The Existential Crises of My Football Fandom (February 5, 2022, the severed branch)
The Raiders activated my fanaticism, but the Lions taught me to simply love the game
Above: Watching the Detroit Lions at the New York Giants (2016)
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Sometimes I think if the Oakland Raiders hadn’t sucked so bad in 2003, I would never have become fundamentalist Christian.
By failing so catastrophically the season after going to the Super Bowl, the Raiders left a colossal void in my life that could only be filled by the infinite love of the Lord Jesus Christ. As a sixteen-year-old with a newly embedded sense of the ongoing celestial battles for the souls of mankind, and indeed with my own eternal life at stake in the tribulation between Heaven and Hell, why would I spend my Sunday watching football?
Later, after I drifted away from this gloomy theology, it was the need for a productive intellectualism that prevented me from really enjoying an NFL game. I couldn’t waste an entire day watching these athletic competitions that had nothing to do with me when there were so many books I still needed to read in order to finally become what I have always so desperately desired to be: a smart person.
But why the Raiders? I had moved to Michigan from Oregon in third grade, and for years I had a sense that I wasn’t really from Michigan… because I wasn’t. I liked to walk around correcting my peers’ incorrect pronunciations of my home state. I was from the West Coast, and so were the Raiders. I couldn’t, or didn’t want to, connect with the Lions.
“My dad was always a Raiders fan,” I often lied to my friends. I based this delusion on the knowledge that my dad had once lived in Oakland for a couple years. I was a fundamentalist Raiders fan now, as of five seconds ago. And with just 1:50 to go in the fourth quarter, my beloved team was leading 13-10. At that moment, Raiders defensive back Charles Woodson forced Tom Brady to fumble. The Raiders recovered. The announcers related confidently that Oakland was now poised to advance to the 2001-2002 season’s AFC Conference Championship.
“What’s the AFC?” I asked.
When I encountered the team that would be the first protracted love of my adolescent life, I was an eighth grader in a suburban basement with a group of friends who were all devoted votaries of the National Football League. I’d never really liked football, but I felt a need in that moment to connect at a closer level with my childhood companions. Every day at school, they wore various jerseys, t-shirts, sweaters, and hats with their team logos eye-catchingly advertised. They had in their cheerful ranks a Buccaneers fan, a Bills fan, a Steelers fan, a Lions fan. They knew all the players and coaches. They could whoop my ass in Madden. I needed to have my own football team in which I could ground my unstable social and regional identity, through which I could fully partake in the joyful comradery of my friends.
And this was the first complete NFL game I ever really watched, enchantingly played in a blizzard at Foxboro Stadium. I saw Rich Gannon, Charles Woodson, Tim Brown, and Jerry Rice persevering in these frosty conditions far away from the warmth of California. I could almost hear the now banished Coach Jon Gruden shouting on the sidelines. I saw the eye-patched pirate and the swords, the silver and black colors of the jerseys and helmets. This was my team. And now that they had beaten the Patriots, they were going to go on to win the Conference Championship. Which, as I had just learned for the first time in my life, was how a team earned a spot in the Super Bowl. This was something I had been wondering about for many years: how do they choose which two teams get to play? Well, this year, within just a few short weeks, I would be able to wear a Raiders Super Bowl champions hat at school.
But then the referees, guided by the now-eliminated “Tuck Rule,” overturned the call on the field, declaring it an incomplete pass. The Patriots capitalized with a field goal to send the game into overtime, during which they defeated the Raiders. For years afterward, I told people about how the Patriots should never have even been in the Super Bowl that year. I said that I had been a Raiders fan my whole life. It was something my dad had passed down to me from his days living in Oakland. And then the referees just snatched all my dreams away with some bullshit call in favor of the Patriots. Even now, twenty years later, when I look at Tom Brady, I am reminded of the animosity that consumed me when the Raiders lost that night.
And yet I never actually watched that legendary game, though I remember it as if I did. All of this was simply a mythological construct that I gradually created. A founding fabrication to guide me as I plunged ever deeper into an unhinged enthusiasm for the Oakland Raiders.
By the time the next season started, I had played enough seasons of Madden on my Xbox and I had watched enough Pardon the Interruption and SportsCenter on ESPN to get by in any conversation about football with the knowledgable boys at school. I wore my Raiders jerseys, Raiders hats, Raiders t-shirts, and Raiders sweaters in the hallways at least every other day, carefully cultivating a reputation as a life-long follower of my beloved team. And as an analytical expert on the league. I started a blog on which I both covered Raiders news and broke down Raiders games. At some point, I came to fervently believe that I really had watched that legendary game against the Patriots. Only just recently did I realize that I actually didn’t see it.
What really happened was that the day after the infamous Tuck Rule Game, I was in my friend’s basement watching my real first football match: the St. Louis Rams against the Green Bay Packers in the NFC Divisional Round. I told the boys that I wanted to be a football fan like them, and within a few seconds, I was a Raiders fan. Based on the logo, the colors, and a partially imagined familial connection to Oakland. And the fact they were good, of course. Soon enough, I had watched enough videos online to be so informed about the Tuck Rule Game that I might as well have watched it myself. I was passionate enough to cheer zealously against the Patriots in the Super Bowl and even to adamantly deny the legitimacy of Tom Brady’s glory. But I was so insecure about the legitimacy of my identity as a Raiders fan that I strove constantly to convince myself to believe in my numerous lies, which I told people to prevent any accusations of bandwagon fandom. To acknowledge that the Raiders were a recent thing would shatter my new self-image.
It was the Raiders who turned around my grades. Up until high school, I was failing nearly all of my classes. Once, the principal of my middle school summoned me and a group of other wayward boys into a classroom during lunch. “I am not going to let you fail,” he told us. “You will sit in lunch detention every single day for the rest of the school year doing your homework.” I still have fond memories of that lunch detention room, presided over by a health teacher who had written us all off. There, me and this other kid made fun of anyone we saw doing their schoolwork. “You know you have seven points out of over 700 in my class, right?” the health teacher asked me. I laughed, eagerly returning to my seat to continue my distracting behavior.
But now, at the dawn of ninth grade, I had something at last for which I could work hard. The Raiders. I was going to be a sports journalist. Hence my Oakland Raiders blog. I looked on the Internet at what GPA I would need to attend the University of Oregon, thereby enabling my return to the West Coast, and it said I would need a 3.3. This terrified me to the point where I began committing myself wholeheartedly to my studies. My parents were pleasantly shocked when I brought home my first report card containing all A’s and B’s, and even more so when I proudly attained my first ever 4.0 semester in the fall of tenth grade.
For the first two autumns of high school, much of my emotional state was dependent upon the success or failure of the Raiders. When they lost, I came to school hanging my head in shame, awaiting the jovial gloating of my companions. But I was still usually sure to wear my Raiders gear anyway. “Even if they lose, I am a true Raiders fan,” I told myself, “and no one is going to fucking question that.” A typical week might see me wearing a Raiders hoodie and Raiders hat on Monday, a Rich Gannon jersey and a different Raiders hat on Tuesday, a Charlie Garner jersey on Wednesday, a Raiders t-shirt on Thursday… in the evenings I could often be found at home in my Oakland Raiders midnight camo pajama pants, which I still have, using my controller to lead my venerated franchise to championship after championship on Madden.
During the off-season, I passed through a week-long phase of watching simulated Raiders games on my Xbox. I would start a new season and, instead of actually playing the game, I would just watch two computers go up against each other. The presentation of this was similar to a real game, with commentary by John Madden and Al Michaels. I got glimpses of the pixelated players’ clunky facial expressions and their stiff-bodied meanderings between plays. I watched the digitized Rich Gannon give his instructions in the huddle. I cheered passionately for these digital Raiders, becoming angry at the television when they messed up a play.
I sensed that one day perhaps even I could be a Raiders player. I created an Andrew Jelinek player on my Xbox and made him one of the greatest running backs in the NFL. Yes, I decided, if I’m not a sports journalist, maybe I will be an NFL running back instead. I went to the high school football team’s summer training. I quickly changed my mind, dropping out after just one day of excruciating physical exertion that involved running up and down stairs in the park beneath a scorching July sun. Better to eat candy and drink Pepsi while playing Madden with my friends in the basement. There, I developed a conviction that I’d catch my big break in college, where I’d play Division 1 football as a walk-on starter.
(I did eventually join the track team. I went to practice one day after a whole Spring Break of eating junk food and playing Halo in my basement. I still remember puking profusely at my stern-faced coach’s feet after a 400-meter sprint in the blistering heat.)
It was in ninth grade that the Raiders went to the Super Bowl. It was the end of the 2002 - 2003 season, which was the first complete autumn of football I’d ever watched in my life. The analysts dubbed it the “tale of three seasons.” The Raiders won their first four games, lost their next four games, and then finished the rest of the season 7-1. These games were not always available in the Michigan market, so I would listen to Raiders radio stations on the Internet and read articles online, from which I gained the information necessary to craft my own insights on my Geocities website. Rarely have I felt such intense emotions as I did on those Sundays when the games were actually on television in my area. Well, actually, who am I kidding? I almost always feel extremist emotions. “Please God,” I would pray, “just let it be a Raiders blowout so I can relax for once.” And sometimes this wish was granted, providing me with a rare stress-free Sunday. The close games were agonizing. They turned my body into an exemplary representation of anxiety, rage, dread, and then, at least that year, an almost inappropriate joy at the final triumph.
The Raiders beat the Titans to win the AFC Championship. Super Bowl Sunday approached. As I said, one of my close friends was a Buccaneers fan. He trash talked me all week at school, boasting of the Buccaneers’ spectacular defense, which reigned supreme in the league that year. Each day I wore a Raiders jersey, and he wore a Buccaneers jersey. We’d argue with each other in the hallway about which player was better. The people around us played up the drama, as if this upcoming match was a competition between just me and him. I yearned to be able to come to school on Monday and laugh in his face. I looked on the Internet at the hat designs for the Super Bowl champion that year, and I was energized by fantasies about walking around at school donning that symbolic proof that my team was the best.
I was anxious that whole Sunday, glued to the television watching coverage, reading every take I could find online, hoping for confirmation that this game was in the bag for Oakland. I scoffed at the delusional analysts predicting a Buccaneers victory. I wrote pompously on my blog about the unstoppable Raiders offense, which was in fact the most prolific in the NFL.
My parents came down into the basement that day to watch the game with me. It had been just over one year since I first became a Raiders fan. Very soon, a Buccaneers blowout seemed inevitable. “I’m sorry Andrew,” my mom said, although I could hear plainly in her tone that she would, unlike me, sleep easy that night. They stayed down there for a while, perhaps out of solidarity with my misery, before finally calling it quits and going up to bed. I lingered alone until the end, when the scoreboard showed 48-21 Tampa Bay. My eyes moistened as I turned off the TV.
“Ha ha!” my Bucs friend laughed, pointing at me in school the next day. I avoided him, knowing that I was a disgrace. I told people I’d been waiting for this so long, given that my Raiders hadn’t been to the Super Bowl since 1980. All I had now, I explained, were the stories passed down to me from my ancestors, none of whom had ever actually cared about the Raiders.
My dad took me to his old stomping grounds in Oakland the next fall. We went together to a Raiders game. It was a thrilling pilgrimage. But the Raiders played despicably that season, finishing with a ghastly record of 4-12. I oriented my blog toward evaluating what had gone wrong. I quickly realized the whole problem was their owner, the elderly Al Davis. Instead of building for the future, in which he could take no part due to his rapidly degenerating body, he had stacked the team with old veterans in a crazed quest to win one last Super Bowl before he dropped dead. Today, the team is controlled by his freakish son, Mark Davis, who gleefully takes his place in the tiny club of enormously wealthy white men that controls the NFL.
A few months after the Raiders’ terrible 2003-2004 season, the second complete NFL season I had ever watched, I abandoned all my interest in sports. This way I could isolate myself in my room reading the Bible and various works of fundamentalist Protestant theology. I hoped to one day read John Calvin’s complete commentaries on the Bible, but in the meantime I cherished his Institutes of the Christian Religion. To spend a Sunday watching football would be a distraction from the affairs of the soul.
I gradually stopped associating with my football fan friends. At the time, and even in the years afterward, I would never claim the Raiders’ shittyness as the catalyst for this exchange of one fanaticism for another. But even now the words of my old boyhood companions echo in my head: “The only reason Andrew doesn’t watch football anymore is because the Raiders suck.” I told one of them that no, the reason I don’t watch football anymore is because it’s a distraction from my relationship with Jesus. And the reason I won’t be your friend anymore is because you value football more than you love the Lord, which makes you a lukewarm Christian. But now I see that the fickle yet fiery passions of my wildly emotional personality perhaps simply needed a new outlet for unbounded devotion. And a life serving the glory of an all-powerful God was preferable to the worship of a failed football team.
It took me nearly two decades to fully revive my interest in the NFL. My religious fundamentalism lasted only half as long as my madness for the Raiders (which is to say that it lasted just one very long year). But once it passed, there were new reasons to avoid watching football.
Perhaps in light of my background as a failed student, I developed a certainty that there was a definite list of books which every smart person around me had read, while I hadn’t read any of them. A close friend recommended one very thick book to me when we were high school seniors, and I told him that the book’s font was just so small. He snickered, mockingly repeating my words back to me. “Small font!” He laughed. “How old are you? Six?!” He went around saying this for a few days, that I was just a little child who couldn’t handle a tiny font. So I made myself read that book, struggling through various chapters, craving a swift metamorphosis into the polymath I dreamed of becoming. I don’t remember what book it was, nor can I recall anything about whatever I learned reading it.
But I knew I could never truly be a smart person until I had nurtured the discipline to read as much as he and my other friends had. In late high school and early college, this meant I needed to read a lot of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky novels, presidential biographies, Noam Chomsky’s wonderful anti-imperialist diatribes, and various histories of the French Revolution. I locked myself away in the evenings to give myself essay exams about British history, which I was studying using Encarta. I created rubrics with which to grade these writings, which I forced myself to complete without using my voluminous notes that I kept in two-pocket folders. Few of my friends had ever deemed any of these subject areas particularly vital. Yet I persisted in a conviction that a very important group of people somewhere out there had read all these books and learned all these things, and I needed to catch up with this council of anonymous sages. Otherwise I would be doomed to a permanent state of idiocy. Sadly, the list of books that must be read has only increased over time.
New opportunities presented themselves to follow football again my freshman year at Michigan State. But I knew that these football games were simply an excuse for those around me to alter their psychological states and inhibit their intellectual development by drinking copious amounts of alcohol, a poisonous substance I swore I would never even try. Although of course I had tried it before, in the form of a Mike’s Hard Lemonade I stole in seventh grade from my parents. For a while I had been very proud of this, bragging about it to friends. Now, though, I would keep it secret forever.
I needed to sit in my dorm all day on Saturday, immersing myself in my never-ending quest to be as smart as these imaginary people out there. I needed to go alone to the library where I could focus on addressing my multitudinous mental deficiencies, all while thundering cheers emanated from the nearby Spartan Stadium. To spend a weekend drinking, fornicating, watching football, and going to parties would threaten my capacity to stop being so dumb. Football fandom was for the half-educated, whereas I would be fully educated. I would be a smart person. I needed to be.
Sophomore year, I did get season tickets for the student section. And I did start drinking, because a girl I liked told me to. I did start partying and socializing with increasing numbers of people. But I was only rarely able to truly enjoy a football game, let alone an entire season. There was always something else I should be doing, something more productive and thus more important. Studying the history of Central Asia, writing a story or an essay. Even just watching a show on Netflix was something I somehow came to consider more productive than watching a football game. Because the fundamental problem always remained. Which is to say: sitting around watching sports is simply a distraction from the bigger questions of spirituality, intellect, and self-education. It is these, I thought, that must industriously engage me at all times.
I know what the TikTok people might say. That my struggle to simply sit down and enjoy a football game without being crushed by an existential dread at my lack of intellectual progress is simply a byproduct of living in capitalism, or of living in “the West.” These are the systems and the cultures which Instagram history lessons say have indoctrinated us all from an early age to equate human worth with work output.
But then, as I fail to turn off my brain and just enjoy a game, I think to myself: what if it is actually the goal of the capitalist machine to have me eating snacks on my couch all day while watching football? Just how productive does this machine need me to be? If I am lazy, I will just consume products and watch advertisements convincing me to buy even more shit I don’t need. Ideally, I will build up credit card debt as well. Perhaps then we have here the ultimate capitalist invention, that of the Self-Care Industrial Complex, designed specifically to create, and then profit from, anti-capitalist propaganda which encourages me to treat myself. Because maybe it’s consumption, not production, which is the fundamental action most important for corporate profits. Sit on my ass and buy things, this is what the corporations and banks really want from me. Whereas I need to become smart, I need to be intelligent, I need to know more things. I need to be a well-read person.
But then where am I instead? I’m walking down an aisle in a bookstore, buying novels and histories which pile up on the floors around me, growing into beastly behemoths that condemn me for all unrelated activities. I become just another kind of fanatical consumer, addicted to the new and shiny. I reach the end of every day chastising myself for not having read enough pages. Isn’t this capitalism too? Yes, one might say: that’s literally exactly what the TikTok people would have told you from the start.
No, something is missing. Still there lingers that one unanswered question which perpetually haunts me, which sends me into unstoppable mental loops that distract me from following whatever is on the television: Why can’t I just allow myself to relax and be entertained? There is something so primal and fundamental about the human need to learn and create. The economy seldom seems to offer these opportunities in a way that satisfies the spirit, but still these aspirations are burrowed deep inside me. A failure to actualize them leaves me despondent about something in my nature that has been subdued, something that most workplaces seek to subjugate in exchange for giving me money. It could be this sadness which leaves me needing to be “productive” in my free time, to labor in a way that achieves something authentic to myself, an outcome that can appear virtually unattainable in the workforce. This, perhaps, is why it is has been so difficult for me to just sit and enjoy a sporting event.
But in the process of this endless analysis, I miss a whole play. After which I viciously reprimand myself for not having enjoyed the game enough. For not having gotten the “full experience.” At this point my only recourse is high doses of mind-altering substances which render productivity impossible. Then I can relax at last.
After nearly two decades of struggling to overcome these dilemmas, I finally mostly enjoyed an entire season of football this year. It was a great personal accomplishment that was not without challenges. I had to overcome the same old guilt that often consumes me when I find myself watching a sporting event.
I started calling myself a Raiders fan again, although I had been calling myself a Lions fan for the previous ten years. It was during this time that my life often took me away from Michigan, and I gradually stopped thinking of myself as “from Oregon” or “from the West Coast.” I progressively came to identify as “from Michigan, from the Midwest.” But now, in my attempt to hit the reset button on my football fandom, I decided to revive the Raiders, my first team, my first true love, the one I decided I had betrayed for the Lions. I hoped this would revive the ancient fanaticisms that kept me happily confined to the basement on Sundays as a teenager. I started telling people about the Tuck Rule Game to prove that my Raiders fandom had a valid pedigree, descended down through the generations of hormones that stretch back into the memorable histrionics of my late adolescence. I vaguely referenced my extended family in California, where the Raiders don’t even play anymore. And the Raiders, for just the second time since that fateful Super Bowl Sunday, made the playoffs.
But I could not avoid the fact that my devotions to the Raiders were based on mythologies. The infamous game I never even actually watched. The Californian connections in my extended family, featuring numerous people who have never actually cared about the Raiders. My growing sense that my identity has nothing at all to do with the West Coast.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the time I visited my friend in Seattle. We went out to the bar to watch a Seahawks game. All his friends were so happy to be together as fans. They drank and cheered with their arms around each other; they high-fived strangers and celebrated wildly out in the streets after the victory. It was something so special and happy into which I had always longed to be accepted, but from which I felt I was forever doomed to be excluded. I wanted them to at least think I was a real NFL fan. Referring to the Packers, I accidentally called Aaron Rodgers “Anthony” Rodgers. To this day, the memory bites into me a venomous and debilitating humiliation.
Early this season, as I strove to reactivate my love for the Raiders, a friend told me about another Raiders fan who might be joining us for dinner. I was filled with panic. Never in my life have I had a real conversation with a Raiders fan. This one would know me immediately for a fake, and so I was greatly relieved when these plans were canceled. Then there was my wife, a Packers fan from the womb, who could name so many players and stories from that franchise, whereas I could only name two or three players on the current Raiders team. She told me I should tell her more about the Raiders while we watched their games. But all I had were legends of the tuck rule and the early-2000s glory days. I couldn’t even name a single wide receiver. Each week, I planned to spend an hour every day researching the Raiders, consuming news about them and catching up on their players. Then I would be able to prove to people just how true of a Raiders fan I really was. But I never did. “Next Sunday,” I promised my wife a few weekends in a row, “I’ll know all about the Raiders.”
Repeatedly, it was the Lions games that truly grabbed my attention. They lost every game they played in September, October, and November, not including a tie with the Steelers. Often these games were very close, lifting me into the air as I cheered the silver and blue down the field. The Lions finally won their first game of the season on December 5th, when they defeated the Vikings 29-27. As I watched, I could no longer shake them from my bones. I was screaming at the television, raising my fist with joy whenever they scored, cursing when they failed. My desire to see them win was unlike anything I had felt this same season for the Raiders. And when they did emerge victorious, I hardly cared about any other games.
The Lions finished the year 3-13-1. But I already knew my destiny on that day when they first won in early December. The way it made me feel, the adrenaline, the thrill of it, the unadulterated pleasure surging through me thanks to a totally meaningless victory by an awful team that had no chance to make the playoffs. The texts I was so excited to send to other Lions fans, to let them know I was a part of them.
I had nothing to think about anymore. All I could do was surrender to the franchise to which my soul had become so intimately connected without my having decided upon it. I can no longer betray the organization whose logo and colors immediately inspire in me a sense of loyalty that, whatever my lingering attachments to my first love, I am no longer able to subdue. The mere sight of the blue Lion on that helmet effortlessly extinguishes my fear that I will become stupid or fall behind in my learning as a consequence of watching football. I can cast my books into the corner, I can set aside my writing, I can ignore all world events. I abandon my drive for productivity and intelligence. Collapsing at the altar of the television, I allow myself to descend into an animalistic devotion to this comically terrible team which I was always destined to love. And at last I am able to simply enjoy, to sit my ass down and be entertained.
“I’m a Lions fan,” I tell people. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”