Warriors fans as an imagined community

On March 17 I was fortunate enough to go to a great Golden State Warriors game. I hadn't been to a basketball since I was seven or eight and this was a great one to go to. The Warriors eked out a narrow victory over the Sacramento Kings. Because the Kings are relatively local and have a huge fan base in the Bay Area, there was almost as much purple in the audience as there was blue and gold.

What struck me about the game was the fans. Granted, the Warriors and Kings fans were relatively peaceful, but they still exhibit fierce loyalty to their teams. I wondered why fans feel so emotionally attached to the fortunes of any specific team.

First, it seems almost entirely arbitrary whether you would be a fan of the Kings or the Warriors if you lived in the Bay Area. For much of the Bay Area Sacramento is closer to or faster to get to than the Oakland Arena. So geographic proximity wouldn't have much of an impact on your choice of self identification as either a Kings or a Warriors fan. Indeed, I believe if one studied the fan base of the Oakland A's and the San Francisco Giants one would find that there is very little or no correlation between geography and team loyalty. There must be another more powerful factor influencing fans loyalty.

The second possible factor could be that the players of a specific team represent the people of a specific area. Now, this theory may have held water in professional sports until, say, the mid-1970s, but since sports have become so professionalized with nationwide drafts and nationwide player pools, it is rare that any team has a larger number of players from any one geographic region - even the teams own geographic region. Essentially, it's rare to find a hometown sports player, let alone a whole team of them. So I would guess that fans don't usually feel loyal to their hometown team because of shared experiences or upbringing with the players of the team. There is no personal connection between the players and the fans. One could argue that the players become a part of the community that they are living in, but in reality the fan base would usually live in a different area than the posh communities favored by rich athletes, and it's clear that athletes feel much more attached to money than the communities where they live for a few years.

The third possible reason for strong fan loyalty to specific teams could be that fans equate their team's success with financial gain and prestige of the community. This theory is a hard sell. I see three big flaws in the logic. The first big hole is that fans simply don't think that way. When Jason Richardson sinks a three pointer and Joe Warriors Fan goes ape-crazy, I doubt he's thinking, "Yes, there's $3000 more tax revenue for my community!" That's just not how sports fans think. My second problem with the argument is that studies have shown that there are really minimal financial gains for a community to build a sports venue and host a team. Partly because the prestige of hosting a professional sports team has bid down what team owners will offer to communities in return for bringing their team to a specific area. My third problem with this argument is that it is illogical for a fan to feel that a team's success reflects at all on the quality of the community where the team is based. As noted above, teams are not made of hometown heroes anymore. Some of the worst sports teams are based in areas that produce the best athletes and vice-versa.

The only logical argument that I could see a researcher positing and reasonably proving is that people feel that the "personality" of the team or its star players reflects their own personality or the personality of the community or region. This is a reasonable argument. I can think of a number of examples in the Bay Area alone. San Francisco is a relatively "yuppy" place and the Giants and 49ers and are perceived as yuppy teams. Meanwhile, the Raiders and A's are perceived as "working class" and Oakland is also perceived in the same way. The same arguments could be made about the Philadelphia Phillies in the mid-1990s and culture surrounding the Los Angeles Lakers until just last year. It's arguable how much of this is similarity between the culture of the community and culture of the team is real and how much is imagined to justify and rationalize the community's support for the team.

There is one other way to think about fan loyalty. As one of my professors would say, Benedict Anderson's theory of nations as imagined communities holds true for the fans of sports teams. There is no way that any one Warriors fan could possibly meet every other Warriors fan but he still feels a basic connection with those who have felt the thrill of victory and the sting of defeat along with him through the course of the season. This one of the basic building blocks of national sentiment and the birth of a nation. The nation, meaning a unit of terminal loyalty, to which all other loyalties are ancillary. Raider Nation, anyone?

As a corollary, I think that this is the argument that Thomas Frank makes in his book What's the Matter with Kansas? He argues (mostly with anecdotes) that voters are less focused on their own personal gain in politics and more focused on the "values" of the party or candidate, regardless of how the individual voter stands to gain or lose in decisions made on his behalf. This argument goes against the accepted models of political participation and voting behavior that say that you can predict a voter's behavior based on his perceived economic gain. Maybe we should be researching sports and politics are if they are closely linked in the psychology of Americans. I mean, what is politics if not the extension of basketball by another name?