At some point this season when the Knicks were scuffling, I
began flirting with the New Jersey Nets. Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t
committing sports heresy and shifting my allegiance, but there was something
nice about rooting for a bad team that was supposed to be bad. I was into the
Nets parade of overpaid role players, including video game mainstays Anthony
Morrow, Gerald Green, Shawne Williams, and Johan Petro. The Nets were horrible this year, and their
future looks grim, but it’s also a future rife with change; the Nets
are moving to Brooklyn. Monday night marked the Nets last game in New Jersey,
and now they have a couple more cosmetic games to close out the year and then
they will cease to exist.
Monday’s game was a surreal affair, with a parade of Net
“legends” in the building to close the door on a franchise that has suffered a
lot of losing throughout the decades. The Nets move dredged up a question that
confronts the very raison d’etre of sports fans. What are they rooting for? Are
they rooting for a team name? A location? A collection of players? The Nets
move illustrates that all of these things are transient, if a New Jersean
continues to root for the Nets they’ll be pledging their allegiance to a
company.
Teams move all the time. The Seattle Supersonics become the
Oklahoma City Thunder, the Montreal Expos become the Washington Nationals. In a
way these teams are like Benjamin Button, they simultaneously grow older and
younger. When did the Nationals lose their Exponess? When the last remaining
player from Montreal left the team? The second they packed up and fled to
Washington? Or are they still the Expos in some intractable way? Are there
people in Montreal who stay glued to Baseball Tonight waiting to see whether
the Nationals pull out a win in Extra Innings?
Teams that move these days tend to move because the market
can’t support them. But think of the Dodgers and the Giants who fled the
biggest media market in the world for the sunny skies of the west coast. There
are still folks in Brooklyn who haven’t gotten over the loss of the “bums”. In
New York, the Mets filled the void for some National League rooters, but it’s
hard to imagine they engendered the same passion as some fan’s first love had.
Presumably some fans stayed loyal to their original team, as evidenced by the
smattering of Giants fans at Citi Field this past weekend, but how do you
remain faithful to someone who has jilted you.
Further muddying the waters is the case of Minor League
Baseball teams. In short, the minors serve as a repository for Major League
team’s prospects, where they can hone their skills. What makes it strange is
that Minor League teams don’t pack up and leave, but instead change
affiliations semi-regularly. For example, the Norfolk Tides were the Met’s AAA
affiliate for years, but the Met’s contract ran out and now the Tides are part
of the Orioles Organization. They play in the same stadium, they wear the same
jerseys, but their fundamental essence has changed. Presumably there are people
in Norfolk who root for the hometown team, and the minor leagues are transient
by nature, but it must have been strange to go to that first game where the
team appeared the same but entirely different personnel. It’s the direct inverse of the Nets
situation.
I’ve written several pieces about the strangeness of sports
fandom. It’s a pretty silly to emotionally invest yourself in the success of a
group of people who have no relationship to you. And yet, it inspires passion and dedication.
It’s ridiculous, but it’s fun. The
larger questions raised by the Net’s move remain ineffable to me. I don’t know
why I root for the Mets or the Knicks or the Jets, I just do. It’s almost like
I root for the institution. I look back on events that took place well before
my life with pride. I couldn’t imagine what it’d be like to lose a team. In the
Net’s case, they will remain the Nets and their move is across a short
distance. There are places in New Jersey where Brooklyn is just as far as the
Net’s current home of Newark. The Brooklyn Nets will have many of the same
players, the same coaches, the same management, and yet they will be different.
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