The most passionate thing I did in graduate school was attend University of Iowa basketball games. Joseph Heller gave a reading the same night as the Iowa-Indiana game, and I didn’t even consider going to the former. My closest friend at Iowa, Philip, liked to say his childhood was about Walt Frazier. Every night he’d hear his mother and father screaming at each other in the next room, and he’d just stare at the Knicks game on the little black-and-white TV at the edge of his bed, trying to will himself into “Clyde’s” body. In the spring of 1980, when Iowa beat Georgetown to reach the Final Four, Philip and I jumped up and down and cried and hugged each other in a way we wouldn’t have dreamed of doing for any other reason.
Fifteen years later—mid-nineties—both Philip and I were living in Seattle (he’s now back in New York). Our team was the Seattle SuperSonics, and whenever he and I would watch their games on TV, he seemed to go out of his way to compliment good plays by the other team, and I always wanted to ask him, Is it a conscious effort on your part not to succumb to jingoistic cheering, or are you constitutionally incapable of the monomania required? I admired his equanimity, but I couldn’t even pretend to emulate it. Though unable to say exactly what the disease was, I wanted the Sonics to cure me.
Sports passion is deeply, infamously territorial: Our city-state is better than your city-state because our city-state’s team beat your city-state’s team. My attachment to the Sonics was approximately the reverse of this. I had lived here for less than a quarter of my life, and none of the players was originally from the Northwest, let alone Seattle. I reveled in our non-Seattleness. My particular demigod was the Sonics point guard Gary Payton, who was one of the most notorious trash-talkers in the National Basketball Association. He wasn’t really bad. He was only pretend bad—I knew that—but he allowed me to fantasize about being bad, or at least talking tough.
You might have to live here to understand entirely why this was of such importance to me. The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses. When I castigated a contractor for using the phrase “Jew me down,” he returned later that evening to beg my forgiveness, and the next week he mailed me a mea culpa and a rebate. Seattleites use their seat belts more, return lost wallets more often, and recycle their trash more than people do in any other American city. Thirty years ago, the Republican (losing) candidate for mayor was the man who (allegedly) invented the happy face. Last month, an old crone wagged her finger at me not for jaywalking but for placing one foot off the curb while she drove past, and my first and only thought was, This is why I loved the Sonics—this is why I miss Gary Payton.
I used to live across the street from a fundamentalist church, and whenever the Supes played particularly well, I was filled with empathy for the churchgoers. They go to church, I sometimes thought, for the same reason fans go to games: adulthood didn’t turn out to have quite as much glory as we thought it would; for an hour or two, we’re in touch with something majestic.
The psychoanalyst Robert Stoller has written, “The major traumas and frustrations of early life are reproduced in the fantasies and behaviors that make up adult erotism, but the story now ends happily. This time, we win. In other words, the adult erotic behavior contains the early trauma. The two fit: the details of the adult script tell what happened to the child.” This seems to me true not only of sexual imagination but also of sports passion—why we become such devoted fans of the performances of strangers. For once, we hope, the breaks will go our way. We’ll love our life now. This time we’ll win. (The Sonics were sold in 2006 and relocated to Oklahoma City in 2008; in 2012, as the OKC Thunder, they played for the NBA championship and lost in five games. In 2016, their star player, Kevin Durant, à la Tom Joad, left Oklahoma for Golden State. Seattle and I, still nursing our loss, cheered wildly.)