Want to be Happy and Healthier? Be a Sports Fan!
Research and anecdotal evidence point to all kinds of benefits from being a fan
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May 11th, Yankees vs. Toronto Aaron Judge would hit the game winning home run
The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Yankees. The score stood 5-3 in the ninth with the Yanks trailing the visiting Toronto Blue Jays. The announced attendance was over 42,000 but the crowd had already thinned considerably and now more people began to drift away into the chilly Bronx evening after the first Yankee batter struck out.
The fabled poem, Casey at the Bat, described in verse a similar, fictitious atmosphere at the ballpark with the home team down and the game on the line. "A sickly silence fell upon the remaining patrons of the game. A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest clung to the hope which springs eternal in the human breast."
Our hope was that Aaron Judge, mighty 99, would get to bat. But one out already and two batters ahead of him.
But D.J. LaMahieu walked, and then so did Jose Trevino. There were two runners on base and Judge, mighty Judge, was advancing to the plate. The remnants of a crowd began to stir. Just maybe?
Judge worked the count to 2-2. "And now the pitcher holds the ball," wrote the poet Ernest Lawrence Thayer, "and now he lets it go."
The crack of the bat was like a clap of thunder. The crowd was on its feet, watching, watching, but we already knew. Everyone in Yankee Stadium knew. It was a home run. A game-winning three-run home run.
The runners circled the bases. Yankees poured out of the dugout and mobbed each man as they touched home plate. In the stands, we shrieked. We screamed. We whooped like maniacs. Frank Sinatra sang New York, New York and we sang right along with him. "Start spreading the news..."
We were happy.
Behind enemy lines at Mets-Yankees game at Citifield with my pal, Phi Bertelsen in 2015
I'm a sports fan. Baseball in particular is my passion Ever since I first moved to New York in 1977, the Yankees have been my team. But two months ago, I had a crisis of faith. The war in Ukraine had just broken out. The United Nations had issued an alarming report on the effects of climate change. Covid was making yet another comeback. Major league baseball would start late after a labor dispute. I wondered if sports mattered, if it was even frivolous.
So, I took an informal survey via Facebook asking that question. To my surprise, almost everyone who replied said they welcomed sports as a distraction, a symbol of normalcy in a turbulent world. That, in turn, led me to wonder what it is about sports that makes it so important to people, including, well, me.
Departing fans celebrate Yankees come-from-behind win
I came across an article in The Atlantic magazine by Arthur C. Brooks under the headline Sports Are Great Because They're Pointless. Brooks, a Harvard professor, wrote movingly about how he and his late father shared a love of the Chicago Cubs. He also cited some statistics* about fandom that surprised me: "42 percent of the most involved sports fans were 'very satisfied' with their family life, compared with less than a quarter of nonfans. Sixty-one percent of fans, but only 37 percent of nonfans, said they 'felt close to people.'"*
Brooks invoked Aristotle's musings about philas, "the mutual attraction and attachments that form the basis of every relationship between human beings." A philia based on a transactional relationship is the least virtuous kind. A philia based on "the deep satisfaction that a relationship brings each person, and desire that the other be happy" is the most virtuous. It may be a friendship based on a shared love of something, like baseball. Brooks and his dad bonded over the Cubs. Continuing to follow the Cubs, he said, stirs those warm memories.
I found other studies that claimed to find that sports fans are generally happier, better socially adjusted, and mentally and even physically healthier than nonfans. Those benefits are often attributed to the comforting feeling of belonging.
"For most people, the need to belong is even more powerful than the desire for self-esteem," wrote Dr. Allen R. McConnell, a psychology professor at the University of Miami, in a 2015 article in Psychology Today. "Simply put, social connectedness is a critical human need, and one way we establish it is through symbolic affiliations with others."
My research eventually led me to Larry Olmsted who wrote the 2021 book Fandom: How Sports Makes Us Happier, Healthier and More Understanding. We spoke recently by phone. Here are excerpts from our conversation.
Larry Olmsted (Facebook page)
RC: What is your definition of a fan? I go to baseball games and pay intense attention to what's going on on the field. Most of my friends are drinking beer and talking about movies and work and politics, all kinds of things. So what's a fan? People like me or anyone who is at the stadium?
LO: The psychologists and sociologists who study this have developed this spectator sport kind of rating questionnaire that determines how avid you are. If you score over a certain amount, they consider you a fan. But my definition is: if you tell me you're a fan, that's good enough for me. It's like saying you're Catholic. It's not for me to judge how devout you are.
RC: How did you come to write the book?
LO: There's thousands of books written about sports and almost all of them are about teams, players, bios, even a number of business management books based on sports teams but almost nothing about fans. So I thought fans were being given short shrift. But to be honest, I came at it from the other side. I attended a Yankees-Red Sox game at Fenway Park eight or nine years ago. I saw a couple with two little kids who were wearing shirts that had obscene sayings about Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter on them. I was like, 'What's wrong with these people that they would dress their kids like that?' I thought maybe there is something about being a sports fan that is bad for us and wouldn't that be an interesting book. So I started to do the research and as soon as I dove into the science, I saw that, 'Oh, that's not that case.' It's 180 degrees the opposite. It's really good for us to be sports fans. In retrospect, I should have noticed the other 39,998 well-adjusted fans having a good time.
Photo credit: Getty Images
RC: Are most fans dedicated to one team in one sport or multiple teams in multiple sports?
LO: Multiple teams in multiple sports. Rarely multiple teams in the same sport though it does happen with people who are transplants. I think the one sort of major study done came up with that people who define themselves as fans follow an average of four-and-a-half teams, which is a lot.
RC: What's the popular stereotype of a sports fan?
LO: Overweight. Male. Kind of never fully grown up. A little bit of Peter Pan Syndrome who drinks too much and wears a lot of sports team clothing.
RC: We see that in movies.
LO: I looked at every movie and sit-com that I could find that portrayed fans and (there were) very few exceptions to that and, on top of it, in movies, they tend to make them mentally unstable. Even in the kind of harmless (characters), I think about the King of Queens TV show. He had guys over. They sit there. They drink beers and by watching sports ignore their families. In real life, that is certainly not the case, Almost half of sports fans are women and lots of couples watch sports together, but you rarely see that portrayed.
RC: What's closer to an accurate image?
LO: I don't think stereotypes are good with anything, especially when you're talking about 52 percent of the people in the country who are sports fans in every educational, economic, racial, urban, rural. Every demographic is represented. To me that's the great thing about sports fandom. It blurs those lines that divide us in other ways. There's a quote that I put in my book from another book about sports fans. He was talking about the Raiders and was saying that in this crowd of Blacks and Whites and Hispanics and people dressed in gorilla suits and young and old, the black and silver of Raiders Nation was all that matters. Everyone is on (the) team. Everyone is a member of a community.
RC: The title of your book is Fans: How Watching Sports Makes Us Happier, Healthier and More Understanding. How does it make us happier?
Celebrating Yankees comeback win, 2016
LO: Purely from a mental health perspective, psychologists who've studied this have identified about two dozen factors, important things like lower rates of depression, higher self-esteem, having a larger social circle, more friends, more satisfaction with their social life. Those are things that people who are fans enjoy at higher rates or, in the case of depression, at lower rates than nonfans. All of which is good for us and what makes us happy. A lot of that comes from a sense of belonging to a community. Humans are tribal creatures and always have been. We have this desire to be part of a community and that (is what) sports give us. Even when you're not at a game, when you're watching the Yankees play, people think 'Oh, I'm watching a baseball game and that area is full of 40 thousand people.' By virtue of seeing all those people in the stadium, the sports fan feels connected. They're part of something and that something makes us happy as humans. To me, that's the bottom line. It's a club that requires no application fees. Nobody can tell you no. There are no membership requirements. You just decide you're a Yankees fan and you're part of it. That's why in sports, the fan groups are called nations. It is like a country unto itself.
RC: The thing that surprised me were studies that found not just that the fan bonds with fans of the same team, but there seems to be a connection with being a fan and your happiness in your relationships with families and friends away from the sporting arena.
LO: Absolutely. One of the studies said people who are sports fans have higher GPA's (in college students). I don't know definitively but my opinion is it's not because being a sports fan makes you better at taking tests or makes you smarter. It's because when you go to college, for most people, it's like their first time living away from home. It might be the first time they are among peers who are a lot smarter than them. It's very competitive. It's very stressful. All of the things that are a negative about college living are alleviated by the factors that makes sports fans happy. If you're happier, more well-adjusted, more self confident and better at socialization, you're going to be more comfortable in college. If you're more comfortable in college, you're going to get better grades. So if you're happier, yeah, you're going to have better relationships with people, whether they're your friends or family.'
RC: How do sports make us physically healthier?
LO: Healthier is not as clear and obvious and proven as happier. I mean, it is proven but the problem is it's kind of a chicken or egg thing. So, sports fans or people who identify as fans are physically healthier than nonfans. But the question is: is it because they're fans? Or are they fans of sports because they're more active? So I tried to look for examples of cases where purely being a spectator on the couch converted people to an active participant in something. I found several examples of that.
Then, beyond that, there is some science that's -- if somewhat questionable but still suggestive that watching sports is better for us than watching a sit-com because your mirror neurons fire and you have this sympathetic muscle response where your heart rate accelerates, where your body is more active while watching than it would be during Seinfeld. The problem with that whole thing is none of these tests is really conclusive/ I think the positive aspect is that watching sorts motivates people to be active. Not everyone, but some people.
RC: You talk in your book about the unifying force or value of sports in the aftermath of 9/11.
LO: This is my personal favorite thing in the book and one that surprised me. I don't think it takes a big brain leap of faith to say if you like watching football then watching football will make you happy (laughter). It's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy but this post traumatic healing of community, nation, city really is powerful and has happened over and over. 9/11 is the biggest example. But we've seen it over and over where it's a way for people to heal and go back to normal. I have a quote from the woman whose husband was killed in 9/11 that said her kids she saw their first smile at the Mets game (10 days later) since their father passed away. One of the sports fans I interviewed said it made it okay to smile again, to clap, to laugh at this time of incredible sadness. That's a big thing. The psychologists talk a lot about normalcy. That's what people want after trauma is a sense of normalcy.
RC: The final item in the title of your book. More understanding. How does fandom make us more understanding?
LO: I wish I would re-write the title of the book now
RC: Too late!
LO: Yeah. Too late. I like the title and I know what I meant by that. But that caused more misunderstanding. People thought I meant the lessons of sports, coaching, fair play, all of these things and that is not what I meant. It literally made us more understanding, democratic, socially minded, less discriminatory people. The low hanging fruit of this is the Jackie Robinson story, the integration of baseball. It's not like Jackie Robinson playing baseball eliminated racism in America. It would be ridiculous to say. But all social progress is a series of steps. And sports fandom has been a vital player in a number of the movements, the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Rights Movement, the LBGTQ Rights Movement. When I wrote the book, I said to myself I wonder what will be next, what will be the next great issue that sports fandom is at the forefront of. And it didn't take long after the book came out to be mental health awareness when the Olympics came around and Simone Biles (the American gymnast who disclosed her depression during the Beijing Olympics last year). The public health movement, they've had mental health awareness month and mental awareness day and these publicity campaigns for thirty years. And sports fandom did more in two days to bring this issue to the forefront of American discourse than the government and the medical community have been able to do in our lifetimes. That's what I meant by more understanding. Especially now, unfortunately, we need people to be better people.
*Brooks attributes the survey results he cites to a book, Fans Have More Friends, by Ben Valenta and David Sikorjak.
With my fellow Yankee fan brother, Rob Marciano
Cover photo credit: Getty Images