Loving a sports team at the end of the world
Can fandom survive the climate crisis?
Dear Readers,
Welcome to year two of Southpaw! We’re excited to keep it rolling. In what we hope is not a harbinger of things to come, there wasn’t a ton of big sports news that interested us this week, so we’re taking a bit of a step back and bringing you a more open-ended essay on blind loyalty, what happens when that’s tested, and why climate change will test it further.
One quick housekeeping note: now that we’ve reached one year of editions, we’ve decided to drop the “Southpaw ##” from our subject lines, since it seems sort of pointless to keep counting. If for some reason you really loved knowing what edition we’re on, let us know and we’ll add it back in.
-Calder and Ian
Can fandom survive the climate crisis?
There’s a famous Jerry Seinfeld joke that gets at the inherent absurdity of rooting for a sports team:
“Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify. Because the players are always changing, the team could move to another city. You’re actually rooting for the clothes, when you get right down to it. You are actually standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city.”
Jerry’s wisdom notwithstanding, millions of people around the country and the world have developed deeply-felt attachments to their favorite teams (or favorite clothing). As a result, fans hate other teams, and when their clothing fails to succeed, it can put them in a foul mood for days. Heartbreaking moments in sports franchises become as much a part of the lore as successes. We feel all of these feelings despite the fact that fandom is really just an accident of geography.
The worst sort of heartbreak that a sports fan can feel is to watch their favorite team pack up and leave their city entirely, in search of more money or bigger tax breaks. The Seattle Supersonics leaving in 2008 to become the Oklahoma City Thunder, for example, is built into the fabric of changes in the city: at the same time as the Sonics left, Amazon and Google moved in, slowly transforming Seattle into the transplant tech haven that it is today. Many longtime Seattle-ites—we spoke to one this week—remember the Supersonics’ move as a major turning point in the trajectory of the city.
In more recent years, some NFL teams have left their previous homes for good, and others have been forced to relocate temporarily to avoid the fallout of our contemporary crises. The New Orleans Saints have had to play outside of New Orleans multiple times in recent years due to hurricanes; the Toronto Blue Jays played half of the current baseball season and all of the last one in Florida because of COVID restrictions between Canada and the United States; the entire 2020 NBA and NHL playoffs happened in bubbles also due to COVID; simple rainouts are on the rise around baseball.
A lot has been made recently of these overlapping crises and the fact that they are all seemingly coming to bear at the same time. While a pandemic sweeps through the world, leaving death and economic destruction in its wake, the unpredictable weather patterns caused by the climate crisis are doing the same. All the while, poorer people around the world are bearing the brunt of the destruction, while the rich—who account for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions and are least affected by global pandemics—continue to line their pockets. Stimulus checks and carbon-neutral buildings are useful stopgap measures, but they don’t address the root causes of these crises.
How is all of this related to sports? Well, these crises are bound to change the way we root for teams, testing our loyalties to our favorite clothes. You might remember last summer when a cloud of smoke settled over San Francisco, turning the sky an ominous shade of orange. The San Francisco Giants, set to host the Seattle Mariners that evening (without fans, due to COVID restrictions) decided to continue to play. But if fans had been allowed, would the calculation have been different? If wildfires in California during the summer get worse, will the Giants and the Dodgers and the Angels have to regularly cancel games? Will the smoke that now drifts all the way to the East Coast cancel games on this side of the country? At some point, will it make sense to keep playing baseball in California under open roofs? In California at all?
In the near term, the richest teams will have the most to flexibility stave off the effects of this crisis without being forced to relocate altogether. Some professional sports owners have already responded to these escalating crises by investing in infrastructure that gives them at least some protection from the elements, constructing stadiums with retractable roofs and synthetic grass, and industrial-strength air conditioning. That’s all well and good, especially if the taxpayers are footing the bill.
But the efforts of non-professional sports teams to grapple with the effects of the climate crisis are providing a window into the future. Earlier this year, when Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana, The New York Times published a story about a high school football program in Grand Isle, Louisiana, that lost almost all of its facilities during the hurricane. The team managed to regroup after the storm, but just barely. “If another Katrina hits, I don’t see anything coming back down here,” said one source in the story.
Sooner or later, even the richest sports teams will have to ask themselves a similar question: Can we stay here? The climate crisis is already causing the mass migration of cultures, including the teams and sports that come with them. What does fandom look like when your beloved team is only one wildfire or hurricane away from never coming back? What happens when teams move in search of higher ground instead of higher tax breaks? What happens when your clothes catch fire?
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . . female athletes participating in the legal fight to protect abortion rights? “Hundreds of female athletes call on Supreme Court to uphold abortion rights,” by Des Bieler in The Washington Post (September 21, 2021).
. . . an excerpt of Dave Zirin’s new book on “The Kaepernick Effect”? “Taking a Knee,” by Dave Zirin in The Progressive Magazine (September 22, 2021).
. . . the trailblazing new head of the National Basketball Players’ Association? “D.C.-area attorney Tamika Tremaglio to replace Michele Roberts as National Basketball Players Association leader,” by Ben Golliver in The Washington Post (September 22, 2021).