Cheering for Laundry

It's my understanding that Stephen Brunt is a Cleveland Browns fan.

Think about this for a minute.

The man that is, arguably, the best sports writer in Canada cheers for a team that won its last Championship in 1964 and hasn’t won its division since 1989.

A 40+ year drought, bad ownership and no short-term success on the horizon.

Sound familiar?

Yet, up to 16 times a year, Brunt cheers on a team that didn’t even exist from 1996 to 1999; a club the NFL actually “deactivated.”

Now, I don’t know if he collects jerseys, if he wears a dog-mask in his living room on Sunday afternoons or if he gets misty at dinner parties when the topic turns to the death of Jim Brown’s character at the end of the Dirty Dozen.

But this is where his heart resides.

While I have no sense of the depth of Brunt’s fanaticism for the Browns, it does lead me to a larger question: Can you extract the team from the ownership and general idiocy that surrounds it? Can you separate the action on the ice, diamond, pitch or field from the suits/idiots in the corridors of power?

Or is fandom more like a marriage – you fall in love with the team, but you marry the whole family?

As a Leaf fan, it’s pretty obvious why this question is of interest to me.

On the Origins of Fandom: Geography, Patricide and Cheap Souvenirs

I likely became a Leaf fan simply because I was born in Toronto. Geography was destiny. Had I been born in my mum’s home town of Kingston, I’d give even odds that I’d have been a Habs fan (as half of my dirt-eating Ottawa valley family seem to be).

Geography aside, I can remember arguing with my Grandfather in his tiny home in Inverary, Ontario about Ian Turnbull (I was for, he was against). It may have been the first time I stood up to an adult. I remember begging my father to buy me a newspaper so I could look at the pictures of the Leafs eliminating the Islanders in ’78. I remember listening to Leafs on the radio as they went up against the mighty Flyers in ’79 and the elation of waking up to find out Mike Palmateer somehow led the team to a tie.

My first inkling that something was rotten with Leafs ownership didn’t come until Lanny MacDonald was traded and Sittler stripped off the C. I was eight, maybe nine, years old. I still had hope. Clearly I didn’t know any better.

Sometime around 1980-'81 my father came home from a business trip to St. Louis and gave me a Cardinals batting practice jersey. This simple off-white cotton-poly blend with three-quarter length red sleeves has led to nearly three decades of supporting a National League team some 1,200 kilometers away.

My pops liked Joe Theismann because of his days with the Argos (Joe’s, not my Dad’s). When Theismann went to the Washington Redskins, the New York Giants became my team. There’s nothing quite like being a contrarian 12 year old l'il bastard who picks a team simply to cheer against one's father.

A Poll of Sorts

I’d like to know why you cheer for your favourite team.

Was it the smell of the grass in the old Tiger Stadium? A trip to Buffalo to see the Bills back in the days of Kelly, Thomas and Reed? An especially delicious hot fudge sundae from Dairy Queen served in a Mariners cap? Or maybe it was just to spite a certain someone who insisted on cheering for the Yankees, Cowboys, Lakers or Habs?

Please post a comment and tell your story.

I think it's time we shared these stories as a rejoinder to those who question why people cheer for a team with history of failure and mismanagement.

I think it's time for the media to stop and reflect before they call fans stupid for supporting teams with venal owners or teams that don't appear to have a championship on even the most distant horizon.

I'm guessing (and sort of hoping) that the lesson from all of these personal stories is that no fan ever fell in love with a team, player or sport because of an ownership structure, player development policies, salary cap discipline or management style.

We'll see...