Do Championships in Sports Really Matter?
I’m a New Yorker and a rabid Mets fan, so I’m admittedly biased by my petty hatred and vindictiveness towards the Yankees and their endless preening about championships. But as I get older, I’ve come to see championships as somewhat besides the point when you’re a true sports fan. Here’s the logic that gets me there:
(1) The goal of life is happiness.
(2) Happiness comes from a journey of meaningful experiences and not any one specific result or outcome.
(3) Professional sports exists for the entertainment of the fans (otherwise, no one would spend money on it and it wouldn’t exist).
(4) Fans enjoy watching their teams compete, win, but also persevere, which means losing sometimes too.
(5) If each game and each season provides enjoyment as it goes along, then to believe that you can only be happy as a sports fan if your team wins the championship is therefore false.
The Mets made it, somewhat surprisingly, to the World Series last year. We then lost in 5 to the Royals. Sure, I wish we’d won (I wish Harvey didn’t pitch the 9th in game 5, I wish Murphy didn’t boot that ball in game 4, I wish Cespedes didn’t kick the ball in game 1, I wish Familia pitched better throughout, etc…). A championship and a parade are a lot of fun. But I enjoyed the entire season and playoffs up until the very end. Royals fans presumably derived more happiness than Mets fans, but Mets fans presumably derived more happiness than any other team. Not winning the championship didn’t feel like the season was pointless. It felt like a lot of fun to make it that far.
Obviously, awful franchises that lose perennially are no fun, but even then, you hold out some hope (I hang on to my Knicks tickets because the seats are great and eventually, the team has to be better and I’ll regret it if I gave up the seats). But if the creed of Lombardi, Steinbrenner, Riley and so many others were true that winning is the only thing and championships are everything, then no one would derive any happiness each season other than the fans of the championship team and that would drive professional sports out of business (and athletes who didn’t win championships would consider their entire careers a failure). And given how much each major sports league is thriving, that’s clearly not the case.
I guess for fans who live vicariously through their teams, championships matter more because it validates their own existence somehow. But anyone like that has bigger problems than their favorite teams won-lost record.
So as a fan of teams that have won multiple championships (the football Giants), teams that have come close more often than they closed the deal (the Mets) and teams who have never won in my lifetime (the Knicks), I’ve experienced every side of the equation. As as I head to the Mets wild card game tonight, I really, really want them to win. But all of the excitement I’m feeling today (especially when I ran through the lineups with my kids this morning) isn’t diminished by the outcome either way. Championships are nice. But the ups and downs along the way are a whole lot better.
