I was just listening to an interview with folks involved in the making of the movie The Big Fan and something occurred to me. For most folks, being a true sports fan is about having strong opinions- to be filled with certainty about a team’s personnel decisions or what factors might cause a team to do well or to do badly.
I offer an alternative: in sports analysis, like political analysis, being truly engaged is about seeing things from multiple points of view, understanding that things have many causes, and that solutions are seldom simple. To be clear, this kind of understanding- this kind of orientation to the situation- is not mutually exclusive with strong opinions or strong engagement. I submit that perhaps the opposite is true. One can only truly arrive at a strongly held perspective when one understands the full complexity of the issue at hand- including evidence to the contrary of that strongly held perspective.
A big part of our problem, it seems to me, is that this kind of analysis is (so they tell me) not good TV. So we have Jim Rome and Glenn Beck. But once again, I stand astride the the disappointment of today and am hopeful for tomorrow. I am a Chicago Cubs fan, after all.