One-Team Athletes Make Me Feel All Warm and Fuzzy

Anze Kopitar sometimes capitalizes the “LOVE” when he types “Slovenia” into a tweet. As the first and only Slovenian in the NHL, you can understand his devotion. Right now he’s back in his hometown of Jesenice for the off-season, a small, fertile little town located near the border of Austria. A week ago he was parading around his old stomping ground with the Stanley Cup he won as a member of the LA Kings. There’s video of him climbing castles and ringing church bells, all with the Cup in tow—watching that, you’d never think, “There goes a guy who lives in LA.”

But still, Kopitar wears Dodgers hats and hangs out with Andre Ethier, he hashtags #bestfansintheworld when tweeting about Staples Center—quite possibly because he knows that we need to know he loves Los Angeles like Los Angeles loves him. Our fragile sports-fan psyches require it. Our players shape our identity, they’re ambassadors for our cities and champions of our homelands—at least that’s how we have it worked out in our heads.

It doesn’t make any sense, really, especially in globalized games like hockey, baseball, and basketball. Where do the natives get off demanding such allegiance from their team’s players, most of whom either didn’t have a choice where they played, or came to their towns for purely mercenary reasons? Crazy or not, town loyalty is mandated. The German born-and-raised Dirk Nowitzki has become a Dallas icon, the Virgin Islands-bred Tim Duncan is San Antonio to the bone, Canadian Wayne Gretzky still lives in California, and Panama’s Mariano Rivera is about as New Yawk City as you can get. We don’t talk nearly as warmly about Brett Favre’s later years or Ricky Henderson’s career, because the whole team-hopping, fading-away-not-burning-out seems somehow contradictory to the very nature of sportsmanship. Why couldn’t Jamie Moyer evaporate after setting the record for wins in Seattle rather than hopping all over the league and then getting repeatedly cut from Triple-A teams?

No matter how wise or savvy or self-aware we get, we still hold our most prized athletes to the outdated standards of our boyhoods. When Jonathan Quick, the goaltender for the Kings, signed a ten-year, $58-million extension, I didn’t think about it in terms of money, or stability, or even the team’s potential future Stanley Cup runs. I thought about it in terms of making a commitment to me. It’s perverse, but the idea of a 26-year-old from Milford, Connecticut, saying, “I like this place, I want to live here with you,” taps to a gleeful instinct forged in our turbulent youths, when athletes were undisputed heroes and everything was black and white, and long before concepts like salary-caps crept into our consciousness.

In some ways this instinct is most magnified when it comes to small-market teams. Some of the greatest legacies and infamous betrayals hinge on the commitment of all-world talent to the flyover states. Take Reggie Miller, who spent 18 years with the Indiana Pacers. No controversy (except for a little Spike Lee taunting), no championships, and no glory hunting, In fact, when Danny Ainge offered him a comeback role with the future world-champion ’08 Celtics, Miller respectably declined. I know it’s all aesthetics, but those sorts of stories just undeniably feel good, like there’s more to playing for a team than stats and cutting checks. Also see: George Brett’s bid to buy the Royals, or Tony Gwynn coaching the San Diego State baseball team. The good guys stick with their teams and build from the ground up. The good guys are never free agents. The good guys will spend their post-playing career as the color commentator on local broadcasts. It harkens back to these long-standing ideas we have about how sports should work.

That dynamic was the whole cultural basis of the 2012 NBA Finals. The villainous, deceiving LeBron James, who abandoned his native Ohio to join his big star buddies in big-market Miami, against the wholesome, goody-two-shoes Kevin Durant and the ideal, middle-America Oklahoma City Thunder. Sure, things were far more complicated than that, but for mainstream fans, it was pretty easy to pick sides.

It’s a dumb, selfish instinct, but I don’t really feel like apologizing. It’s ridiculous to hold professional athletes to such imaginary standards, but isn’t that what sports are about? I watch sports for the mythology more than anything else. These devotions, this self-conscious citywide patriotism we want so desperately to be reflected in our players, grants a kind of poetry to certain moments. Derek Jeter clocking a home run for his 3,000th hit, every one as a Yankee, Peyton Manning finally getting over the championship hump in his ninth season with Indianapolis, Paul Pierce persisting through years of mediocrity and finally winning—no great championships, retirement speeches, or controversies would exist without our willingness to treat these men like regional representatives. We should be so lucky to be so irrational that ballgames become theater.

@luke_winkie