A few years ago Philip Roth caused a stir when he announced that he was giving up rooting for the Mets and switching to the Yankees. "Why should I continue to feel obligated to schoolyard allegiances?" he asked.
How do we choose which teams to root for? For many people, it's a matter of geographical fate. I was born and raised north of Chicago's Madison Avenue; therefore, I'm a Cub fan. Move my childhood only a few miles to the south, and I would be a White Sox fan. But I spent a good portion of my adulthood--eleven years--in Philadelphia, so I'm also a Philliies fan. When I walk around the Chicago area with my Phillies cap, especially downtown, I get a lot of mildly suspicious looks, as if I were flying the flag of a foreign nation. It's not quite like being a transplanted Chicagoan in Wisconsin, where Packers fans regard a Bears fan like he's in a terrorist cell, but the hostility pops up every so often. Walking around the Loop one day in my Phillies hat a grandmotherly type snapped at me, "You can't wear that around here." Then my family complained when I gave my son a Phillies hat, a souvenir from a business trip to Philly. Finally, unwilling to interpellate my son into the vagaries of my own biography, I bought him a Cubs hat for his third birthday—interpellating him, of course, into another ideology. But I'm glad to see that he prefers wearing his Phillies hat.
My son knows what baseball is, but he has no concept of the Major Leagues or even teams. One trip to Wrigley Field will imprint the Cubs on his brain forever, just as it did me when I was six years old. But why should we get assigned our fandom identities before we choose a career or a life partner, and why can't we freely choose who we want to root for without having to explain our choice all the time? Why can't I be a Cardinals fan, a much more sensible choice given the histories of the Cubs and the Phillies? We think of America as a society of self-fashioning in which we freely create our identities in a particularly linear manner. Recall that Huckleberry Finn, generally regarded as the first truly American novel, is the story of a boy who leaves home and doesn't look back. So playground allegiances shouldn't be so hard to shake, but they are.
Maybe we need some identities that we don't choose, that are imposed upon us at birth and never leave us, for better or for worse. Maybe we all have a psychical bartering system that recognizes some immutable but unfortunate identities while allowing us to keep all of the other identities more provisional. I'm a Phillies fan partly to recognize a discontinuity in my life--the Chicago to which I returned a few years ago is different, and not altogether better, than the Chicago I left--and partly to keep open the possibility that I could move someplace else. To have the freedom to choose where one lives also means that there's always another, better, truer home someplace else. Sports team allegiances are a form of localized identity, and as such they're major markers in the narratives we construct about ourselves.
So yesterday was an interesting day: the Bears lost, badly, but the Phillies beat out the hated Mets for the Eastern Division crown. The Cubs clinched a few days ago in their typically diffident way, unlike the '93 Phillies, who charged right into the World Series. There's a realistic chance that the Cubs and the Phillies could meet for the NLCS, and should that happen, I'll suffer a lot of cognitive dissonance, but I know that my old playground allegiances will reassert themselves. Sorry Phillies.
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