I’ve got a couple of episodes in the pipeline, but I wanted to interrupt them with a quick trip down memory lane, prompted by the NY Knicks’ historic run and eventual NBA championship.

Living in central NY (I explain to people sometimes) isn’t all that different from growing up in Iowa, when it comes to sports fandom. We’re close enough here to NYC that we get a lot of its sports backwash (along with that from Buffalo/Toronto), but we’re far enough away that we’re still allowed to pick and choose our rooting interests1. We hear far more of the inner workings of the teams we’re near, and experience the occasional tv blackout, but otherwise, I don’t feel like there’s much local pressure to pledge allegiance. If anything, I’d argue that there’s more local buzz for the Buffalo Bills than any other team/sport.

That said, there was a lot of Knicks discourse over the past couple of weeks. The team went on an unprecedented hot streak, one that was even more unlikely given the way the team was assembled, gambling on a series of potentially flawed players and giving away a great deal of future capital to do so. But hey, it worked.

I have to admit that, upon reading the breathless account of the Knicks provided by the NYT above (impossible, uncomplicated joy!), my first instinct was to roll my eyes. But then I took a beat. This year is the tenth anniversary of my own sports-related, impossible joy, the year where the Chicago Cubs won their first World Series after 108 years of futility. And this summer marks the tenth anniversary of the last time I attended a game at Wrigley. I still have the tickets to mark that occasion.

The piece of that story that I sometimes neglect to mention is that it was a very near thing for me. The entire trip (2-3 days in Chicago, including the game) was a milestone birthday gift for my mother, where we’d each drive in, meet up, and spend a couple of days together. Under normal circumstances, it would have been easy enough, but this was less than six months after I’d been hospitalized for my heart issues and had my defibrillator installed. And this was my third major surgery over the span of about five years; I was still re-learning how to navigate the physical world without endangering myself further.

This isn’t a story about how the Cubs somehow made it possible for me to live again, or anything like that. I will say that having a team to watch and root for, when I was otherwise convalescing and going a little stir-crazy, was a net positive. And I spent a lot of time that year reminiscing about how tightly woven the Cubs were into my entire life’s fabric (and my parents’ and my grandparents’). If I’d lived in Chicago at the time, there’s a better than average chance that I would have been partying in the streets after each of those Series wins. I can’t really mock those fans who’ve waited so long (and suffered both heartbreaking misses and some pretty awful decision-making over the years) for a championship. There by the grace of the sports gods and goddesses went I.

As I’ve mentioned occasionally on this site, I listen to Pablo Torre’s podcast pretty religiously2, and one of the things that he mentions occasionally is that sports are the last bastion of monoculture in this country. When I’m able to lend some grace to folks from other fanbases, I can almost agree with that claim. There’s something about sports fandom that bridges across lots of other differences; that’s one of the coolest parts of watching the World Cups every couple of years. For every France or Argentina, there’s a Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, or Scotland. There’s a lot of joy on display.

At the same time, though, it’s become a lot harder to imagine that sports fandom will survive much longer, much less as a monoculture. As lovely as the World Cup can be, it’s hard to ignore that FIFA itself is a corrupt dumpster fire of an organization. As exciting as that epic Knicks comeback was, it felt like the coverage was spending an awful lot of time on the rich and famous who were milking the event for attention (to say nothing of the mad king’s disruption of Game 3). We’re seeing stories about billionaires turning college programs into fiefdoms, thanks to NIL changes. And that’s to say nothing of the casinofication of sports in general3.

What monoculture once existed in this country has been the relentless target of disruption and extraction by private equity and billionaires, and it’s hard to imagine that sports will be able to resist those forces for much longer. Fandom is slowly becoming one more thing that feeds the enshittification cycle, and those of us who have suffered through long droughts on behalf of our teams know exactly how that feels.

Wow, I really didn’t set out for this episode to take a dark turn. Let me cut it short and say that, despite all this, it actually warms my heart to see Knicks fans celebrate their championship, even if it took me a minute to get there. These sorts of celebrations speak to an older, deeper relationship to sports than our culture currently encourages. We still get glimpses of that relationship, especially during events like the Olympics and World Cups, but I don’t know how future generations will come to know sports as anything other than the raw material for rampant sports betting and periodic scandal.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m sure there’s a World Cup game waiting for me. I’ll be back soon…