'God Save the Fan' Airballs

I am not your typical sports fan. I am decidedly unathletic. I don’t play a sport in college and didn’t really play one in high school, either. My favorite in-front-of-the-TV snack is yogurt and fruit, not pizza and beer. I don’t own a single fantasy team and have only been to ESPN.com a handful of times. And I’m a girl. But, still, I absolutely love the Dallas Mavericks.

Will Leitch is a fan, too. He is a fan of sports fans. His new book “God Save the Fan,” a collection of ruminations on all things sports, bemoans what he sees as the loss of the sports fan’s influence in the sports industry. He claims today’s world of professional athletics is dominated by big money contracts and organizations like the NFL and ESPN whose inner-workings are hidden from the public eye.

The problem with the book is that I’m not the type of fan he’s particularly interested in saving. He’s right that I, like most Mavs fans, am “still not over that loss to the Warriors, and probably never will be” and that I “can no longer rationalize that Mark Cuban is a positive influence.” But those are the only assumptions Leitch makes about his reader that apply to me.

Too much of the book is written for your twenty-something sports bar regular who thinks his love of sports is a reflection of his masculinity. While this is the stereotypical picture of a sports fan, we all know that it is actually only a small subsection of the millions who tune in every Sunday afternoon and Monday night. From the start, Leitch’s oversight of the thousands of sports fans who don’t fit this pigeonholing description alienates readers like me.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Leitch addresses this audience in a hopelessly juvenile style. The jokes are lame, the asides irrelevant, the word choice beyond bizarre. (I still can’t get over my shock at seeing the word “anal-raping” in print. See? Shocking.) Leitch’s personal anecdotes are at once amusingly self-deprecating and annoyingly self-aggrandizing. And call me a prude, but when Leitch writes of Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds that “their back looks like your face did when all you could think of was your algebra teacher while masturbating into a sock. (And by ‘when’ I mean ‘Tuesday.’)” I can’t help but feel that his editors ought to have taken another look at the manuscript before it went to print.

To be fair, the book is not entirely lacking in insight. Leitch’s essay about steroids is a particularly cogent meditation on sports’ most-discussed topic, if only because its thesis is one rarely voiced in the media: the truth is, we just don’t care. At the end of the day, Barry Bonds is an incredible athlete, even if he was using steroids, and sports is hardly the only arena where cutthroat competition encourages a win-by-any-means mentality.

But most of these insights are not especially earth-shattering. One of the pitfalls of writing a book for and about the Common Fan is that the Common Fan already knows most of what Leitch has to say. We know that owners like Peter Angelos, who has famously enraged fans by treating the Baltimore Orioles like a business venture rather than a source of city pride, are detrimental to the spirit of professional sports. It is common knowledge that athletes like LeBron are not “just like us” and never will be; they are highly specialized “piano prodigies who can jump,” and as much as we bemoan their occasionally scandalous personal conduct, there’s no denying that our fascination with every detail of their lives is what grants them their celebrity status.

What is perhaps most unique about the book the intense hatred that Leitch, who runs the popular sports blog Deadspin.com, holds for all things ESPN. A not-so-subtle anti-big-media theme can be found throughout “God Save the Fan,” but Leitch’s soapbox is hardly compelling. His argues that ESPN has ties to the NFL, NBA, and other major sports associations and so has little incentive to publish sports news that reflects poorly on these groups or threatens the star players who are their greatest sources of revenue.

But the only knowledge we can glean from this rant against ESPN is that the network refused to cover the story that Michael Vick, in his glory days, knowingly transmitted an STI to an unsuspecting woman. The public, says Leitch, has a right to know, even when it isn’t convenient for the NFL. And while he may be right, the evils of ESPN are clearly not so great that they deserve the total condemnation of what is for most sports fans the most reliable purveyor of stats and scores. As editor of an “underground” blog that boasts “sports news without access, favor, or discretion,” Leitch has obvious reasons for disliking larger media conglomerates. But by assaulting ESPN he risks falling into the trap of the very “preening sportscasters” he criticizes: when sports are your life, you take them too seriously.

Ultimately, in trying to celebrate what got us sports fans hooked on the games we love in the first place, Leitch has missed one of the greatest things about sports: the way they bring people together. Boys and girls, young and old, strong and weak, nerdy and not­—almost everyone loves some sport.

Leitch writes that people use sports as an escape from their daily lives, a contention that is true but is not the whole story. People of all colors and sizes and walks of life are sports fans, and through sports they are able to connect their otherwise diverse and disparate experiences. Unfortunately, Leitch’s book loses that simple truth in its unrelenting and unsuccessful efforts to both make you laugh and arouse your indignation.

But maybe there just isn’t that much to get angry about. At the end of the book, I can’t help feeling that maybe fans don’t need any saving after all. We’re doing just fine the way we are.

­—Staff writer Anjali Motgi can be contacted at amotgi@fas.harvard.edu.