I think I’ve had three over the years. I think I had a red a on a black background, because I saw the white A with a random background color, while it looked nice, would be common.
Then I had Tommy Wiseau, because I enjoyed The Room for all the wrong reasons, as many others have.
Currently my avatar is a Purdue University sports team logo. I changed it back in April, which maybe makes me a bit of a front-runner, what with the basketball team’s run to the NCAA title game. But it was special and something I’d waited for, with the understanding it might never happen, and it took the sting out of a lot of tournament underachievement relative to regular season success. I felt lucky. Purdue’s players and coaches seemed like genuinely good people.
I don’t dedicate THAT much to sports (less as the years go by) but being a Purdue means something to me. I think it helps me understand things. It’s not mindless belonging. It’s more than the Onion article “The team from my general area will defeat the team from your general area.”
The below may be self-indulgent explanation, but I don’t know where else to put it. They’re thoughts I think even non-sports fans may find interesting.
details of fandom
There are certainly people who brag and yell about sports and tie their self-worth up in it. I don’t want to be like them. I’m lucky to be on message boards where people are self-aware enough to avoid this.
Also, fans of any one team need no constitutional protection. We will never be targets of discrimination. But I remember a North Carolina fan and Duke fan, in college, getting together to talk about me like I wasn’t there. Purdue? Why? UNC and Duke were archrivals, but they still discussed how much more THEIR teams had won.
This is not bigotry, not even close. But it helped me understand the tip of the iceberg for more serious things. I remember the fans above laughing at an NC State player who was a computer science major – “NC State’s not that good a school” – while simultaneously cutting down computer science major classmates as weird, too brainy, etc. This NC State player made it to the NBA and established scholarships, etc. The othering was strong, even at a prestigious school. Again, it has nothing on being on the receiving end of bigotry. But you understand a fraction of how it must feel to be “othered” when it actually matters, not just in the “geez what a dumb team to follow” sense.
On the bright side, I find how stats have been applied to sports pretty amazing. I like when Matt Painter (Purdue coach) says, when black coaches do well, some people say “He must be a good recruiter” and that’s an insult to their intelligence and hard work.
Also it’s sad to have to tell a fellow Purdue fan that certain talk is unacceptable, but it’s nice to find an Indiana fan I agree with on basic decency. I’ve seen people put aside their in-group bias to say, my team did wrong, or my archrivals did right.
So it can be a laboratory for trying to stand up for what’s right for things more important than a final score.
And sports fandom at its best is an area where people can have opposing views and even evaluate their views post-season to see where they were too optimistic, etc.
It also helps us accept what we can’t change (yelling at the TV won’t change the score) and seeing college players improve so much in the offseason reminds me that 1) I expect them to and 2) I should really expect that of myself, when I can, or I’m a bit of a hypocrite.
Yeah, I think amateur athletics are pretty messed up – Oregon versus Maryland as a conference game is clearly just for money, and a 3000 mile plane flight somewhere new should be fun and not an obligation – and I may grow sick/even sicker of the seedy side of it. But it’s given me a lot.
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