Being An All-Weather Fan

I want to write about sports. I want to write about being a fan of a team. I want to write about loyalty.

Recently I came across a column written by Ex-Denver Bronco turned radio and tv personality Reggie Rivers about what it was like to start the regular season 0-3. Here is an excerpt…

“That’s when the fans turned on us. At first, the crowd at Mile High Stadium booed. Then, we heard scattered profanity. Next, angry fans marched past the fence behind the bench and singled out individual players for their wrath. Chants started with: “Broncos suck! Broncos suck!” and then became “Wade must go! Wade must go!” in reference to then-Bronco head coach Wade Phillips.

This wasn’t happening in New York, where fans are known for their what-have-you-done-for-me-lately attitudes. This was not Oakland, where, as a former Bronco player, it always seemed to me as if many fans attended the game while on furlough from local prisons. This was Denver, home of the best home winning percentage in the NFL. This was Mile High Stadium, where every regular-season home game since 1970 has been sold out. This is a town where the fans stick behind their team no matter what — or so we thought.”

Like I said, I want to write about loyalty.

I’ve been a Denver Broncos fan since I was a little kid. In 5th grade, when I actually started to understand football (the rules, the teams, the players, etc…), I lived and died every Sunday with guys like John Elway, Steve Sewell, Steve Atwater, Karl Mecklenburg, and Dennis Smith. When they won I went nuts. When they lost I thought my life was over. It got to the point where my parents had to talk with me one Sunday night about whether or not I should be allowed to watch football anymore. It had become that important to me. It was in that year that I discovered the true beauty of sports. In a three hour football game, you got to see strategic wit, physical poetry, and real human drama all unfolding at the same time on a 5o x 100 yard field in front of thousands of screaming fans.  It really is beautiful to watch. I know it’s only a game, but football (and other sports like it) give the everyman (and woman) something to root for. A simple, far removed from real life thing to root for. The escape watching a football game every Sunday provides for people is priceless.

That is why these teams are so important to their fans. That’s why it’s so devastating to a fan when their favorite player jumps ship for more money, or when guys like Mark Maguire or Sammy Sosa are revealed to be steroid users. These players are larger than life heroes that give guys like my dad and his friends or me (a lowly land surveyor) something to believe in when their lives seem frustrating or bland. That’s the connection. That’s the escape. That is their importance.

But it has to work both ways.

 Fans expect a lot from their teams. They expect rewards for the time they invest. Basically, they expect wins. And this is the line that is drawn between true fans of a team and fairweather fans. I like to call the latter “poser fans.” Poser fans are the people that catch on either from word of mouth, local news, or SportsCenter that a particular team is currently on a role and they decide they’re fans of said team. They disguise themselves as real fans by saying things like “Hey, I’ve always watched the Broncos play” or “I’ve had this John Elway jersey for years!” In reality they’ve never watched a game until the team started winning.

I first experienced this bandwagon phenomenon during the 1997-98 NFL season. The Broncos, led by a brilliant coach and an unstoppable rushing attack, made an extraordinary playoff run capped off by a nailbiting Super Bowl victory. It was by far the most exciting month of sports watching I’ve ever experienced. I actually felt exhausted after that Super Bowl, as if I had been on the field in San Diego that day. It meant that much. But all of a sudden everyone at school (I was a senior in High School at the time) was a fan as well. The hallways were filled with Terrell Davis jerseys and “Super Bowl XXXII Champions” hats. Everyone loved Elway and was soooooo happy to see him finally win the big one as if they had suffered with him the entire time.

Well I had suffered with him the entire time.

Nothing erases memories like championships. Since that fateful Super Bowl victory, people in Colorado have completely forgotten what things were like before that. The week leading up to that game, even, I can remember fans being interviewed on TV and columnists in the local papers saying they didn’t know if they wanted the Broncos to go to the Super Bowl. They didn’t want to see another 55-10. This was the week before the Super Bowl!

During the early nineties, when I was in middle school and just starting high school, it was cool to be a Cowboys fan and incredibly lame to be Broncos fan. If you conveyed any positive word about John Elway, you would find your head down a toilet (I, luckily, never had to deal with this because I had a huge head that would never fit in a bowl far enough to get wet). Yet if you came to school with a Cowboys Starter pullover jacket, they would hand you $1000 and a hot girlfriend at the front door. [Sidenote: Remember those obnoxious Starter pullover jackets? How ugly were they?! Do they still make those? Did they make jackets for any other team besides the Cowboys? I don't think they did.] It was hard to be a Broncos fan. I got made fun of. I got beat up. I constantly had to hear the same ‘John Elway looks like a donkey’ joke about a hundred times a day. And the temptation to become a fan of the Cowboys, 49ers, or (yes, it does seem crazy now)Raiders grew stronger and stronger.

But I resisted.

I stood by them. Through every close game they lost to Jeff Hostetler, Tim Brown and the rest of the Raiders, every ass kicking at the hands of [INSERT NFC TEAM HERE], and every 7-9 or 8-8 season, I stood by them. Every year I believed they could win it all. Every year I believed Elway could finally win his Super Bowl. Every year I believed. I was a real fan. I was loyal.

The bottom line is this: if you expect your team to constantly reward you with win after win after win, you’re being unfair. Your team needs you to reward them as well. With devotion. You have to stick with them when they’re struggling. You have to have faith in them during “rebuilding” years. A lot of people claim to be a fan of a team only to completely turn on them when they lose a game. Then they claim to be the biggest fans when they win.

That’s bullshit.

Right now the Broncos are 0-1. They lost 18-10 to Jeff Wilkens (er, I mean the St. Louis Rams). Jake Plummer threw 3 interceptions and fumbled once. And what are people talking about? They’re talking about how flawed Mike Shanahan’s team is and how horrible of a quarterback Jake Plummer is. This is the same quarterback that led them to a 13-3 season last year. The same QB who had the team 1 game away from the Super Bowl. Now he’s the worst QB of all time and, OBVIOUSLY, must be replaced by…cough cough…a rookie! Yeah, Jay Cutler should take over the Broncos. It’s time. Yeah. That’s really what everyone is saying right now. That’s the talk in the papers, on the radio, and on the streets in Broncoland this week, leading me to the following conclusions…

1) Most people don’t know shit about how football works.

2) Denver fans aren’t nearly as loyal as they think they are.

So just like Reggie Rivers’s 1994 team, if these Broncos get off to a rough start this Sunday against the Chiefs, I expect to hear booing. I expect to hear chants of “We want Cutler” or “Plummer Sucks.” It will happen. That’s what Denver “fans” do.

Not the real fans. They won’t be booing. The real fans won’t be screaming at Shanahan to put Jay Cutler in. Real fans understand that there are thousands of other factors causing a team to struggle beyond the play of their quaterback. Real fans understand that there are at least 20 starting QBs in the NFL much worse than Plummer.

Real fans keep the faith in their team. They support them the most when things seem dark. The fan-team relationship is a two way street. Your team will be good to you if you are good to it. Just like any relationship.

As for me, I’ll be supporting the Broncos even more this season than I usually do. Because I remember what it was like to be a fan in 1994 and 1997/98.

As for the booers at Invesco Field this weekend?

If you were to raid the closet or attic of any one of them, I bet you’d find a beat up old Dallas Cowboys Starter jacket. Seriously.