Being a Fan

Just encountered this in a Sport's Guy article, and it really resonated with me, so I'm putting here to make sure I can always find it. It is a quote from Roger Angell of the New Yorker, in "Agincourt and After":

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

The only thing that I will add to it is that the lesson here, that we should not begrudge someone their enjoyment of something they love simply because we do not share the feeling, is something that "real" sports fans should think about the next time they turn up their noses at NASCAR, professional wrestling, or whatever other child's amusement they deem unfit for an adult's entertainment.