A theological case for sports fandom

The Super Bowl is approaching, and, to be honest, my family is not that excited. In the span of a week, we suffered two big losses as sports fans: my alma mater Notre Dame fell to Ohio State in the college football national championship game, and my husband’s Buffalo Bills got beat for the fourth time in five years by the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC Championship (hence our lack of excitement about Sunday’s game).

Moments like these provoke existential questions like: Why am I a fan at all? Is my fandom a waste of time and energy that should be spent on other, less worldly, more worthy pursuits?

While potential spiritual gains of playing sports might be more obvious–developing perseverance, the capacity to work as a team, and so forth—-the benefits of following sports are less self-evident.

I explored these questions with my 16-year-old son and some of my students in my Theological Foundations course in the wake of the anguish of defeat. While there are good reasons to question the value of modern fandom (exorbitant salaries, prima donnas, sports viewing crowding out Sunday worship, etc.), I believe a strong case for sports allegiance being a worthwhile way to develop community and virtues, especially fortitude, empathy, humility, and spiritual abandonment.

Made in the image of a Triune God, human beings are made for relationship. As Pope St. John Paul II once said, “Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion.” Sports fandom has provided a way of communing with my family, my classmates, and many other human beings with whom I would otherwise have little in common. My maternal grandfather went to the University of Notre Dame and worked as a college football referee, and my dad also grew up cheering for ND, so passion for Fighting Irish football runs deep on both sides for me. As a child, watching and pulling for the squad in the shiny gold helmets bonded me with my grandparents, parents and siblings and strengthened my sense of identity as an Irish Catholic. When I had the opportunity to attend ND, my fandom instantly connected me with the other 13,000 current ND students and the thousands of alums who had matriculated before us.

I’ve experienced a similar phenomenon beyond ND football. Shortly after graduation, I married a fellow ND alum who was also a diehard Bills fan, having grown up just south of Buffalo. The saying goes that when you marry a person, you also marry their family—and, for me, that included his family’s fandom. Adopting the Bills gave me a way to bond with my spouse’s family and for our nuclear family to stay connected to my husband’s roots, even though we ended up settling hundreds of miles away in Kentucky.

Regarding courage, the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes fortitude as, “the moral virtue that ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good…[it] enables one to conquer fear, even fear of death, and to face trials and persecutions” (1808). Sports fandom cultivated this very thing in me as a young person. Growing up, my dad fostered a passion for University of Louisville basketball in his children in addition to zeal for the Irish. (Lest you worry and think he was only obsessed with sports, my dad also imparted a great love for God, humanity, learning and many other things in his children.) He was born and raised in Louisville, but he and my mom settled in Northern Kentucky, close to Cincinnati, after they graduated from medical school. Most of the population were rabid University of Kentucky fans (Louisville’s staunchest rival). We were a few red dots in a sea of blue.

This was particularly challenging because I came of age during a stretch when Louisville struggled and UK was totally dominant, winning two national championships while I was in middle school. My male classmates mercilessly teased me for being a Cardinal fan. Ultimately, I’m grateful for this bit of torture, because it taught me to stay true to something even when it’s unpopular. I proudly practiced a mild form of civil disobedience when my sixth grade art teacher made us make a UK sign for a project. She told me I could not have red paper to make a Louisville sign. I made a UK sign, as ordered, but cut out and pasted on “UK is #2” instead of #1. These experiences prepared me to stand strong as I defended my unpopular religious beliefs and morals in high school, college, and beyond.

As to empathy, a growing body of research suggests that reading fiction helps us better understand and share in the feelings of others as it helps us enter into human experiences beyond the scope of our own lives. I think there is a similar benefit to following a sports team. I am sometimes truly amazed I can be so affected at a physical level by events taking place in stadiums hundreds of miles away with people I have never and probably will never meet. My great-grandmother actually had to tape ND games and watch them after she knew the results because it was too hard on her nerves to watch them live. As for me, I get clammy hands and stomach aches when games are tight; I shout in jubilation when a player makes a great play.

Similar to reading, tuning in to a game is a way of entering into the experiences of others. It’s said that “a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.” Well, a fan plays a thousand games. You feel it all with the team–their crushing defeats, their valiant triumphs. And this is more than just a vicarious experience. With wins come genuine opportunities to be gracious (obviously some fans miss these opportunities by being so obnoxious, but that’s neither here nor there). And when you lose, you get to be humble and congratulate the opposing fans on their success, even if the words taste like vinegar.

And now to spiritual abandonment. The “Serenity Prayer” is one of my favorites: “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Being a sports fan has been an exercise for me in learning to recognize and accept what I cannot change and to practice abandonment in the face of these circumstances. Obviously, the gravity of whether your team wins or loses is far less and quite different from issues such as whether a sick person is going to get better, whether a loved one is going to overcome addiction, or something of this nature. But again, like with courage, sports fandom provides a sort of training wheels practice experience for learning the virtue of spiritual abandonment. We learn that many times in life, we cannot change the result. We can only pray.

And if you are wondering if I am implying that it’s okay to work the rosary beads during a football game, I absolutely am, especially if you’re cheering for Our Lady’s team. In the words of the great ND coach Lou Holtz, “God doesn’t care who wins a football game, but His Mother does.”

You may think this piece is, in the end, a failed attempt to give a justification for my family’s outsized devotion to football. And you may be right. I’ll be the first one to admit that sports fanaticism can get out of hand and take up more than its fair share of our minds and hearts. In that sense, losses are a good correction that makes us reflect on our priorities and keeps our fandom in its proper place. It’s a sad existence if our joy in life really rests on worldly success and the actions of people we cannot control.

However, kept in its proper place and lived well, I think sports fandom is a beautiful thing. It is a way of being in communion, a partial fulfillment of the desire we have as human beings desire to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and a way to grow into the people God created us to be.

So here’s hoping that the game this Sunday is a moment of communion and an opportunity for growth in virtue for Chiefs fans, Eagles fan, and sports fans everywhere.