I didn’t always watch the NBA. Sometimes I watched the dog humping the couch. Sometimes I watched bad anime. Sometimes, in a dead heat to occupy myself through the long winter nights, I would even resort to that most thankless of hobbies, book reading. But now, due to the imposition of fate (I have a basketball-addicted girlfriend), several nights of the chilly week I watch the Oklahoma City Thunder. And I shouldn’t be chastised for being a fairweather fan, even though that’s exactly what I am.
Anyone who clicked on this article knows that the timing couldn’t be better to be an OKC Thunder fan who previously was not one. Shai just blew through his all-time scoring high. JDub is an All-Star. Aaron Wiggins just saved 41 points’ worth of basketball. Sam Presti isn’t surreptitiously trading away our best players with no notice. Chet Holmgren did this little stinky hand gesture. Lu Dort is still in. Several nights of the week, I can watch Alex Caruso scramble like a turtle who’s just burst forth from a sand-covered egg after a ball that might never become a turnover, and he knows it, but by God, he’ll scramble anyway. (Or real sicko shit, like his floor-to-screen-to-assist against the Trailblazers.) It rules.
Being a fairweather fan has its perks. If the Thunder lose a game (which they, on occasion, do), I descend into a partial and particular ennui, as opposed to an all-encompassing, existential one. If the Thunder don’t go to the NBA Championship, I will hold myself back from posting expletive-laden rants against Adam Silver on Twitter/X, the evil website. The character of my fandom is cool, easy to calm, and only cares so much about conference rivalries or trade controversies. To me, Durant leaving for the Warriors was as distant and as consequential as tectonic plates moving to create the Ouachitas.
But the character of my fandom is also shifting like mercury upon the water. I find myself, when in a frustrated moment (the dog is humping the wrong thing, perhaps: a bookshelf, for some reason), channeling Mark Daigneault screaming mother-fucker to himself, and I will smile. I will remember that Mark Daigneault is only four years older than me, and I will suddenly stop smiling. I will realize that the yearly salaries of NBA players are orders of magnitude higher than my lifetime earnings will ever be, and my mouth will quiver in a way so small that only my mother would notice. I have become distraught at the prospect of a game against the Dallas Mavericks, whom I despise. [Update: I have stopped fearing this.] I have found myself saying the phrase “coast to coast like butter and toast” like Michael Cage anytime I reach a new level of Journey of the Prairie King, the soul-rendingly difficult arcade game inside Stardew Valley.
I am, terrifyingly, becoming a Thunder fan.
But will my fandom last? That is the test of the fairweather fan. If the Thunder slump, will I hold true to my urge to jump up from the couch, when Jaylin Williams hits a huge three, to give it the old “dad watching sports” air-punch? There are some questions that only seasons can answer. Spring creeps at the edges. Some days I look up at my girlfriend’s signed Lu Dort jersey and weep like a penitent stroking his beads at the feet of Mary. Some days I think that watching a bad Thunder game will give me an ulcer and ultimately kill me.
The question of sports fandom is, I think, partly a question of love. To love a thing is to watch it become a million other things; to see one face in reality is to know the ten thousand faces it actually possesses. I don’t know how you people do this. Am I willing to swallow the upset which being a sports fan guarantees me?
No! I’m a coward. That’s why I enjoy sports from the margins. Every item of Thunder merchandise I buy goes straight to my girlfriend’s closet. And yet. I don’t pray, exactly, for Shai to get MVP, but I do, erm, think about it a weird amount. He’s the points leader for the NBA as of this writing. And wasn’t it nice when he gave that kid the jersey off his back for his birthday?
Maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up and be a completely devoted Thunder fan. It’s not like the dog humping the couch is going to send me through the full spectrum of human emotion. Books don’t hit game-winning stepback threes.
