Legal Commentary

On Caring About Sports

By Ilya Somin

Co-bloggers Sasha Volokh and Ken Anderson express puzzlement as to why anyone would care about the outcome of professional sports competitions. By the same logic, why would anyone care about any kind of entertainment? Why, for example, do people care about and identify with fictional characters in the Harry Potter novels or in Jane Austen?s works?

Harry Potter is not a real person. Why should anyone care whether or not he manages to defeat Lord Voldemort? Elizabeth Bennet is not a real person either. Why should anyone care whether she gets married, and to whom? The answer, of course, is that vicarious identification with fictional characters is fun. Occasionally, it even has some educational value. The same, of course, goes for vicarious identification with sports teams. It?s fun to root for your team and hate its rivals, even if your initial reasons for identifying with Team A rather than Team B are essentially arbitrary (usually that you grew up in City A rather than City B). Though I hasten to add that there are excellent nonarbitrary reasons to hate the New York Yankees, even if you?re not a Red Sox fan like me!

Some literati will argue that they only read novels for their aesthetic value and don?t get invested in the fates of the characters. I suspect that such people are very much in the minority among avid readers of literature. How many people read and enjoy Pride and Prejudice or War and Peace without caring at all what happens to the characters? Similarly, there are some sports fans who claim that they don?t care which team wins, but just want to see impressive athletic feats. They too are a small minority.

Not everyone enjoys vicarious identification, of course. And among those who do, some prefer to satisfy their craving by means other than rooting for sports teams. But vicarious identification is a common and deeply rooted emotion ? one that probably has biological roots. And it?s not really that surprising that it leads some people to root for sports teams in much the same way as it leads others to identify with fictional characters.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on February 06, 2011 (boomark / email).