APOLOGY¹ FOR WASHINGTON SPORTS FANS

In the June issue of the Washington Monthly editor Amy Sullivan² assails the "tepid" sports "fandom of Washingtonians." Sullivan is one of the smartest writers at the Monthly; her treatment of religion and politics is much more compelling than that of most liberal pundits. But I simply cannot abide her mistreatment of her fellow Washington-area sports fans. If she makes some good points (and some obvious ones) about the District sports culture, she also focuses on the exception to the complete exclusion of the small pool of other important considerations (i.e. every single area team save one).

So here she is, lambasting us for ignoring the now-undeniably-good Washington Wizards:

If you walked around downtown Washington this spring, you'd have found virtually no sign that the Wizards were in the playoffs -- no Wizards pennants in store windows, no overheard conversations in coffee shops about last night's winning three-pointer. When I talked to friends—most of them, like me, transplants from other cities—about the Wizards, the typical reaction was "Oh yeah, they're in the playoffs, aren't they?" They, not we.
 
In Washington ... the immigrants don't assimilate. That's a big reason why the city, despite its size and power, feels so artificial. It's like one giant hotel where people stop off for a temporary stay, sometimes for the length of an administration, sometimes for decades, but almost always with some intention of leaving. ...

I may be a Michigan girl, but I'm a Washingtonian now. It's my political statement, abandoning my old identity and accepting the new. If we Washingtonians have any pride—in who we are and in what we do here—we'll root for the home team. Especially when it's winning.

It's certainly true that the transient nature of Washingtonians means that the local franchises have to compete for the hearts of local sports fans. I presume that most sports fans from elsewhere in the country have designated bars to watch their favorite teams on satellite. I myself remain a committed fan of teams from back home, notably the Oregon Ducks football squad, whose satellite and broadcast games I attend with religious zeal³. And I remain a steadfast fan of the Portland Trail Blazers — even though their last couple years have been defined by almost anything but winning. That's true fandom.
 
But that's beside the point. Here's the problem. Her article makes no mention of the Washington Nationals. Apart from a passing reference to the Nixon era, she doesn't talk at all about the Washington Redskins — only the most profitable NFL franchise currently and in history.

Amy, come on! This simply isn't fair. To wit:

Let's get the weakest comparisons out of the way first — I'm not much of a metric football fan personally, but DC United is something like the Lakers and the Yankees rolled into one, if you follow MLS, and Amy, at least a few of your peers do. There's also the Capitals. I don't know how popular they are, as I follow hockey perhaps even less than I follow soccer, but I do know you don't want to be caught changing trains at Metro Center after a Caps game.

More to the point: The brand-new Nationals are averaging 32,000 attendees per game. This is 2,300 more people per game than what the storied, Sosa-ed Orioles bring in per game. And if you read Gabe Rivera's Baseball Bug, you can't help but notice the Nationals are among the most-blogged teams in MLB — this was true even when they were creating a great sucking sound earlier this season. Moreover, I think Ms. Sullivan has been walking around town with her eyes shut, because you can't walk half a block without seeing someone wearing a cursive-W Nationals hat. And most Washingtonians hate the guy most synonymous with the letter "W"!

I don't even know where to begin with the Washington Redskins. It's one of the most successful franchises in all of professional sports, with memorable Super Bowl wins and annual revenues second only to the New York Yankees, but still larger than the GDP of some Middle Eastern countries. At 91,000 seats, it's the biggest stadium in the NFL (probably in all of professional sports), and tickets are prized mightily. The return of legendary coach Joe Gibbs (returning from NASCAR, another "sport" I suppose Washingtonians could be accused of not caring about) was big, big, big news in January 2004, and is all the more compelling as Gibbs just might be bringing a Super Bowl contending team to the field this fall (knock on wood). The team's subsequent return to respectability hasn't exactly gone unnoticed in the local and national media. I could probably root for the also-pretty-good Seahawks, as do most of my fellow Portland natives, but I for one have cast my NFL lot with the Potomac Drainage Basin Indigenous Persons (aka "the team from Washington," as my hometown paper insists on calling them).

Her failure to consider the Redskins' ubiquity and the Nationals' instant popularity renders her article nothing less than a smear on all Washington-area sports fans. And I tend to abhor the decrying of any one critical opinion piece as a "smear." But this qualifies.
 
So what about the Wizards? I dunno. She's got a point there. Led by coach Eddie Jordan and point guard Gilbert Arenas, they're legitimate playoff contenders (if not quite title contenders). But her argument is overall so wrongheaded that this interesting question is almost entirely obscured. In my case, I would be more than willing to make the Wizards my second-favorite team after the Blazers... as soon as they change their name back to the Bullets.

Sometime Later Update — My former DCist colleague The DCeiver hits hard, and fair: "[T]he basic problem with Sullivan's premise" is that she "doesn't know any actual Washingtonians."

_____ 
¹In the formal justification or defense sense of the word.

²Full disclosure — Sullivan sought me out to write about Sonny Bono Memorial Park last year, and in the end pretty much re-wrote what I turned in. But she also made it much better in the process.

³ Not that I don't skip church on some Sundays (and the other eight months of the year).

---

posted by WWB at 8:47 PM |