Thanksgiving and football seem to go together well, and with an extra holiday NFL game airing this year, there was another opportunity to watch, discuss and at least pretend you know what you’re talking about. There’s no sin in faking football knowledge, be it to impress a parent, boyfriend or crazy aunt who shows up wearing his or her team’s face and body paint, or even just to enter into a conversation and make sure people remember that you’re still there and that you’re still interesting. This is a natural occurrence, much like turkey making you sleepy (damn you, tryptophan!) or your neighbors saying something slightly anti-Semitic and thus making the rest of the meal a bit awkward.
However, a great sin of football – and sports overall – does exist and has become particularly problematic here in San Diego. The issue, of course, is bandwagon fans.
They’re everywhere. They wear jerseys with the names of the San Diego Chargers all-world running back LaDainian Tomlinson and second-year defensive stud/supplement user Shawne Merriman. They put those license plate covers on their cars and hang flags out of windows. They complain about head coach Marty Schottenheimer, then they praise him and then they complain about him a little more. They are without a doubt the most sinisterly evil spawns of Satan ever to ooze their way onto the earth’s surface.
That might be a little much, but then again, but so are the bandwagon fans. The term itself probably needs more of a definition – these are people who become fans of a particular team when said team becomes exciting and/or competitive.
Of course, there are some distinctions to be made. Becoming a fan of a team because of a particular favorite player is not bandwagoning.
In the ’90s, 50 percent of the country were Bulls fans, but that’s because Michael Jordan’s appeal was just too great to ignore. Liking the way point guard Chris Paul played in college and then becoming a Hornets fan when he’s drafted is no crime. (Liking the way Darko Milicic played overseas and then becoming a Pistons fan is.)
Furthermore, being a newly minted Chargers fan as a result of recently moving to San Diego also earns bandwagon immunity as a fan of geographic convenience.
In the interest of full disclosure, I grew up as a San Francisco 49ers fan, and I told a large Chargers contingent in elementary school just how badly Steve Young was going to torch the secondary and that then-Chargers quarterback Stan Humphries couldn’t hold his jock. This earned me a beating nearly equal to the 49-26 thumping the Niners administered, but on Super Bowl Sunday 1995, it was all worth it.
When I made the decision to attend UCSD, my first postdecision move was to sign up for San Diego Chargers season tickets. This was not turning my back on the Niners, whom I still root for, but simply elevating what had until then been a secondary team (a squad’s scores you check, watch some games when convenient and hope they do well, but still root against when they play your favorite) to a higher level of fandemonium.
However, I divide myself from those San Diegans who have just realized that Tomlinson is their favorite player after watching him run to the end zone like it was Black Friday and all Matthew McConaughey DVDs are going for three for $10.
I bought my tickets in early 2004, after the Chargers had finished a horrible 4-12 season and Eli Manning announced that he did not want to be the No. 1 overall selection if it meant playing in San Diego. It’s hard to blame Manning if you listened to sports radio and TV shows during that time, with more than one “”expert”” declaring that the Chargers had a real chance to become the first NFL team to finish a season at 0-16.
The Chargers went on to finish 12-4, get a playoff home game and prove everybody wrong – even that college student who bought tickets on a whim and expected to suffer through a few years of losing before a playoff season.
Does buying those tickets make me Miss Cleo? No, though I did like “”Cool Runnings.”” It simply means that while most of San Diego became Charger fans after they proved to be no joke, demanded that kicker Nate Kaeding be cut after missing a potential game-winner against the Jets in the playoffs and then insisted that quarterback Drew Brees not be let go after seeing him lead the squad to back-to-back winning seasons, I was there when the first win was supposed to be the last, when Kaeding was hitting 80 percent of his attempts, including 8-of-11 from beyond 40 and when Brees came out on the field at Qualcomm Stadium to a thunderous round of boos during the preseason.
It doesn’t completely infuriate me to see all the new throngs of Chargers fans with those beautiful powder blue jerseys. Not as much as all those Dallas Cowboys fans who had to be tolerated in the mid-1990s, or that short-lived wave of Favre-natics and then, of course, the thousands of transplanted Colorado fans who just happened to find their old John Elway jerseys after the Denver Broncos won back-to-back.
And it’s definitely not on the same level as the Anaheim Angels “”fans”” who celebrated in 2002, but couldn’t tell you who Chili Davis or Chuck Finley were, or how everybody seemed to have a connection to the Boston Red Sox when they finally broke the curse in 2004.
I guess the only real justice for bandwagon fans is that while they might crash the victory party, they never experienced the losing, taunting and shame that make watching your team’s success as fulfilling as turkey on Thanksgiving Day.
