On the Rams, the Super Bowl, and Human Nature
Reaching the Super Bowl — let alone winning it — wasn’t the Rams’ goal during their last five or so years in St. Louis. The front office kept the stadium dark and dull, the roster bland, the coach as mediocre as they come.
In a plot straight out of Major League, the team’s front office ensured the franchise stayed moribund in every possible way so as to drive attendance down to the point where it appeared as though the fans in St. Louis didn’t care. Almost immediately upon arriving in Los Angeles, the Rams became one of the most forward-thinking and exciting teams in the league.
The move to Los Angeles was among the most heartbreaking experiences of my life — a sign of a lucky life, no doubt, but painful nonetheless. It wasn’t just me, of course; a city full of Rams fans felt like our dog died. Where I diverge from my fellow former Rams fans is in how to treat the team moving forward — which, due to its success and the NFL’s dominance of the North American sports scene, is inescapable.
Most of the people I know seem to hate the Rams now — and have been rooting against them since they left St. Louis. No doubt they’ll root against the Rams more desperately than ever on Sunday.
I won’t be rooting against them. I won’t be rooting for them, either. I simply won’t be rooting at all.
***
Not long ago, I was at a basketball game with some friends. Our team was the visitor, playing in a 21,750-seat arena full of people cheering for the home squad. After a critical foul was called against our team, a cheer erupted from a majority of the crowd. My friend didn’t like the call and booed.
It occurred to me: Sure, his displeasure was obvious to the 50 or so people within earshot. But what effect, if any, did his booing have on the thousands of people who sat hundreds of yards away — in other sections, and on other levels?
The answer seemed obvious: His booing only added to the noise. In an imperceptible, incalculable way, his booing made the arena louder. To the vast majority of people in the arena, the effect of his booing was the same as if he had been cheering.
Perhaps this line of thinking occurred to me because of a recent conversation I’d almost had on Facebook.
The following had shown up on my feed:
As you see, I had typed out a response. Before pressing “enter,” I deleted it and closed the tab. Even my fiercest condemnation of whatever that video showed would have propped it into someone else’s newsfeed.
Moreover, the very act of commenting on that Facebook post probably would have, in a subliminal way, encouraged the man who posted it to continue posting People-actually-believe-this-shit!?!?-type stories. The pleasure centers in our brains that release endorphins when our words elicit comments— when people decide to interact with us—are tricky little bastards. And often, they don’t discern between positive and negative feedback.
We’ve learned on the Internet not to feed the trolls, just as we learned on the playground that if you respond to bullies, you’ll keep getting bullied. If you ignore them, eventually, they’ll stop. They don’t really care about making your life miserable; they just want to demonstrate their power and show off to their friends. (Along the same lines, I doubt that any of history’s most powerful leaders — i.e. bullies — truly wanted to make the world a better place. It makes more sense to me that they simply wanted articles and biographies and documentaries and monuments to their lives — i.e. show off their power and cement a legacy. But I digress.)
We know, intellectually, not to let the bullies see that they’re hurting us. But our intellect is overridden by our emotions all too easily.
Why is it so easy? Why do we boo a bad call in an opposing arena, despite knowing intuitively that we’re only adding to the noise? Why does clickbait work so well?
John Donne said, “No man is an island.” Aristotle before him said, “Man is by nature a social animal.” But I submit that we don’t fully comprehend the extent to which man is a social animal.
All day, every day, we are swimming in a river of egos and self-preservation. When other people interact with us, regardless of what they say, our egos receive a boost. Our hunger for self-preservation is momentarily satiated, too. If we say something that evokes no response, it dies. Any response at all, and in a way, it lives forever.
Therefore, I think if we were to dig down to the deepest root of our motivation, we’d find that we don’t primarily care about what we profess to believe.
No, coming out in favor of what is “right” and against what is “wrong” is not a means to the end of fixing some problem or supporting some cause. Calling things “right” and “wrong” is an end in itself. Because what we most care about is making ourselves heard — making ourselves part of the story. Participating in the conversation, and ensuring that the conversation continues. For without conversation, what else is there?
Those former Rams fans who will hate-watch on Sunday will nonetheless be watching. The advertisements that sustain the game will still pass in front of their eyes . If the Rams lose, ex-fans’ “Tee-hees” and “Hahas” (or if they win, ex-fans’ “Oh, damns” and “Screw thems”) on Twitter will surely rain down.
But when a subject scales to hundreds of millions of people, nuance is stripped away in favor of raw numbers, reaching ever higher toward a critical mass.
For example: I have no idea whether James Ingram saved a child’s life or committed a triple murder, only that people are talking about him. And if that number were to multiply by a million or so —if everyone I knew were talking about him—I’d have no choice to but to look him up.
For the same reason, those who talk and tweet and write about the Rams, regardless of the content, make it infinitesimally more likely that someone, somewhere, learns the Rams exist. And if that person ever wanders down a Los Angeles boulevard on an autumn Sunday morning and sees a Rams schedule taped to a bus stop, they’ll be ever so slightly more inclined to buy a ticket.
Therefore, if my fellow former Rams fans really wanted to hurt the team, they wouldn’t watch at all. (And if I really wanted to hurt the team, I wouldn’t publish these words. My point exactly: I couldn’t resist. The opportunity to voice an opinion was more important to me than the right or wrong of the Rams.) If we really wanted the team and its owner to suffer, we’d summon the strength to ignore them altogether.
But what we really want is to be heard. At heart, we’re still the little kid looking down for the first time on a raging river. All we want is to make some contribution, somehow, to this big, scary world. Ultimately, though, no matter how innocently, angrily, or absentmindedly we spit, the fact remains: we added water.
If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy my book, Ticketless, available on Amazon.
