Confessions of a Boston Sports Fan

It’s time for me to admit it. My name is Dan, and I’m a Boston sports fan. It’s been four days since my last trip to Fenway.

(Hi, Dan.)

It wasn’t always this way. For 18 years I didn’t even know I had a problem. They were simpler times, growing up in Cambridge; every sports fan I knew liked the Red Sox, every sports fan I knew liked the Patriots, and the only subject of debate was whether Tom Brady was the greatest quarterback of all time, or merely the greatest quarterback of his generation. (I’m exaggerating. Kind of.)

As I prepared to make the transition to college, it never occurred to me that my sports allegiances would be met with anything but support. Even the students from out of town, I reasoned, would no doubt adopt Boston teams as their secondary rooting interest after their own hometown squads. Surely you didn’t have to be from Boston to feel for the Red Sox and their mesmerizing curse storyline. Surely anyone could appreciate the Patriots, who won the way we all want to see our teams win—by doing everything smarter than the other team.

Well, no, not exactly. Like anyone who thinks his opinions are facts, I was destined to learn that there were other points of view—a process that began as soon as I arrived at Harvard. My fellow students seemed, somehow, to find Boston teams a bit tiresome, if such a thing could be believed. Some people, I quickly learned, were tired of hearing about curses from a team with the second-highest payroll in baseball, or about the quarterback who threw perfect spirals and dated Brazilian übermodels. In fact, they seemed to feel that Boston fans were just a little bit entitled (imagine that!), unbearably smug and boastful when their teams won, and sulky and defensive when they didn’t.

It was earth-shattering, to learn that outside my safe, championship-filled Massachusetts bubble my people could be viewed in such a light. But as difficult as it was to learn that not everybody thought like me, soon something even scarier happened: I learned that some of the people who didn’t think like me might be right—at least about some things. It’s true: we Boston fans are a little smug about our seemingly interminable parade of victories. Many Red Sox fans really are happier, in a perverse sort of way, when their team is losing. And Bill Belichick, it turns out, may not be the greatest guy.

For this newfound perspective, I have my fellow Harvard students to thank. Without them, it would have been easy to remain convinced that my teams were inherently the most lovable in all of sports, dismissing the opinions of any contrarians who might disagree with me. But at Harvard, and especially at The Crimson, I found a group of friends that not only disagreed with me on many sports-related topics, but also often knew more about sports than just about anyone I had ever encountered. My colleagues’ analytic and encyclopedic knowledge of sports forced me to hear them out, and in the presence of such expertise, I quickly realized that my knee-jerk Boston homerism wasn’t going to cut it. I had to—and I wanted to—reconsider my opinions to make sure they actually made sense. And while many of them did, some of them didn’t.

Of course, I haven’t completely changed my sports identity. I still love Boston teams, especially the Red Sox and Patriots, above all others. I still think those two teams have developed their organizations more intelligently than most of their competitors (and I have the championships to back me up on that). And I’m not sick of watching Boston teams contend for titles, or of being ever so slightly smug when they capture one.

My outlook on sports hasn’t changed completely, but it hasn’t stayed the same either. Being at Harvard has exposed me to a variety of people with different backgrounds and diverse points of view, and as a result of this exposure, I have come to reconsider and refine my own worldview.

In that way, sports showed me what college is all about.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Rubin-Wills can be reached at drubin@fas.harvard.edu.