Category: sports

The Chosen Ones? Jordan, Einstein, and “The Babe” Defy the Myths

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Genius Chronicle: April 30, 1992, game three of the first round of the Eastern Conference’s playoffs, and Michael Jordan is nearly trapped in the corner of the three-point arc by Kiki Vandeweghe and John Starks. Jordan moves left and Kiki Vandeweghe drops off. Starks then baits Jordan into a trap, leading him into one of the most feared defenders in the NBA, Charles Oakley. Seeing those two Knicks narrow in for a trap into the corner would’ve led 99% of the NBA brightest stars to pass the ball. Jordan gambled. He faked left, and Starks fell for it, almost literally falling to the Madison Square Garden floor. Jordan then tucked under Oakley to take advantage of a sliver of real estate that existed between Oakley and the baseline. He straddled that baseline and dunked on arguably the most feared defender in the game at the time, future Hall of Fame inductee Patrick Ewing. If this wasn’t one of the greatest plays in NBA history, it might’ve been one of the most memorable. Jordan himself claimed it was his personal favorite dunk. Some said it was “Michael being Michael.”

Michael wouldn’t have been able to accomplish that play, against those guys, without incredible natural abilities. Yet, how many NBA stars, past and present, have been blessed with similar abilities? Jordan fans would say no one, but what separated Jordan from his peers was his ability to achieve the spectacular and the comparatively routine. He did both so well, so often, that he helped the Bulls achieve a 65.9% winning percentage in the regular season and a 66.5% in the playoffs, and six NBA Championships. Those of us who marvel at highlight reels often forget about that other half. Yet, a Michael Jordan, an Albert Einstein, or any of the geniuses of physical and cerebral accomplishment couldn’t have accomplished half of what they did without outworking their peers.

Genius Chronicle: June 30, 1905, Albert Einstein drops the first of four major contributions to the foundation of modern physics special relativity (later expanded into general relativity). The other major contributions included the photoelectric effect, and Brownian motion. In doing so, he helped fundamentally transform physics by redefining space, time, gravity, quantum theory, and atomic behavior, shaping modern theoretical and applied physics. Those who knew Einstein probably marveled at Einstein’s findings, but others probably said, “That’s just Albert being Albert.”

A line like that sounds like a compliment. It sounds like we’re saying that they’re so talented that they make the miraculous appear mundane, and we just came to expect that from them in their prime. Yet, I consider such lines reductive, because they fail to recognize their struggle to get to the point that their continued greatness was just “them being them”.

Dealing with Failure

Those who drop the “Michael being Michael” line should know that Michael Jordan wasn’t always Air Jordan, or Black Jesus, as some called him. He was cut from the Laney High varsity team as a fifteen-year-old sophomore, due to his height (5’10” at the time), his physical immaturity, and his lack of experience. Yet, how many fifteen-year-old sophomores make the varsity team? Prodigies do, and Michael Jordan thought he was just that. The coach, Clifton “Pop” Herring, later said he spotted Jordan’s potential, but that he didn’t believe the fifteen-year-old was ready to face varsity level competition. Herring basically told Jordan, he wasn’t a prodigy, not yet, and that crushed Jordan. He was so crushed that according to Roland Lazenby’s Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby, Jordan kept that publicly posted tryout list as motivation. The young Jordan obviously sulked about it, but then he went to work. Over the decades that followed, Jordan developed a relentless work ethic that he double downed on anytime he experienced defeat.

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career [12,345 regular season and 2,309 post-season for a total of 14,954],” Michael Jordan is famously quoted as saying, “I’ve lost almost 300 games [380 regular season and 60 in the post season]. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed.” This number, twenty-six, is the best-known estimate, attributed to Jordan himself, but it’s not independently verified by modern statistical databases. It likely includes shots to tie or win games in the final seconds of the fourth quarter or overtime, across both regular season and postseason. Bleacher Report estimated Jordan’s clutch postseason shooting percentage at 50% (8 of 16 attempts through his first 16 clutch shots), but this doesn’t specify total misses.

Einstein was asked to leave his school at fifteen. The school’s administrators informed Einstein, “Your presence in the class destroys the respect of the others.” He failed an entrance exam at Swiss Federal Polytechnic, and then he struggled to find work postgraduation, leading him to experience some level of poverty firsthand. His initial attempts at academic recognition fell flat when all of his early papers were either ignored or rejected, as his peers deemed his work unremarkable. Yet, how many young scientists, with no connections, are accepted into the scientific community in their initial attempts? Prodigies, or the “chosen ones” who can remove the proverbial Sword in the Stone are. Like Jordan, the idealistic, young Einstein knew he was destined for greatness, but no one else did. They were both faces in a crowd of idealistic young people who knew they were destined for greatness. 

When we read such stories about geniuses, we can’t help but think of ourselves as faces in that crowd. We thought we were destined for greatness when we were young, and it would’ve meant so much to us to be recognized as the geniuses we were, back then. Is that irrational, considering that we probably didn’t have the remarkable talent we thought we did, and if we did have any talent, we didn’t put in the work necessary to hone it? It is, but we were young, idealistic, and a little delusional back then. When we attempted to remove the proverbial sword from the stone, we realized that we weren’t “the chosen one”. Learning this hurts, but the notion that we are a lot more common than we ever thought stings. Even when it was obvious to everyone around us that we weren’t ready, we resented the guardians at the gate for not recognizing our genius. We became bitter, and we sulked. I don’t care what any eventual recognized geniuses say, they sulked too, and then they achieved greatness by using that rejection as fuel to prove their detractors wrong. Most of them had no shortcuts through nepotism, or anything else to ease their rise, and their only recourse was to just work harder than the similarly gifted.

Dealing with Rewards

The question those of us who will never be invited into the historical halls of greatness would love to know is, was your eventual, hard-won invitation just as meaningful as it would’ve been when you were an idealistic, and perhaps a little delusional, young teen? We’ve all been taught to think that success is the reward for hard work, but how much hard work is too much? When we devote so much of our time and energy to achieving greatness, sometimes we sacrifice the ability to develop normal, human relationships, we might accidentally ignore family members, and we could employ a level of tunnel vision that effectively ruins what could’ve otherwise been a happy life. Is that moment of acceptance as euphoric as we think it would be, or is it almost, in way that’s “tough to describe” anti-climactic?

Our knee-jerk response is that instant recognition would’ve stunted their growth, and the great ones probably wouldn’t be as great if bitterness, resentment, and all that inner turmoil didn’t fuel their drive. Yet, we can also imagine that there had to be some measure of “Where were you when this really would’ve meant so much more to me?” involved in their acceptance.

Michael Jordan hugged and cried on the Larry O’Brien Award the first time he won it, but those in his inner circle say that his almost ingrained sense of bitterness and resentment drove him to win five more. This bitterness and resentment could also be heard after his retirement, in his Hall of Fame induction speech.

Einstein harbored a similar sense of “smoldering resentment” toward the gatekeepers who dismissed him. In a 1901 letter to his sister, he wrote of “fools” in academia who favored conformity over originality, implying that if they weren’t so rigid he wouldn’t have had to work so hard to gain acceptance. The two of them both had chips almost biologically attached to their shoulders throughout their lives, and we can speculate that they may not have achieved half of what they did if they weren’t rejected early. They both used those early rejections to fuel their inner fire to prove their respective communities were wrong about them, but even when they did, my guess is it didn’t remove the pain of those early rejections.

The Supernatural, Natural Abilities

We’ve since limited the idea that Einstein was a genius as Einstein being a genius, as if he didn’t achieve that status. He was just different, so different he may have been a slightly different creature. We’ve studied his brain to see why he was so much smarter than everyone else, to see why he was so different that he was special or supernatural. We discovered that his brain had what they called “a unique morphology, and abnormal Sylvius Fissure, increased glial cells.” We also found that his brain “was actually smaller than average (1,230 grams vs. typical 1,400 grams), contradicting the assumption that larger brains equate to higher intelligence.” Even though speculative estimates suggest less than 1% of the population might have neurological enhancements comparable to Einstein’s, based on neurodiversity research, I still find it reductive to limit his incredible accomplishments with the idea that he had an unusually efficient brain. Why can’t we just say that all of his findings could’ve been the result of a lifetime of intense research into general and specific areas of physics? Why can’t we say that he spent so much time studying physics, persevering through the failures inherent in trial and error that he ended up developing some incredibly creative theories? Why can’t we say while he may have been biologically predisposed to intellectually brilliant findings, many others had the same cranial gifts, and they didn’t do anything anywhere close to what Albert Einstein did with these advantages. Why can’t we just say he worked harder, and more often than his peers?

We know there was nothing supernatural about what Einstein or Jordan did, but it’s just not very interesting to talk about all the hard work they put into it. We’re interested in the origins of genius, and we’re interested in the results, but everything in between is the yada, yada, yada portion of that discussion. We’d rather ask “How did they do that?” than learn about how they actually did it. It’s far more entertaining to think in terms of a “natural talent fallacy” or a “the genius myth” than breakdown the hundreds of hours they spent in a gym, or in a lab, honing their ability, or dedicating so much of their mind and energy to their profession, or craft, that when they happened to be “around”, they probably weren’t much fun to be around.

The Babe

George Herman Ruth (AKA “The Bambino,” “The Sultan of Swat”, or “The Babe”) may have been the opposite of Einstein and Jordan in that he appeared to enjoy every step of his gradual ascension to greatness. The Babe didn’t face the same substantial levels of rejection Einstein and Jordan did, but that may have been due to the fact that The Babe never felt entitled to it. I don’t think anyone would accuse Jordan or Einstein of being entitled, but whatever vagaries we apply to the term entitled in these cases, The Babe was the opposite when he was but a babe.

Babe Ruth was born into poverty, in a rough working-class neighborhood well known for crime and violence. His parents were hard-drinking saloon owners, who provided their son a chaotic, unstable, and troubled environment that led him to commit petty crimes and truancy. His overwhelmed parents sent to a St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, a reformatory school. While attending this school, a Brother Matthias taught him baseball, but Ruth’s talent was confined to the school’s teams, unseen by wider audiences. Students of St. Mary’s were not expressly forbidden from playing in youth baseball leagues, but his confinement to the school’s isolated campus and strict schedule prevented participation in other organized, external leagues. Thus, while Ruth excelled, he toiled in obscurity, playing on St. Mary’s team.

Ruth’s luck changed when an owner/manager of the then minor league team the Baltimore Orioles, Jack Dunn, just happened to spot The Babe’s talent in 1914, and by 1916 he was a twenty-game winning pitcher for the Boston Red Sox who pitched a one-run, fourteen inning complete game (still a World Series record) to help the Red Sox win the World Series. Every talent has his or her story on the rise to fame, and they’re littered with personal motivations, including others seeing their raw talent that needed development and those who underestimated how talented they were, but compared to Einstein and Jordan, Ruth’s rise to fame was relatively quick and smooth.  

Based on Ruth’s upbringing, we can only speculate that he didn’t view rejection in the same way an Einstein or a Jordan would. Prior to being “discovered” Ruth likely viewed himself as nothing more than a poor, dumb, reform school kid. As such, we can guess that Ruth didn’t have the social awareness or the levels of expectation they did. As a poor, dumb, reform school kid, The Babe probably viewed anyone giving him a chance, someone paying him to play baseball, and all of his numerous accomplishments thereafter as gravy. In his autobiography, The Babe Ruth Story (1948), he describes his St. Mary’s days fondly, focusing on baseball and Brother Matthias’ mentorship, not on being overlooked. His 1914 minor league struggles (doubts about his discipline) were met with defiance, not despair, per teammates’ accounts. Therefore, we can say that bitterness and resentment never drove The Babe to accomplish rare feats in the beginning, or throughout his illustrious career, but something unusual drove him on the tail end, the very tail end, of his baseball career.

Genius Chronicle: May 25, 1935, George Herman Ruth is five days away from retirement. Did The Babe know 1935 would be his last season? He may not have at the beginning of the year, but his performance was so bad (he hit .181 that year, with thirteen runs batted in, and most importantly, only three home runs prior to 5/25/1935), and his 1935 Boston Braves were so awful, and that he knew. By the time he stepped to the plate in 5/25/1935, the accumulation of twenty-two years, and 2,503 games, of Major League Baseball play were also catching up to him, as his knees were so bad that he ended up only playing 28 games for a team that didn’t even know the definition of the words in-contention. He probably spent the 1935 season depressed with the knowledge that the natural talents, the grit, perseverance, and everything that made the man who changed the game into what he know today, were all gone. He was a shell of his former self, and he was only forty-years-old, relatively young for the average human but ancient for an athlete, particularly in his era.

Even with all that George Herman Ruth stepped to the plate on May 25, 1935, against the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Pirate pitchers he faced were “respectable but not dominant”. The days when Ruth dominated headlines were long-since passed, and I’d be willing to bet that most casual baseball fans probably didn’t know Ruth was still playing by this date. This was probably best reflected by the attendance of Forbes Field that day, was a mere 10,000 attended a game in which Babe Ruth played in a 25,000-seat capacity. Few wanted to see a man many considered one of the greatest to ever play the game of baseball, because it’s always sad to watch a broken-down, old horse gallop around the track in his final days. How many of them regretted that decision afterwards when they learned that Babe Ruth managed to put everything that made George Herman Ruth “The Babe” one final time, and in one final blaze of glory by hitting three home runs, which just happened to be the 712th, 713th, and 714th of his storied career.

Hitting three home runs in a game is still a remarkable feat for any Major League Baseball player, but at the point when Ruth did it, professional baseball was roughly sixty-five years old, and this feat had only been accomplished seventeen times by thirteen different players, including Ruth, who only accomplished it twice before in his lengthy and storied list of home runs. Ruth would go onto only have five more at-bats in the five games left in the season, before he retired. This entry is included in this article because Babe Ruth was often called the “Most naturally talented athlete of his generation.” Fans and players alike appreciated his talent and domination of the game of baseball, but there had to be some temptation to reduce his natural talents as supernatural, as if he  just picked up a bat on a Thursday and by Friday he basically invented the home run that we all celebrate today. Some fans probably marveled at the fact that this celebrated athlete put it all together in one final blaze of glory, but others probably laughed and reduced it to “The Babe being The Babe”.  It’s just kind of what we just do. It’s human nature.

Even with all the information we have about the rise of Jordan, Einstein, and The Babe, we still attach this The Sword in the Stone characterization to them, because we love the idea of superheroes. The three of them may have been blessed with superior natural abilities, but they weren’t supernatural abilities. Yet, belief in the latter permits us to worship them, and it gives us comfort to think “they’re just different”. We prefer to avoid thinking about all the “yada, yada, yada” of true grit, unusual levels of perseverance, and all of the work they put into honing their abilities. We prefer to focus on “natural talent fallacies” and the “genius myth” that suggests their Creator was so generous with them and comparatively stingy with us when it came to dispersing talent. I have news for you brothers and sisters, the idea of a chosen one being the only one able to remove the sword from the stone is a fictional tale, and there’s no such thing as a chosen one. Gifts require honing, dedication to craft, and a level of tunnel vision that would lead many of us to grow so bored with the mind-numbing hours of practice and work these men put in. We also wouldn’t be able to deal momentary, temporary embarrassment that arrives with the level of failure they dealt with under the scrutiny of white, hot lights. Those of us who admire these geniuses from afar often characterize them as the chosen ones, and ourselves as the character Sir Kay of that book, who attempted to pull the sword and failed, because it gives us comfort to think if we were as blessed as they were, we would do the same. It’s a compliment that we deem them different, of course, but it’s also uninformed and reductive.

To my mind, the greater details of the stories of Jordan, Einstein, and Ruth remind us that greatness and genius aren’t a gift bestowed at birth, but a fire forged through rejection, toil, and unrelenting drive. From Jordan’s high school cut to Einstein’s academic snubs and Ruth’s reform school obscurity, their triumphs—whether a baseline dunk, a revolutionary theory, or a final three-homer blaze—were built on the ashes of doubt. We marvel at their highlights, but their true legacy lies in the unseen hours of grit, proving that greatness belongs to those who dig deep enough to find that elusive “other layer” so often that we develop creative theories about how it’s all so unfair.

My Futile Fight to Divorce the Atlanta Falcons

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“Are you going to watch the NFL draft tonight?” John asked me.

“Of course,” I said, “and I’ll probably shout, ‘I want a divorce from this Gawdforsaken franchise’ again this year. It’s an annual tradition in my household.” 

Are you strapped into the fandom of a futile franchise? “What do you mean strapped?” The first image we have of being “strapped in” is that of a pilot, heading upward in for a flight into the wild, blue yonder. Now picture a pilot being strapped into a vessel headed downward. That is the futile flight the passengers on board the Atlanta Falcon have experienced lo’ these many years. 

Why do I continue to cheer the Atlanta Falcons on forty-eight years after I randomly chose to cheer them on when I was nothing but a seven-year-old, stupid kid who randomly pointed at them and said, ‘That’s the team I will cheer on.’ 

“You don’t choose your favorite team,” says a sentiment in Korean sport, “your team chooses you.” I get that, if we’re from Foxboro, Santa Clara, Cleveland, or the surrounding areas, it kind of makes sense. We have regional pride, personal history, and social bonds formed by everyone who forced us to cheer on the local team. What if we’re from an area, three to four hours’ drive time from the nearest professional organization, how they choose us? 

I was seven-years-old when I chose the Atlanta Falcons as the team I would cheer on for the rest of my life. I didn’t choose to cheer them on for the rest of my life, but that is what happened. The stadium the Falcons call home is fourteen hours’ drive time from where I live, I didn’t know anyone who cheered them on, and I’ve met very few fellow fans since. My dad didn’t know much about professional football, and he admitted he’d barely even heard of the Falcons. The Falcons also didn’t have any of my favorite college football players on their roster at the time, and they’ve only had a handful of them since. I had little-to-no connection to the Falcons at the time, and I still don’t in all the ways we’ve outlined here.

We All Like Winners

The first thing the uninformed, unaffiliated seven-year-old fan routinely does is cheer on the team their dad does. If they are unable to formulate that connection, they choose to cheer on one of the closest teams they can find. The final determining factor for them is the success of the team. When you’re seven-years-old, your favorite team says a lot about you, and you want people to think you’re a winner. In the 70s, everyone’s favorite team was either the Steelers or the Cowboys, or if you were naughty, you cheered on the Raiders. Those teams were the winners in the late 70s, our formative years, and everyone I knew selected one of those three teams. I met a few Vikings fans, but the general sentiment on them was that they weren’t good enough to win the Super Bowl. I knew one Dolphins fan, but he received some grief for cheering on a franchise whose time had passed. 

I decided to cheer on a team who didn’t have a past, a present, or future. A website called Quick Report lists the Atlanta Falcons as “the fourth worst NFL franchise of all time.” Another outlet called The Top Tens rates the Atlanta Falcons franchise as the 46th worst franchise in professional sports.

My favorite characterization of me is that I chose a team, independent of any influence, as a testament to the strong sense of individuality I obviously exhibited at a very young age. They were mine, all mine, and I didn’t have to share them with anyone, because no one else wanted them. Did I have an enviable streak of individuality at a young age? I did not when it came to books, music, movies, and other entertainment mediums. I liked what the cool kids told me to like, and when they turned on those players in the industry, I turned with them. I was not immune to peer pressure by any means, but I chose to thwart it in this one instance. Does that make sense to you, because it doesn’t to me. 

The only theory I have that makes any sense is color. I liked the pretty colors they wore on their uniforms. The Atlanta Falcons franchise chose to wear Red, white, and black. These were the same colors as my favorite college football team, the team that represents my states, and the university I attended. I’ve only purchased four cars in my life, all of them were either red or white, with black trim. Those colors obviously appeal to me. If you’ve followed the history of the Falcon’s uniform choices, however, you know they’ve switched the color of their uniforms from black and silver to now black, red and silver. I didn’t switch with them or from them. Why?

Philosophical and Emotional Layers

The next logical entry is the “lovable losers” tag that we used to apply to the Chicago Cubs franchise. I submit that the worst business move the Cubs ever made was winning the 2016 World Series. Why, because a large segment of the nation, outside Illinois and the surrounding region, cheered the Cubs on because they were lovable losers. They won the World Series in 1908, and they waited 108 years to win it again. Five generations of Cubs’ fans knew nothing of championship rings, and they loved it. They loved it so much that if we were to talk about their latest losing streak, their foibles in the post-season, the Cubs’ fan might chuckle with us. They knew all about it, and they loved it so much it was almost a crafty marketing gimmick, enhanced by the stories of jinxes, including the Curse of the Billy Goat, the Black Cat Incident, Steve Bartman Incident, and the Bernie Mac Jinx. The Falcons are nearing sixty-years as a franchise, and the franchise has the Eugene Robinson incident and, of course, 28-3. 

If the Atlanta Falcons fan, the WE, can make it past 28-3, what does that say about us? It suggests resilience, loyalty, and a sense that we’re all sharing in the struggle. Unwavering support is a badge of honor. If you’re a superfan, it becomes a part of who you are. It’s not just a preference, or it no longer is, it’s a reflection of your values, memories, and experiences. I becomes we, they becomes us, and those guys become our fellas fighting in the fields for glory. 

“I think we’re going to draft an Edge rusher this year,” we say, “because that’s been our greatest need for almost a decade.” Again, I know very very few Falcons’ fans in my locale, about fourteen-hours’ drive time from my home, so when I say, “we” and “us,” I’m not sharing a perspective with anyone I know, except the far-flung writers on a Falcons message board.

When a team like the Falcons become us/we, the theys on message boards drop “28-3!” on us in a snarky, smug way that attempts to force us to probe the tapestry of our being. The truly sad thing is that it took me a while to realize that the personal pain I felt, after that infamous choke job, was actually and factually absurd. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t actually on the field, missing a crucial block, throwing a crucial interception, snapping the ball with too much time on the clock, and electing to pass rather than run. I didn’t personally do any of that, I see that now, but I didn’t see that their (not our in this particular case) loss was not a reflection on my character. I actually had nothing to do with that loss. If it’s hard for you to grasp the idea that a rational, logical person couldn’t easily separate himself with the failure of images of football players on TV, you’ve never been, or known, a superfan.    

As difficult as it can be for a superfan to disentangle himself from the emotional entanglements that emphasize his existence, I am making strides. I now write things like this, “I realize I know little-to-nothing about the day-to-day decisions on personnel and any of the intricacies involved in their decision-making process. I’m not there for the day-to-day, I don’t see these players in practice, and I don’t know them personally.” I wrote on “our” Atlanta Falcon’s bulletin board, “but I think the decision they made was a mistake.” In that disclaimer, I effectively gained some psychological distance from the ‘us, we, and our’ lexicon we superfans usually use. 

I dropped that disclaimer on the billboard page many times, because I was trying to objectively say that I know my opinion is not only relatively and comparatively uninformed, and I know my opinion doesn’t matter, but I have to write it somewhere. No one ever replied to any of my posts. My guess is that this disclaimer might have been a buzz kill, because we all kind of know we don’t know squat, compared to the owner, the GM, the coach, and all of those in the hierarchy responsible for personnel decisions, but no one admits it. Such a disclaimer might also “pop” the delusion that we all know what we’re talking about, because we read it, watched it, and saw it in the games, so we know. Their ambivalence to my posts might also have something to do with the idea that it’s so obvious that we don’t know what we’re talking about that it really doesn’t need to be said. 

Here is another element to the post 28-3 Falcons’ loyalty, if we’re going to vicariously partake in whatever glory they achieve in victory, we must also commiserate with them in pain. Wrong, watching football on TV is supposed to be something we do to pass the time, and it should provide entertainment to our lives, nothing more and nothing less. Wrong, it’s not entertaining, it’s football. It’s not life and death, and some part of me knows that, but it’s often the difference between a smile on the face for the rest of the week, and a “We suck!” Mr. Grumpy Face week. 

“I look forward to [the offseason],” a man named Ryan Ray says in the GQ article cited aove, written by Tom Lamont. “The six to eight weeks when I don’t have to focus on anything to do with this football club. I long for it.” Ray also said, “Sometimes I wish I could just sit there without any bias [while watching a game], without any interest—but it’s not me. I’m tribal.”

I’ve been there Ryan Ray, and I feel you. I’ve watched numerous football games involving other teams, and I know how entertaining this game can be, when I have no rooting interest. I wish, like Ray, I could have fun watching a Falcons’ game and appreciate them from a distance. I wish I could sit back and appreciate the athletic exploits of Falcons’ players the way normal folks do, but when Falcons’ players succeed it’s nothing more than a relief that they didn’t fail yet again. I marvel at other players play at peak performance where the difference between winning and losing can be mere inches, or the subtle juke the runner puts on a defender that only a true fan of the sport can appreciate. When it’s all on the line, and my bias is in full force, I only experience abject failure, misery, and roughly three hours of what it must feel like to have clinical depression.

“If they make you so miserable, why don’t you just switch teams?” the non-sports fans might ask from Mount Simpleton. My dad asked me this question referencing the video games that made me scream like a lunatic. “If they make you this miserable, why don’t you just shut it off?” We laugh so hard at his simple-minded question that we didn’t even bother answering him. He didn’t get it. ‘You can’t just shut a game off, because you lost,’ was probably what we should’ve said. ‘That’s the whole reason we keep playing, to eventually and finally beat it. If you’re a gamer, you know this mindset without knowing that beating a game easily and often is actually kind of boring. If you can find a game that is so hard IT CHEATS! that’s the game you will play, to figure out, forever. We don’t quit working after we make our first million, that’s just the start, we don’t dump a lover when they start acting obnoxious, because their drama kind of, sort of makes them more dramatic, traumatic, and interesting in a way that’s tough to describe, and we don’t stop cheering for a professional sports team just because they’re 114 games under .500, and 10-14 in the playoffs without a ring. That’s the very reason to continue to cheer them on for life, because it says something about our character that we stay loyal to them no matter what. “NO MATTER WHAT happens!” Even if it means upping our Tricyclic Antidepressants (TCAs) and Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors (MAOIs) on those three special Sunday hours. It’s all worth it. “No, it’s not!” It is to me, is what I’m telling you. Wait, what we’re talking about again? Oh right, shut up!  

We’re passionate “prisoners [who are so] accustomed to our jails that we refuse means of escape,” Lamont writes, “Logic is not meant to be a part of the true fan’s equipment.” 

If we did our research, and we do, every year, we find that some teams just do it better. That’s rough, tough, and difficult to accept, so we think, “They CHEAT!” They don’t, but it’s easier to say that “and I can back it up!” than it is to sit through the incredibly long and boring NFL Draft and know that some teams obviously have better scouting staff members, General Managers, coaches, and all of the others in their hierarchy who help select the best player for their team. It’s easier to suggest something nefarious is going on than to admit that the franchises in Kansas City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco are going to make “the perfect” decision for their team for the next four-to-five years.

“Why can’t we find those guys?” we shout at the screen every year. We’ve even gone so far as to hire those who used to make those draft picks for their other franchises, and they somehow lose that magic touch when they go to work for us? How does that happen for 58 years? 

“On paper,” Lamont writes, “Intense fandom is absurd.”

If the Atlanta Falcons were a company that had a fifty-eight-year record of making poor decisions, I would’ve sold stock in their company so long ago I wouldn’t even remember owning it. If it were a TV show, movie franchise, or band that put out an inferior product year after year, we would’ve stopped enduring their stench of failure long ago. If our child continued to make such poor decisions, we’d have a “Come to Jesus” sit down moment with them. If it were a spouse, we might divorce them. Why don’t we seek a divorce from our team?

Lamont, quotes a therapist, saying, “People often seek me out because they are feeling stuck in a painful emotional pattern that just won’t let go.” She was probably speaking more generally, but we could easily attribute that quote to our super fandom. The therapist also said when she heard of some suffering from a mean case of super fandom, it reminded her of the mindset of those in a cult.  

She described a commonly reported reason that people give for staying in cults: the sunk cost fallacy. “People can’t leave because they’ve spent so much time and money and energy,” she explained. I read this, and I reread it, and it tells me that some of our deepest affiliations aren’t calculated but emerge from the fabric of our lives.

She later regretted likening it to extraction from a cult. “The situation,” she said, “had more in common with addiction, the high highs, the low lows, the swearing-offs, the shame-inducing returns to the cookie jar.”

“There is a fascinating page on NamuWiki, the Korean-language Wikipedia, that outlines the philosophical case against abandoning one’s team,” Lamont writes. “The act is known in Korea as 팀 세탁—team laundry—and it is understood to involve a paradox. You care enough [that] you want to put an end to your suffering, [but you also] care enough [that] you can’t.”

Some of us grow wiser as we age, and we learn when, where, why, and how to expend our resources. When it comes to sports, I’ve learned, and I’m still learning, with massive amounts of failure in this regard, how to not care so much. Wisdom has taught me that it’s just better for my mental well-being to if not “turn it off” as my dad might suggest, but to lower the volume on all my caring. The Salvation Army suggests that “caring is sharing”, and it’s true in most cases, but caring can be scary at times too. It should be fun to watch “my” guys play football, but it’s not. I do not enjoy it. So, I tape the game on the DVR, and I go outside and play catch with the boy. Then, I check the score of the game on one of my devices. If I find that we won the game that day, I watch the game and vicariously partake in the joy of victory. If they lose, I delete the entry on my DVR. Seeing the final numbers (the score) on a screen, gives me even more distance from the foolish notion I have that some of this final score if “my fault”. It’s also so much less painful than watching their total destruction, or long, slow destruction occur in real-time. If I were part of self-help Falcon fan group session, I would suggest all participants engage in this behavior for better mental-health.   

Some of our more obnoxious group members might suggest for even better mental-health, we should all consider a messy, complicated divorce from the “fourth worst NFL franchise of all time” and “the 46th worst franchise in professional sports”. If some of them could do it, I might applaud them, because I wouldn’t be able to do it. I will continue to cling to the handrail of this slowly sinking ship, in this tragic movie of my demise, where everyone in the audience is screaming, “Just jump off!” I’ve spent so much time, energy, and misspent passion on this inept franchise that even if you were to offer me a life raft, I might say, “Eh, I think I’m doing just fine right here.”

This might come as a shock to most superfine, but it doesn’t really matter what team we choose to cheer on. When fair weather fans tell me why they switch teams with regularity, they basically say, “I choose to cheer on winners, because I’m a winner.” I could say, ‘I’d like to see the science behind that,’ but I know it’s such a ridiculous statement that it’s not even worth challenging. Yet, is saying, ‘I choose to stick by my team no matter what happens, because it’s a testament to my character,’ just as ridiculous? Yes, it is. It makes no sense that I could never follow through on a complete divorce either, even though the temporary separations I’ve achieved over the years have proven great for my mental health. It’s illogical, absurd, and whatever adjectives we apply to superfans, but it is a part of our personal constitution that we stay loyal no matter what happens, and we think less of those who don’t. 

Evel Knievel in The Man who Sold the World

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Evel Knievel was so cool that he could wear a cape, and no one would question why a grow man was wearing a cape. He was so cool that it just seemed right on him. There was a time when Evel Knievel ruled the world, ok maybe not the world, but he definitely ruled the United States for what some say was about nine years, between the late 60s to mid-70s. He had his own toys, his likeness was on lunch boxes, T-shirts, and I even saw an Evel Knievel pinball machine one time in an arcade. I couldn’t play the pinball machine, of course, because the wait time was far too long for me, but it was fun to watch it. We all had our favorite comic book heroes, athletes, and other assorted entertainers, but there was only one “real” man who could wear a cape in public without anyone asking, “What the hell is going on here?”

Evel Knievel could jump anything and everything we could dream up and never fail. All right, he failed … a lot, but we didn’t care about all that back then. We wanted to see him do what he did “better than anyone else ever has or ever will”, and we pretended to be him when riding our bikes. Robert Craig Knievel probably wouldn’t have listed this in the greatest of achievements in his life, but it was huge in our world. The list of characters we pretended to be was about as exclusive as lists can be. We bestowed this honor on The Six-Million Dollar Man, members of the rock group KISS, and various other mythological creatures we call superheroes, but Evel was a superhero to us. 

Thus, it would’ve stunned us to learn that when the history of motorcycle stuntmen was eventually written, Evel Knievel wasn’t even the best motorcycle stuntman in his own family. His son Robbie Knievel proved smarter, more technical, and more prolific than his celebrated father. (Evel committed to 75 ramp-to-ramp jumps while his son engaged in 340, nearly five times more than his beloved father.) Robbie, it could be argued, even created a better name Kaptain Knievel. How cool is that? The name Kaptain Knievel rolls off the tongue with such ease that I’m surprised Andrew Wood didn’t write a Kaptain Knievel song for his band Mother Love Bone. Kaptain Knievel could’ve and probably should’ve been more famous than his father, Evel Knievel, so why wasn’t he?  

Timing: Evel Caught Lightning in a Bottle

I was not a viable lifeform when Elvis rocked our world, and I was not here for Beatlemania, but I saw, firsthand, the hysteria that was Evel Knievel. The guy hit the scene like a comet in the 70s, a red-white-and-blue blur of bravado that turned him into a myth before I even learned how to tie my own shoes. When my friends and I were old enough to hero-worship, we had Evel’s iconic imagery all over our world, from posters on our wall, lunchboxes we took to school, and T-Shirts on our torso. Evel just owned a once-in-a-lifetime sweet spot in time that no one, not even his own son, could duplicate, no matter how much higher or farther he flew. Before he died, this son, Robbie Knievel, Kaptain Knievel, ended up not only continuing the Knievel legacy, he topped it by all measures, but he could never match the fever-pitch frenzy, and the hysteria, that surrounded Evel Knievel. No one could. It was a very special window in time, and unlike some icons who shied away from the spotlight with something called humility, Evel reveled in his moment in the sun.  

It was not mandatory that every kid in this era have an Evel action-figure, but those who didn’t received that “You don’t know what you’re missing” look, even from the nice kids. Mr. Rogers, from Mister Rogers Neighborhood, would never allow his network to commodify his product in this manner, because he didn’t want kids who couldn’t afford those products to feel ostracized. Evel had no such concerns, as his spangled merch flooded every store in the 70s.

I had three different Evel Knievel action-figures–same figure, different outfits—I didn’t care. I had to have them all. Then, we found out that the Evel Empire produced a windup, energizer accessory. If you were a kid during this era, you probably still owe your parents an apology for all the whining and badgering you did as Christmas day approached, because you were probably as awful to them as I was to mine. When Santa Claus ended up fulfilling my only wish, I wound ‘er up and let ‘er go, and when I was done, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t experience a level of euphoria equal to, or greater than that moment if I lived to be 100-years-old. Decades later, I tried passing those feelings of euphoria onto my nephew with an exact replica of this Evel figure and its windup energizer accessory, he broke it within a week. Weeks after that Christmas, I found this toy I once cherished on the top shelf of toys of his closet to gather dust with the toys he would never play with again. The idea that my nephew had no regard for this toy stunned me. I knew he never heard of Evel Knievel, but I thought it was a standalone, great toy. I was wrong. The euphoria I experienced playing with this toy, at his age, was obviously based on the mythology, iconography, and the hype and hysteria of all things Evel in the 70s.  

The Media: Evel Owned the Airwaves

There was a time when one individual could rule the airwaves, and Evel Knievel did. It was so far back that it almost seems quaint now before cable, YouTube, VCRs, DVRs, and the internet or streaming services. There were only three channels, and they didn’t repeat broadcasts, or if they did, we usually had to wait months for the rerun. If we missed one of his appearances, pre-jump interviews, and the events themselves, we were just out. “You missed it?” our friends asked. “How could you just miss it? I was counting the days till it happened.”

“I forgot. I was out playing or something, and I just, just forgot,” I said to my never-ending shame. It was one of those situations where our friends could recount what happened for us, but it wasn’t the same, and we had this idea that this might mark us for the rest of our lives. 

Robbie, bless him, hit his stride when cable and the internet fractured the game. Sure, he got some TV love—his Grand Canyon leap was aired live after all—but Evel’s regular-network spectacles had a bigger and rarer feel that had that must-see-TV feel, long before the networks coined the phrase. Robbie could share his feats online, but that magic of “counting the days till it happened” were long gone.

Evel Knievel Was Larger Than Life

Back before the internet and 24-hour news shows, we didn’t know everything, all of the time. We didn’t know the negatives about our heroes. We had our naysayers of course, but we could dismiss their ideas as speculative, because they didn’t really know what they were talking about either. We couldn’t pull up a device and search for all nuggets on Evel Knievel to find everything we wanted to know about him. If I ran into him at the supermarket, I wouldn’t have known it was him, because I didn’t even know what he looked like. I figured he probably looked as good as Superman with Batman’s aura of cool. We filled in the blanks of what we didn’t know with what we wanted to think, and we decided to make him god-like. Kaptain Robbie probably ended up pulling off more dangerous stunts, and if we gauged them by qualitative and quantifiable measures, he was probably the better of the two motorcycle daredevils, but Evel was there first. He also pioneered the iconic image of guts and glory in a way that led to a cultural impact that penetrated the zeitgeist in a way no one, not even his son, could.   

Evel was also a Mess

I was a kid during Evel Knievel’s prime, so I didn’t know all the ins and outs of what Evel did, and I was too young to analyze why he had such historical allure. He wasn’t really human to me. He was an action-figure to me, a symbol for everything I wanted to be, but he was no more real or unreal than Batman—an action figure, literally and figuratively. Yet, this obviously wasn’t reason he was so famous among adults. Why did they love him to the point that every source of media had to have some attachment to him in some way if they hoped to compete in the era’s landscape? He crashed. A lot. “You know what I was really good at,” Evel told his cousin, and U.S. Congressman, Pat Williams. “You know what I was bad at was the landing. It was the bad landings. That’s what brought the crowds out. Nobody wants to see me die, but they don’t want to miss it when I do.”

As evidence of that, Evel Knievel’s most iconic video is that of his failed jump at Caesar’s Palace. After he narrowly missed hitting the landing ramp square, he bounced up and over his bike. When he hit his head, he appeared to narrowly avoid life-altering impact, but when his lower back and hindquarters slammed into the ground, the audience at-home could almost feel the hollow thud that must’ve screamed in Evel’s ears. When he rolled about four times, it didn’t look real. He looked like a ragdoll or one of those crash test dummies that we watch react to impact with an emotional distance, because they’re not alive. Anyone who has ever crashed on a bike, in a car, or on a bigwheel knows some small, not even worth discussing level of comparable pain that teaches us the golden rule of crashing: If you’re going to crash, try your best to avoid landing on concrete, because it hurts like the dickens. 

Why did adults of this era watch? Why do non-fans watch NASCAR, hockey, and why do we slowdown for a wreck on the interstate. Adults presumably turned up at the shows and tuned into the broadcasts that carried these performances, because they wanted to be there if someone was going to die that day. 

Whereas the son, Kaptain Knievel, achieved twenty different records, Evel racked up twenty major crashes, and his own Guinness Book of World Records’ record 433 broken bones. 433! Yes, Biology enthusiasts, we only have 206 bones in our body, and no he didn’t have more than double the number of bones the rest of us have. If you’re going to attempt to break Evel’s current record, you’re probably going to have to break the same bones multiple times. Kaptain Knievel decided he didn’t want to go the course of his father, so he chose a Honda CR500, a much lighter bike than Evel’s Harley-Davidson XR-750, and Kaptain Robbie analyzed his jumps and made sure he would succeed. He did succeed far more often than his famous father, but the adult audience probably grew so accustomed to his success that they kind of got used to it in a way that bored them a little.

“I’m not going to watch,” my aunt said before one of the airings of Evel’s jumps, “because I’m not going to contribute to that man’s desire to kill himself, because he will die. You know that don’t you? That fool is going to get himself killed.” 

My aunt was right, of course, as Evel wasn’t very good at what he did. Kaptain Knievel had some crashes too, but they paled in comparison to the severity of Evel’s. When Evel crashed, we felt bad for him, we thought of his family and other loved ones, and some of us even cried a little. We did it, because we cared, and we enjoyed caring, because we didn’t want to see this beloved man get hurt again. Robbie never built that reservoir of love and concern, because he rarely failed, and when he did, he didn’t get hurt as severely, and we viewed him as nothing more than a guy who used a motorcycle to jump over stuff. 

The most memorable jump Evel Knievel performed, for me, was the January 31, 1977 jump at the Chicago International Ampitheatre. This scheduled event suggested that Evel was going to jump over a number of sharks, SHARKS! This event just happened to coincide with the aftermath of the first true summer blockbuster, Jaws. Jaws was a movie so horrific and scary that no one I knew was allowed to see it, but as you can guess that verboten nature led us to talk about it endlessly. We all knew someone who knew someone who saw it, and we recounted for our friends what actually happened in that movie. Thus, when we learned that our superhero was going to test the meddle of the world’s most fearsome maneater, we kind of worried: 

“What if he misses?” we asked one another, in the midst of the hysteria. “What if a shark jumps out of the water, as he’s flying overhead? They do that. No seriously, I’ve heard that they do that.” None of us knew that sharks are actually relatively cautious predators, and the reason their predatory behavior involves them circling unknown prey is that they’re trying to determine if they’re going to get hurt in the process. They know that even a small, relatively innocuous injury can damage their predatory skills and could lead to their premature death. If Evel splashed into the tank, in other words, the sharks that weren’t hit on impact, probably would’ve swam as far away from the point of impact as possible. We didn’t know any of that. We thought they were the impulsive killing machines depicted in Jaws. I later learned Evel’s jump ended in disaster during a rehearsal, and he retired from major jumps shortly afterward, but none of that mattered to me as I was all hyped up on everything Evel. 

We loved to ride bikes in the wayback when kids did things outside, and every kid I knew pretended to be Evel Knievel for just a moment when we took rocks and put plywood on them and “jumped” from one board to another. When we did this often enough, even in our Evel Knievel mindsets, it could get a little boring after a while. To try to match the intensity of our hero, we did everything we could to make our jump more dangerous. We increased the angle of the board, had our friends lay between the two boards, and any and every stupid thing we could think up to make it a little more dangerous. We wanted someone, somewhere to say, “You are crazy!” No one ever said that in an advisory manner, in my memory, it was always said with a tinge of excitement, as in ‘He’s crazy, but I think he’s going to do it.’ I still remember the time I broke Steve’s record on the block for longest jump, but even though it ended with a me-bike-me-bike roll up crash, I still beat it. Was it worth it, if you asked short-term me, I probably would’ve said no, as there was a lot of memorable pain, but when the theys on the block were still talking about it, months later, it felt worth it. They talked about the painful crash of course, and they laughed when they did, but they always mentioned that it set the record for the block.

We unwittingly answered the question why Evel Knievel was more popular and still is more famous than his son Robbie. Evel was either so stubborn, or so crazy, that he didn’t want to do things the way they should’ve been done. He performed with a “my way or the highway” that usually led to him waking up in a hospital. Evel Knievel did succeed on occasion, and we shouldn’t forget that, but when he did, it was almost a relief to see that he didn’t get hurt in the process. Robbie Knievel was so good at what he did, presumably learning from his father’s mistakes, that when he completed a jump, it eventually became less of a daredevil feat and more of a guy jumping over stuff with a motorized vehicle. There was no drama to it, and it lacked the “Is he going to die today?” had-to-be-there-if-he-did status that his father’s jumps did.