, as some may have argued in justification, it was simply an act of trolling and trying to intentionally spark a debate about sexism in gamer culture, which if true would actually make the act more postmodern and pathetic and lazy). It’s a prevalent paranoid idea that certain people, but especially and most somehow offensively girls, are dipping into geek culture as a means of acquiring some sort of exploitable social quirk. It’s believed these posers are not true geeks; they are just joining the culture because it’s safe, sans risk of wedgie.

The similarities between the divide over authenticity in the geek world and the sports-fan world are clear. In both cases there’s a group of “true” acolytes disparaging newcomers to their respective realms of interest; there’s a sense of “unearned” joy as a cultural ill. In both cases there’s the undeniable fact that what is being obsessed over, be it comic books or football, is frivolous: the feelings wrought from it may be profound, but the activities of interest in and of themselves are not. As a way to avoid any crushing self-doubt, then, the concept of a “fake,” inauthentic participant in the culture must be fabricated and disseminated; the label must be spread, must be reinforced, in order for the placating, soothing illusion of morally superior “true” obsessiveness to appear axiomatic. The judging of certain fans as “inferior” must obvious, natural, and normal, no matter how vague the criteria the judgements are based on may be.

(It is also interesting to note, on the side, the same phenomenon in the world of music: the cliche hipster refrain of “I liked them before they were popular” used when referring to a band. However, I almost feel like protective music fans are more justified in their rejection of culture-vulture newbies. A boom in fans of a band, especially if that boom is due to a surprising single that is not reflective of the rest of the group’s material, can actually directly alter the artistic trajectory of said band, often leading to the creation of lower quality art that panders to the buying power of the broader, newer, more LCD fan base. This is not to say I condone snobbery, but rather that, at least in the case of music, the snobs may at least have some sort of point, whereas I don’t think having bandwagon Miami Heat fans at all hurts the playing of the Miami Heat.)

So bandwagon fans, then, are not the scum of the sports world but rather the bacteria: perhaps a tad repulsive but ultimately necessary for survival. Every true fan needs a bandwagon fan; the relationship is uni-directional and parasitic in a similar manner to the relationship between a team and one of its true fans. Bandwagon fans allow true fans to justify their slavish devotion to a team because that devotion is understood as “superior” and “right,” any potential inclination towards questioning removed from the equation; the actual emotional suffering experienced by a true fan is legitimized no matter how nonsensical it may seem from a critical one-step-removed distance. This is not a cry, though, for bandwagon fans to be loved or even amicably tolerated–just understood as the catalysts they are.