Not About Wine: In Praise of Fair Weather Fandom

I’m not a big sports fan. At least not any more. I’ll catch a Cal football or basketball game every now and then and I’ll rarely turn down an invitation to drink beer and eat unhealthy food while watching any sort of sporting event. Even tennis. Oh, and relaxing on a warm afternoon at a baseball game is one of life’s great pleasures. If I have a beer and some nachos I don’t even care who’s playing.

That wasn’t always the case. As a kid in the Bay Area in the late 80s and early 90s when the Giants, A’s and 49ers ranged from competitive to dominant it was hard not to be a sports fan. And I was a huge fan. Will Clark and Jerry Rice posters. So many Starting Lineup figurines.

But I got older and I met girls and by the middle of high school I just stopped paying attention to sports. In college I had season tickets to Cal basketball games but that was the extent of my interest.

In the last couple years though, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing two of my childhood teams unexpectedly go all the way (Giants) and pretty damn far (49ers). And I’m not ashamed to admit that I didn’t pay a damn bit of attention until the regular season was 90% finished.

Look, there are a lot more important and interesting (to me) things to do than watch men in spandex run around but when the season-long bullshit shakes out and games actually have stakes–most important of which is the big fuck you to the absurdly biased east coast sports media when a west coast team wins big.

But am I going to watch regular season Giants or Niners games next season? Only as much as I did last season, which is to say, not very much.

So call me a fair weather fan or just an lame-o who doesn’t care much for sports. I’m okay with it.