When I was a kid, my dad sat me down, opened a book about the NHL, and said it was time to pick my team. The Vancouver Canucks were the closest geographically, but that was my older sister’s team. I scanned the logos—Calgary’s flaming C, Pittsburgh’s skating penguin, Detroit’s winged wheel—and picked what I thought was the most beautiful emblem: that of the Chicago Blackhawks.
That quick decision sparked decades of support. I idolized players; I drew fan art; in 1993, I collected tokens from boxes of cereal and paid shipping and handling for my school picture to be transformed into my very own hockey card. I still keep it in a hard-plastic case.
As I grew older, my superficial childlike support for the Blackhawks began to change. Players I once idolized were embroiled in controversies off the ice—something, as a fan, I couldn’t ignore—and the team’s logo has been included in important conversations around offensive branding and mascots. I find myself cheering for the Canucks these days.
The reasons people have for supporting
one sports team over another often come down to the randomness of life. They can be tied to where a person was born, be sparked by watching a winning goal or point, or come from the absolute fealty passed down through generations like a hereditary trait. There are lifelong fans and casual fans, diehards and bandwagoners. There are those who camp out for a ticket, who make pilgrimages to cathedrals of sport, or who rise bleary-eyed in the middle of the night to watch a game on the other side of the world. At first whistle they are all united, a collection of individuals brought together—in joy, in anxiety, in hope—to form the powerful entity that is a crowd.
There may be wins, but there are often losses. Still, fans hang on—for just one moment of celebration over something that means so
little and yet means so much.
