Let's Stop Talking About Having Sex With Sports Teams

Yesterday, Bill “The Incarnation of Sports Fan Id” Simmons tweeted a pretty typical Bill Simmons tweet: “How great is life gonna be for Katie Holmes' next boyfriend? She's gonna be more rejuvenated than Youkilis on the White Sox.” For those not living in his pop-culture universe, that compares Kevin Youkilis, a player who got traded to Chicago from Boston and is hitting the hell out of the ball, to Katie Holmes, who just fled the clammy, metallic embrace of Tom Cruise and will, Simmons postulates, um, fuck the next guy she meets real good or something.

For Simmons, making that kind of sports/sex reference is as natural as Teen Wolf growing fur and savagely mauling people, or whatever he did in that movie. Last month, he devoted a whole column to comparing the Sonics leaving Seattle for Oklahoma City to a guy leaving his wife for a 20-year-old yoga instructor. Which means, I guess, that we should picture 600,000 obese, hairy, sweatpanted Oklahomans engaging in tantric sex with Kevin Durant? Or that these Oklahomans were the sinewy, flexible blonde to Seattle’s undersexed frump? Simmons didn’t invent the “Fan=spouse, player/team=sexxxy lady” analogy—it’s been floating around for a while, and has been featured in such articles as, “LeBron James Is a Hot but Crazy Chick Who’s Flirting with Us” and ”The Whalers Leaving Hartford Is Like a Man Leaving” (a rare gender reversal).

Comparing fandom to relationships is amazingly easy. For a lot of male fans, the two most significant relationships of their lives are with a woman and their team—an ever-changing group of muscular millionaires they’ll never meet. So sure: A team leaving a town is a divorce, a star player is a gorgeous piece of ass, college players going through drills at the combine are chicks at the club, etc. etc. etc. And being a fan is like being in love in that it’s irrational and never something we choose—you can’t stop seeing that asshole, you can’t suddenly sever ties with the Cleveland Indians. There’s something wonderfully naïve about rooting for a team, just as there’s something wonderfully naïve about falling in love.

All that doesn’t make those Dwight-Howard-is-like-a-crazy-hot-chick-amiright-fellas metaphors any less boring or bullshit. Fans might think they’re in love, but many players and almost all owners are just in a business relationship. Players largely don’t get to pick where they’re going to play and generally go wherever gives them more money—and wherever they go, they’re living in McMansions and penthouses and having parties at clubs you’ve never heard of. Even when they live in your town, they aren’t really living in your town. These aren’t the days when Gil Hodges lived down the street from you and Johnny Unitas worked construction in the offseason. Owners, meanwhile, buy teams in cities they’ve never been to because it seems more fun and profitable than buying a yacht with a pool large enough to sail another yacht in. These people do not care about you. Youkilis didn’t flee a broken marriage; LeBron James is not your hot ex-girlfriend; a team leaving is a lot easier to deal with than a divorce.

When you’re hunting for analogies to describe the intense, almost impossibly dumb feeling of being a fan, maybe look further than the length of your dick. Being a Knicks fan for the past decade, for instance, has been like being forced by the government to store 200 pounds of rancid dog meat in your fridge…. Mark Sanchez is that good-looking waiter who seems suave but gets your order wrong and knocks plates over, possibly because he’s drunk…. When the Sonics left Seattle, it was like being told my high school had been blown up by the FBI and they weren’t going to apologize because that’s what they meant to do. If any of those things are like love to you, one of us needs to see a psychologist.

@HCheadle