Changing Weather Pattern

 

I have a confession to make, which would puzzle the childhood version of me and which will infuriate half of my neighbors in the region, but which I want to fess up to anyway: I have become a fair-weather fan.

The term is spoken as an epithet around these parts. It is an iron-clad law that you root for the home team, you live and die by their outcomes, and you pass the burden onto your progeny.

One is given some grace as a transplant, to the extent that you are not looked down as lesser than for not growing up around here, to divide loyalties between the home teams and the teams where you grew up, so long as the groups are not bitter rivals, which if so then you'd better choose wisely. Otherwise, it's "ride or die" with the team that owns your heart and soul.

I subscribed to this belief as a kid. I ached with joy and pain with every high and low experienced by the Bay Area teams I grew up rooting for, namely the Oakland A's baseball team, the Oakland Raiders football team, and the Golden State Warriors basketball team. Being superstitious, I not only watched games in real time with bated breath, but would contort my body in an attempt to will the players to success (and then froze such poses lest any movement break the spell of their hot streaks).

But then I left home to go to college, and I was too busy to follow either my boyhood teams or the Philadelphia teams, and that lack of sports in my life continued well into the early parts of my career, which my childhood self would have been stunned and upset to learn, but it was the sacrifices I made to prioritize other things at that stage of my life.

But I left California to go to school some 35+ years ago, and have lived in Philadelphia that whole time, and two of the three Bay Area teams I used to root hard for have moved away from the Bay Area (the Raiders now play in Vegas while the A's play, well, I'm not exactly sure nowadays as it's complicated, but I know for sure it's not in Oakland anymore). So my childhood allegiances have faded. Meanwhile, my ties to Philly teams has grown simply from proximity to news coverage and local fans. It's fun to get caught up in the excitement of an entire region cheering the home team onto victory after victory. And, as someone who desires our local economy to be strong, there's a clear correlation between sports success and commercial activity, as deeper playoff runs mean more out-of-town visitors as well as happier local fans with looser wallets.

When Bay Area teams have had success during this time, it literally and figuratively felt distant to me. I rarely consumed coverage due to the time zone differences, and championship parades were faint news stories rather than experienced in person. Conversely, in the span of my being a parent, I've been able to take each kid to a championship parade on Broad Street: Phillies in '08 with Jada, Eagles in '18 with Aaron, and Eagles again in '25 with Asher. And so, over the course of an entire adult life, I've come to follow, root for, and experience euphoria and heartbreak with the Philadelphia professional teams. 

But lately, I seem to be back to a season in which I am deprioritizing following sports. Part of it is that my life is full with other obligations and pursuits: career, parenting, golf, friends. But part of it, and this is the "fair weather" aspect, is that I'm simply not interested in going on an emotional roller-coaster with any of the teams. 

The thing about watching sports in real time is, you don't know the outcome until the end. It could be a satisfying rout, an exhilarating nail-biter, a crushing defeat, or a lopsided loss. And at this stage of my life, I'm not interested in investing 3+ hours in an activity only to leave it disappointed, heartbroken, or angry. And I'm certainly not interested in revisiting the agitation the day after through news coverage and talk radio.

Now, should any of the local teams get hot at the right time and run the table towards a championship, you'll find me back to paying attention and cheering the players on. That's another part of being a fair-weather, is not just being uninterested when things are going poorly but jumping onto the excitement train when things are going well. And perhaps that is blasphemy around these parts, but it's just where I am at this stage in my life. Call it shallowness, call it self-preservation, call it an efficient use of my scarce time: whatever you want to call it, it's where I am now.