Fandemonium

I confess, I’m a sports fan of the irrational, one-team-long-time-faithful variety. But since I live in Vancouver and the team I support is the Chelsea Football Club of West London, a place to which I have no connection other than having visited a few times, my allegiance is difficult to justify. This was illustrated poignantly when Chelsea lost to Roma in the qualifying stages of last year’s Champions League. On paper we should have destroyed them. (Note the use of “we” as the fan experience is always communal.) But Roma had our number that day and ended up popping in three goals in 24 miserable minutes. When I sulked after the game, my wife finally commented, “How could you possibly let something upset you that is completely irrelevant?”

I didn’t argue, having thought many times previously that my fan-hood really was a bit insane. Watching games with other Chelsea fans in Vancouver – all of us in our team scarves and jerseys, cheering and groaning and yelling at the television – I’d often marvelled at the happy delusion that sustained our caring. But I’ve since changed my mind. In fact, I’m starting to think fandom, far from being delusional, is actually a rational (if unconscious) strategy deployed in response to a profound human yearning. And that yearning is the same one that enlivens the human response to great art.

Yes, you read that correctly. I’m equating, on at least one critical level, the experience of standing in front of an El Greco or a Michelangelo, or a Picasso or a Jeff Wall for that matter, with that of witnessing Zidane’s step-over, Federer’s fluidity on the court or, say, Ovechkin’s upside-down goal. And the equivalence of these experiences has to do with our response to moments of extraordinary human creativity.

Bear with me on this. We live in an increasingly demystified world. We understand the observable phenomena around us to be explained by the twin realities of natural science and market economics. Yet in our own lives, we often resist this rational reduction. We show or witness kindness without carrying out a strict cost-benefit analysis, just as we don’t cite endorphin and amino acid flows in our response to beauty or love or lust. In these instances, we attribute the texture of life to causes just outside the scientific realm. So the grammar of genetics and self-interest seems mechanical and limited, unable to describe life as it is lived and remembered.

Art is very frequently an emblem of that disconnect between our rationality and our experience. I recall a time in Rome (yes, that city again) when my wife and I went to see Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of St. Peter in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. The painting hung in a darkened grotto under a coin-operated light for which we’d forgotten to bring a coin. But as we stood there, squinting and disappointed, a sleekly dressed businessman stepped in off the street and plugged in the necessary euro. The grotto sprang to life and we drew a collective breath at what was revealed. The indescribable depth and clarity of the artist’s vision, certainly. But even more so, the immediate and visceral presence of an artist’s creative power. Caravaggio burst to view in the grotto, much as his painting would have originally burst into the world from some reserved and mysterious place within the artist that was yet outside the purview of science.

I realize that professional sports don’t easily align themselves with this observation because of how commercial they’ve become. We encounter them through a thick crust of sponsorships and advertisements. The team owners are billionaires. The soccer and hockey and baseball players are all megamillionaires. The brutal logic of money is everywhere.

And yet, as anyone who has thrown themselves into the act of spectatorship can tell you, this is not how a game is experienced. In the flow of its ever-changing story, fans are captivated and the concerns of the team become their own. The player’s decision to seek a transfer or demand higher wages may be cynical. Surely, every Chelsea fan registered the absurdity of captain John Terry’s demand (since satisfied) to be the highest paid player on the team for close to a decade (implying a salary of about $250,000 a week).

Nevertheless, the hard-fought tackle and the bit of skill along the touchline are not cynical in the moment they are performed and witnessed. They seem instead to emerge from some protected zone within. And in the climactic moments of the game – and this has to include the time Terry headed in the winning goal with 15 minutes left in the game to knock archrival Barcelona out of the Champions League – the players prove what the sudden illumination of an Old Master proves: that something utterly original may be produced from no source in this world other than our own individual creativity and human will. They give evidence of something far greater than the mere investment of 10,000 hours of training, as per Malcolm Gladwell’s dry formulation, of some magical added ingredient. Call it genius.

Sports fans live for those moments. And like art lovers, they are made more alive by them, more aware of their own existence and individual strength. Watch the faces of spectators the next time you’re at a sporting event, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. At the pinnacle moment of joy, the face will animate, as if something deeply submerged has risen to the surface. Genius moments in art may reveal to us why we live. But genius moments in sports remind us of how it feels to live.

At least, that’s how I felt five days after Chelsea’s loss to Roma, when, in the driving Lancashire rain, Chelsea put two past Blackburn to return to winning form and the top of the Premier league. Neither goal was sublime. But each came from a burst of individual ideas, exploding to life from nowhere. Malouda cuts inside, Lampard takes the pass and pokes it through to Anelka, who appears to slow the hands of time as he strides forward, once, twice, then chips the keeper to seal the game.

I was dancing, pumping my arms in the air. Irrelevant, delusional? Not a chance. That was the noumenal spark, baby. Essential and unprocessed. Out of this world.

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