”My sports team is not always the best sports team.” Ths is one of the things we should say more often according to Kid President.It's okay for a sports fan to want “their” team to win. What's not okay is to allow team support to distort rationality. A fanatic is a good thing. A fan addict is not. Many people confuse the two. A fanatic is simply a fan in the pure sense of the word who loves the game and how it should be played. A fanatic does not put any team above the sport. On the other hand, a fan addict is a fan in the impure sense of the word. A fan addict puts whatever they support above anything else, even rationality. Many who call themselves fans are actually fan addicts.
Fanning The Ego
When personal identity is guided by ego rather than conscience, a reality is created where, whatever a person decides to support becomes the basis for truth. This occurs because the person's sense of identity comes from “their” sports team and “their” team winning rather than the person's identity coming from self-esteem based on knowledge of self. The person's self-esteem comes from the desire to “be right” and intelligent enough to make the right choice of sports team, religion, spouse, etc. The above is also true when a person's identity, sense of self and pride are tied to other things such as country, race, ethnicity, culture, political party, group, club, organization, age, martial status, gender, financial status, occupation, formal education, etc. rather than identity being tied to knowledge of self.Ego Corrupts Character
When the ego dominates how a person thinks, bad behavior is encouraged. For instance, basketball and football supporters are encouraged to be loud and distract players on the other team.Thankfully, in tennis and golf, this is unacceptable behavior.
Within many sports, players are expected to break rules and cheat as much as possible and hopefully get caught fewer times. To them and their fan addicts, that's a winning strategy. It gets worse. In many sports, verbal and physical attacks on a supporter or player of another team is acceptable gang behavior.
