№ 6
Long-Suffering Fan Gets a Few Things Off His Chest
—Edmonton Journal, July 20, 2003
True Believers
The Tragic Inner Life of Sports Fans
By Joe Queenan
Henry Holt, 236 pages, $33.95
Fear and loathing seem second nature to Joe Queenan. After you’ve finished reading True Believers, you’ll never accuse him of being a happy man.
Joe Queenan labours under a curse. Born into this world a Philadelphia sports fan, his entire life has been sidetracked by an unending series of doomed seasons supporting teams that invariably fail — from baseball’s Phillies to football’s Eagles, from basketball’s 76ers to hockey’s Flyers. Each year, his absolute loyalty is rewarded with angst and suffering.
Near the start of True Believers, this sometime confessional, sometime road map to “the tragic inner life of sports fans,” Queenan asks the all-important question: Why do we persist? Isn’t watching sports, he writes, “a massively time-consuming activity that inexorably leads to inordinate misery?”
It may very well be, he says. But he’s obsessed and he wants to show just why so many of us are, too.
This isn’t some semi-literate oaf speaking. Queenan writes regularly for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and he’s also written seven books, about everything from former U.S. vice-president Dan Quayle to the movies.
But True Believers isn’t a genteel ode pulled from The New Yorker; this is South Philadelphia stuff, Rocky country. Forget about the high road. Like any good sports fan, Queenan loves to hate — maybe even more than he loves to love.
And this man’s animosities are Olympian. He despises New York sports culture. TV announcers. Women (what about the men?) who sing national anthems. Preseason games. Mascots. Fair-weather fans. Bandwagon jumpers (“front-runners,” he calls them). And, of course, the New York Yankees, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the Dallas Cowboys.
He’s also preoccupied with sports movies. To him, Buffalo ’66, Vincent Gallo’s 1998 film about a Bills fan out to murder the placekicker who threw away the Super Bowl, is a picture-perfect glimpse into the human soul.
“Gallo,” he writes, “has captured exactly what most sports fans feel about athletes who screw up. They want to go gunning for them.”
Queenan isn’t joking. Later on, in a chapter titled Fans Who Misbehave, he writes: “If you ask the average male to describe his dream scenario, it would be the chance to beat somebody senseless and know that he could get away with it.”
Here, Queenan relates his own ragged impulses. He’d love to throttle dozens of fans who’ve annoyed him at sporting events over the years. Only the fear of retribution (and sometimes his better judgment) has stopped him. He’s still waiting for that “blind, one- armed midget Klansman” — his ideal prey — to emerge at the ballpark.
During spells like this, True Believers becomes dangerously off-putting. Queenan can be very funny; he’s rarely charming. And when he’s prying larger truths about “the intransigence of the male primate” from a scene at the concession stand, things begin to crumble. You end up craving something more substantial, a kind of coherence beyond the lurching anecdotes and pop-culture debris. Witty Top Ten lists — Guidelines for the Perfect Fan or Things Sports Commentators Should Never Say — only go so far.
True Believers is like a simple, hypnotic riff turned into an entire CD, a Saturday Night Live skit blown up into a film. For 13 minutes or so it’s very funny. Then it just conks out.
If the best sports books make you tug on your cap a little tighter and root, root, root for the home team, Queenan makes you feel slightly psychotic. He also reminds you that if the Flyers are in town, watch your back. That guy gunning for your head might just be him.