On Obligation and Fandom
Should I Stay or Should I Go
There’s a sentiment that pops up on tennis twitter from time to time and I want to take a moment to respond to it. It goes something like this: “you have no obligation to the player you support as a fan. Sports are entertainment and if you’re not having a good time watching your favorite player, you should dump them and move on to something else that brings you more joy.”
To understand where this is coming from, it helps to contrast it with more traditional ideas about loyalty in fandom, where long-suffering, diehard fans are held up as the ideal in contrast to undependable “bandwagon” fans. Telling people instead, especially those in fan communities, that you don’t have to prove anything to anyone with your fandom is a welcome reprieve. Much discourse around fandom is in service of gatekeeping: separating “real” fans from “fake” ones, so it’s good to see this corrective.
Still, saying you should never hesitate to just go ahead and bail on a struggling player you’ve supported in the past doesn’t really sit right with me. The idea that, primarily, what we as fans get out of sport is entertainment elides the fact that much of the meaning in sports fandom is social. It can be hard to watch your favorite player struggle, but going through it with others can create a powerful bond.
Who we support is also wrapped up with how we perceive the world and want others to see us. We don’t get any say in our favorite player’s results, but we do get to express ourselves through our choices as fans. The type of player we want to support: their background, their attitude, their game-style, each aspect reflects back upon us and our worldview. Fandom, after all, isn’t based purely on performance in the first place. The idea that you should step away from a player if their results take a sustained turn for the worse doesn’t account for our personal and social investments in fandom, which leads to confusion as frustrated fans continue to find themselves attracted to the fandom, even as they try to pull away.
In principle, I’m not opposed to more self-centered priorities in fandom. What fan communities have going for them is that they are easily accessible and full of passionate people. In a world of weakening social ties and rampant cynicism, that’s not nothing. Still, at the end of the day fan communities are not so essential that our positions within them determine the course of our lives. You can and should move on from a fandom if you no longer feel the desire to be part of that community. Still, for many, breaking away from a fandom entirely because they are frustrated with recent results will seem like the nuclear approach.
One of my issues with the idea that ‘you have no obligations to your player as a fan’, is the assumption that the only way to assert control over your life as a sports fan is to stop watching. Although this might be tempting when the losses are stacking up, I would argue it fails to get at the root of frustration and actually risks making matters worse. The decision to withhold support until a player returns to a certain level of success turns the fan-player relationship into an ever more “transactional” one. Counterproductively, this attitude only serves to emphasize the very expectations and obligations that make us unhappy as fans to begin with. You tune in for the first time in a while and you’re immediately judging your player and calculating whether or not their level is worth your investment. Doesn’t sound particularly enjoyable to me.
There has to be something other than the absolutely-loyal or the purely-conditional visions of sports-fandom we find here. We need to find a better way to articulate the balance between the time and energy we devote to our favorite players and what we hope to receive in return. I like to think about how we might do this in terms of what I like to call our “fan stories.” Fan stories are exactly what they sound like: the narratives we tell about ourselves as sports fans. “Because my parents met at Davidson College, I saw Stephen Curry play when he a Freshman in college and have been a fan of him ever since.” (True-story by the way) Fan stories aren’t just retrospective. They can also be aspirational: “My family is from X country and no player from there has ever won a major. I want to see it happen.”
It’s in the stories we choose to pursue and tell about ourselves as fans that we come closest to the heart of the matter. Who are we and what do we want to witness? Take this story: A seasoned tennis fan who has already followed a top player and seen them win a major; now they want to experience the career of a very different kind of player. They want to follow, not someone who was supposed to be great, but rather someone who was truly a mystery to them. This player doesn’t have the same upside as some others. They’ll likely never win a major or be world #1. But what remains in the absence of expectations is genuine curiosity about what they will be able to achieve and a desire to watch it all play out. As you may or may not have guessed, that was about me. The story of how I became an Elina Avanesyan fan.
Fan stories like these are usually formed retroactively. I didn’t go into the 2023 Roland Garros looking for a player to satisfy the conditions described above. Instead, I found myself drawn to Elina after watching her by chance. I came up with this story to make sense of the potential I was seeing in her. I’ve followed her career these last 2 years and sometimes now I do get frustrated with her limitations. When that happens, I find that re-centering my fan-story, emphasizing why I am following her and what I’m still getting out of the experience, helps.
For fans who find themselves frustrated (so in other words, all of us), examining and reinventing one’s fan story can be worthwhile. It can clarify what keeps drawing you back to a player, even when they are struggling, and help you come up with a set of standards that is based on your priorities, rather than on their results. If it turns out that we no longer have a compelling story to tell about ourselves as fans, then perhaps it really is time to cut and run. At least this way, it will have been born out of an attempt to understand ourselves and find where we belong (which is really what fandom was all about in the first place).