Hi,

Since most of 2p2 is semi-intelligent people I figured this was a decent place to post this for discussion.

Was at the Spurs bar here in NY for their match this afternoon and ran into a Boston idiot that I had the displeasure of discussing this with for 30+ minutes.

I'm looking for thoughts on the idea of rooting for your home teams in sports as opposed to rooting for non-hometown teams and if it matters or not? I personally don't understand how this can matter. I realise and understand the idea of rooting for your home teams in itself, but that's not what I'm asking. I am more wondering why some people act as if this is some mandatory thing that people must do.

Id also like to understand why some people who root for their home teams (very) often talk down to someone else for rooting for teams that aren't from wherever they grew up as if it makes some sort of difference. I've experienced this a million times.

Someone who roots for teams from Boston (yes they are originally from Boston but that's beside the point) told me I'm a bandwagon fan because all my favourite sports teams are from different cities lol. That's either the dumbest thing I've ever heard or I don't have any idea what bandwagon means.

Also learned people who root for teams from different cities are lonely, insecure, and have no sense of loyalty. And people who root for teams from different cities always immediately bring up how loyal they are or talk about how long they've been a fan with a reason for how or why they started liking the team, and that this story is a lie or exaggeration every time. And they also make excuses for why they like them.

Tbh if you ask me anyone saying this type of thing is the one that's insecure (about their fanhood at least) and their team being from their hometown is the only excuse involved.

And just to clarify I'm not hating on anyone that likes their home teams nor do I think there's anything wrong with it. I'm just trying to understand where this idea that liking teams that aren't from your hometown is derived from because plenty of people share it.

Glenn

Helluva drug

And just for the record when I asked said Boston idiot to name the Patriots offensive line he froze up like a ****ing clown before he could name 1 of them. Not that this really matters, but at least it was fun.

inb4 yankeesheatlakerspatriotstruck.jpg

obviously rooting for the sawks in new york is grounds for removal, but theres an even more special place in hell for people like you who bandwagon teams from different cities

because you rooting for a team hundreds miles away basically proves that youre not a real fan.

a real fan discusses the games of his team with people in his life. who are you talking to in boston who watched the last match of your beloved LA team? nobody even seen it, nor does anyone care about it. so your "fandome" is you watching 20 games a season and than you forget it about for the rest of year.

a real fan also gets a fan of his team at a very young age. thats why you dont pick a team hundreds of miles away nobody around you cares about. you pick the local team everybody knows and talks about.


being a fan of a far away team basically proves that you somehow decided to watch your sport 2 years ago and randomly picked a team you had no connection to whatsoever.

Lol at this post. At least you were right about one thing. I became a fan of all my teams at a very young age. Except for MLB maybe which I started liking in '99. The rest of my teams I've liked since 93 or prior. I'm not even going to state my teams because it's literally pointless and all it's going to do is sway people's opinions and take away from the subject at hand.

How the **** does rooting for teams hundreds of miles away "basically prove" you started liking them 2 years ago? Because that is definitely not true.

And which city are you from? I'm guessing it's a city where sports are big? I grew up between Huntington Beach CA and Scottsdale AZ and I can tell you right now when I was in school NFL teams like the packers cowboys and Vikings were wayyyy more popular with the kids I went to school with than the cardinals or chargers/raiders/whoever.

And who the hell says you can't discuss sports with people around you if you aren't a fan of the home team? Ever heard of forums? Not to mention I discussed sports basically nonstop growing up with my close friends and they didn't like the same teams as me....who the hell says you can only discuss sports with people who are fans of your teams? I know more about random sports teams than most people who claim to be fans of them.

Your post is terrible and you're the exact type of person I'm talking about.

Who are your teams OP? As long as it's not the lakers/cowboys/Yankees, you're probably not a fraud. The worst are Cowboys fans who were born/live in Philly, they're biggest frauds ever and they also root for the Yankees too, usually.

I do think you're born into your teams, but I also thinj there's special circumstances sometimes (like not being from a big sports city or something similar) where it's probably fine to root for different teams.

I never like the guy who doesn't root for his home teams. In my experience, it's one of the best predictors of whether someone is my type of person. That Cowboys fan in the middle of Michigan or Florida is just almost always a douche IMO. A few rare exceptions are granted when his parents indoctrinated him into the fandom of their hometown team despite relocation.

Also foreigners are free to cheer for whomever they choose without my judgement. If they want to be Yankee or Seahawks fans, so be it. I'm impressed they care enough to pick a team.

I don't see how there's an issue with being a Lakers/Cowboys/Yankees fan if you liked them all from a young age and stuck loyal to them. That's my point when saying it doesn't matter which teams it is.

yes ive heard about forums. I kinda doubt you posted on any sports forum in 1993/when you were about 10 years old.


How did you actually pick your teams when you were "very young"? 5years olds basically do what their parents do. 5years old pick a team because they went to the stadium with their family. because their whole sports team likes the local team. Because all of your family and friends like this team. a 5year old boy pointing at the map and choosing to support whatever city he hits is not a valid reason for becoming a lifetime fan. you need a real connection to your team.

and your argument you are talking about sports with all your friends who like different teams is exactly what Im talking about. No matter where you go people gonna talk about the local team. No matter where you go, if there is a game on its the local teams game, not your random 500miles away team. In the end you watch/talk more about the local team you dont really care about than the team you claim to be a lifetime fan of.

I can try to give a bit of insight on this as someone who grew up in Nor-Cal but grew to be a fan of two faraway teams: the Celtics and the Packers.

Now, I am a big fan of my local teams: the Kings, the Giants, the 49ers. But I am also a fan of the Celtics and the Packers for very specific reasons. When I was a kid, my uncle and my dad's friend were big Celtics fans, and I asked why one day. They explained to me the history, how they'd been a dominant dynasty in the 60s, how Bill Russell helped changed the perception of African-Americans in basketball, etc, and it was about the time of the Larry Bird crew, so I started liking the Celtics at an early age. I liked the history, even as a kid, and I liked their style back in the 80s, and I really liked the green uniforms (lol come on, I was a kid). That was always kinda with me. And since the Kings and the Celtics were never good at the same time (and probably never will be, because lol Kings), it was never a big struggle for me.

The Packers thing started during the Brett Favre era, and had nothing to do with the players themselves. It was when I learned that they were the only community-owned team in sports. I just thought that was awesome. I still do. No egotistical douchebag billionaire just getting rich off the team and screwing with whole cities to satisfy their lust--I wished for over a decade that the Kings could be like that! But the Packers have always been 2nd to the Niners in my heart. Basically, I'll root for the Packers unless they're playing SF.

If that makes me a bandwagoner, so be it, but I stayed a fan of these teams even when they were bad, and I became a fan of them for reasons that had relatively little to do with them being good.

Had no idea San Antonio expats had a bar in NYC. And that there were bandwagon Spurs fans.

And FWIW the Phoenix area definitely falls into the category you mentioned of not a big sports city or at least it did when I was young. There was not any cardinals fans and suns fans only existed when they were good. There was tons of kids at school who liked teams from other states. Cardinals fans definitely temporarily popped up on Facebook in 2008 though. I even deactivated my facebook for lole 2-3 weeks during that ****, it made me sick. One person in particular who was a HUGE ravens fan all the sudden became a huge cards fan in 2008. He was like 21 or so at the time. That is disturbing to me and honestly deserves some sort of cruel punishment.

Spurs are an English football team in North London, I'm not a San Antonio spurs fan.

My best friend likes the Yankees/Spurs/Duke Hoops to go along with Florida and Texas for college football lol. I talk **** to him every single opportunity I can about this.

During the Yanks/Tigers game the other night I asked him who he will be rooting for, or is that dependent on who's winning at a given time.

I don't understand how someone can watch so much sports but not have a
fire of passion burning inside them for their home teams.

If you're from Virginia your pro selection is a joke and I don't give 2 ****s who you root for, unless you feel the need to jump on VCU's bandwagon then **** you. Been chastised far too many times out at bars for not supporting that program.

Root for who you want to root for, just be consistent. If you don't have your mind made up on teams by the time you hit puberty you're forever destined to be a flip flopping bandwagoner, or one of those guys who follows LeBron around.

Considering I went to college out of state and still live out of state (NYC) what am I supposed to do here if I'm a fan of Arizona teams? Or are you only talking about when I was a kid? If I was a fan of Arizona teams when I was young nothing would have been any different. NYC is obviously a bad example because there's actually bars here to watch out of state teams so lets pretend I live in Minneapolis or something. There's gonna be NFL bars for most teams in most big cities but your other teams you're not going to have friends around to discuss and watch with. And the bars are definitely not going to be playing their games. So what are you supposed to do, switch teams?

As for why I started liking my teams, NHL and NFL were similar to what you said about "being told who to like" by parents....it was because my older cousin liked them. And NBA I started liking because I liked a certain player on the team. The Suns were VERY good when I started liking my NBA team (this was definitely during the 92-93 season when the Suns went to the playoffs) so I was definitely not being a bandwagon fan at all. And as I stated I never had a baseball team until 1999. Since then I've watched or paid attention to online or on a phone app probably 90%+ of their games and they've never played a meaningful game past August, and most seasons past July.

I don't see how my personal case here matters though and it's taking away from the point. Obviously all my teams suck. The reason I think it's pointless to say who they are is because say I started liking all my teams in 1995 and they were the Broncos, Lakers, Red Wings and Yankees....how in the hell does that make me a bandwagon fan? If I watched them all and discussed them all on a daily basis with friends and whoever and was loyal to them how does it matter if they are good or they suck?

And no I probably didn't get into forums until the late 90s but I was definitely online about 24/7 starting in 1996-1997 but I spent most the time in an ECW chatroom on AOL. I do probably have a combined 100k+ posts on my teams forums since whenever I started doing that though (2001ish?) and they'e definitely been around and heavily used by many sports fans all over the world for over a decade now.

So, you're not a "real fan" unless you were just coincidentally were born in the same area as that team and you like them because it's just watch everybody around you is talking about. Good to know.

I hear this argument every time I discuss this subject, why is so hard for people to accept that for some people its impossible to be a real sports-fan?

If youre born in the jungle and never hear about the sport "baseball" in your entire life, yes I have to inform you that you will never ever become a real baseball fan in my eyes.
Im pretty sure you agree with me here.

If you are born 5000 miles away from "your" team, but you cant afford to watch a single game of them in your entire life because youre too poor for electricity/flight, yes I have to inform you that you will never ever become a real fan of that team in my eyes.
Im pretty sure you agree with me here.

So why cant you understand that for some people its impossible to become a real fan?

Because living in the jungle and/or 5000 miles away and never being able to see a single game of your team is a lot different from living in another state, watching all their games on TV and even going to a few of their games every year.

A person almost always chooses to root for a team outside of the home market because that team is more successful than the home team at the time that they become a fan. That is not a respectable motive and it's natural that it gets met by derision.

Having lived a life of rooting for teams who have done way more sucking than succeeding (though thankfully my NFL team finally reached the mountaintop after over 20 years of my fanhood), it's just always been very frustrating to deal with those who openly try to take a shortcut to getting to experience a championship as a fan.

i was a fan of the jaguars for a little while because when the jaguars and panthers both came into the nfl i decided i wanted to be a fan of a team since their inception. that **** got old pretty fast

This just isn't true. It's going to be a coinflip in almost every case. My NFL team is the only one that fits this criteria. The 2 close friends I have who also like teams from various cities are 3 out of 8 in fitting this criteria you described. (8 being their teams from the big 4 USA pro sports leagues, compared to their home team at time of becoming a fan)

I think you're just making things up now. Shortcut to a championship? You're only looking at it that way because you're A) not in the minority and root for your home teams and B) had to wait forever for a championship, seahawks i'm assuming?

Nobody has given me a reason as to why people should root for their home teams other than "its who everyone else around you roots for when you grow up" which isn't even true in my case and in many others. THere's plenty of people who didn't grow up in NYC Philly or Boston.

Got old why? Did you switch teams to the Jags from another team? And how old were you when you did this?

I think as long as you stay committed to a team and didn't abandon a hometown team, then you shouldn't be considered a fraud. Some people maybe just didn't have parents who raised them on sports, or they grew up in a bad sports town, they aren't frauds... The real frauds are "fans" who just bandwagon the big name teams whenever they are doing good, or even those Dallas fans (who don't live in Dallas) who don't even understand how football is played, but they just love rooting for DEM COWBOYS.