Imagine being a Ducks fan for 30 years, and after countless close calls and losing seasons you decide to call it quits. You’ll no longer cheer for the green and yellow, no longer go to games, and you’ll sell/burn all of your memorabilia and clothes. Bye-bye, autographed poster of Patrick Chung. So long, ticket from the 2006 Oklahoma game.
That’s essentially what a Minnesota man did earlier this week when he posted his loyalty to his favorite team on Ebay. To the highest bidder he would sell something that had been part of his life for close to three decades.
His comment on the auction site read: “In the interest of sparing my emotions from one more gut-wrenching season, I am auctioning off my loyalty to the Chicago Cubs.”
The Chicago Tribune ran a story yesterday about the wayward fan. His name is Scot Moore, age 30, and he said that he just couldn’t take it anymore.
In the stipulations, Moore said he would burn what remains of his memorabilia and wear a sports jersey of any team the winner chooses. The proceeds from the auction would go to two local theater troupes in Minneapolis. At one point the bidding reached $455, but upon further investigation on Ebay, I found that the post had been deleted.
Another post, by “airline_freak,” was advertising a similar auction. That one was labled “Cub Loyalty and Support.” But unlike Moore’s, who probably had some sympathetic responses for the donations, this auction reached a grand total of $5.50 before Ebay nixed it. It must be pretty depressing to realize your loyalty is worth little more than a $5 foot-long at Subway.
My favorite excerpt from the Chicago Tribune article was:
“‘I can’t take it anymore,’ Moore said in despair Tuesday. It is possible, he said, for a fan to care too much. ‘I get too invested.’”
My response to him and others like him is that they are obviously not invested enough. What loyal fans, I put a huge emphasis on loyal, would sell something as cherished as their connection to their childhood sports team?
Some of my fondest memories are of me watching baseball with my four uncles, my brother and my dad. We are huge Mariners fans, and anytime we got together we would go to games, discuss how crappy they were, or lament how their amazing seasons always ended too soon.
Would I ever sell my autographed baseball from the 2001 Mariners team? You can sure as hell bet not. What about my ticket stub from my first game in Seattle? You might as well try and get me to jump off the Space Needle.
The thing isn’t even about the merchandise or the physical manifestatProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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ns of team loyalty. It’s the memories.
You know the ones. When you think back to them you get this warm, fuzzy feeling and can’t help but smile. They are the ones that, in essence, explain who you are. For some people, it takes a memory of something completely non-sports related to create this feeling. But for many, their religious following of the Kansas City Royals is what gets them out of bed every day.
I say if you sell your loyalty, you’re not actually loyal. The word is defined in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary as “unswerving in allegiance” and being “faithful to a cause, ideal, custom, institution, or product.”
I think unswerving is what does it for me. That means no matter what, you’re never going to quit rooting for your team. That means not selling your faithfulness on Ebay for money after your team does well but then loses in the first round of the playoffs.
Part of the reason Cubs fans are so famous is because they stick with their team. One hundred years of losing. There are very few people who can remember the last time Chicago won a World Series.
I would bet one of the bleacher bums who sits in the outfield during every single game at Wrigley Field would agree with me when I say that Scot Moore was never a true fan of the Cubbies.
So if you intend to “spare your emotions from another gut-wrenching season” and you “can’t take it any longer,” find a new hobby, because being a fan isn’t it. Part of the reason fans freaks out when their team wins a championship is because they’ve been there during the bad times. The highs and lows of sports are what makes being a fan so intoxicating.
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