How to take the fantatic out of the fan pt. 2

How to take the fanatic out of the fan

Matt Andreason

There’s a reason the word fanatic was shortened to fan. It’s my belief the move was symbolic, with fanatic representing the extreme, and fan representing the condensed version of our rooting behavior. If you’ve been to a sporting event recently, you’ll see my perspective is not always the majority. As a self-proclaimed "professional sports observer" I’ve broken down fanatics into four distinct groups. These four groups can disturb, annoy, drink, and do a number of other things to poorly represent a fan base. The only question is how do we eliminate the fanatics and welcome them back as simple fans? Let's find out how one might do it.

Group 2

Contradictory Fanatics: Years ago I attended a BYU football spring training game as part of a family function. As the game progressed there were some inflammatory comments made by a fan a few rows back. You see, BYU’s backup QB was making some poor throws, and this particular fan was letting his displeasure be known, loudly. Every bad play, you would hear comments such as, "Go back to Junior college!" "There was a guy wide open, why’d you throw it to the other guy!" "How are we going to win any games if Beck goes down and this guy has to step in?!" As fate would have it, this quarterback had a sudden change of luck as the game proceeded. His errant throws from before became long touchdown passes that delighted the partisan crowd. At one point this quarterback had thrown 15 straight completions. As you can imagine, our fan from the beginning suddenly had a change of heart and couldn’t seem to praise the quarterback enough. His previous disparaging comments were replaced with remarks of heaping adoration. "Is there a quarterback controversy on the horizon!" " I promise there isn’t another team as deep at quarterback as us!" "Put him with the first team starters!" A convenient reversal of position for our contradictory fanatic. The fate of him and other contradictory fanatics?


Solution for fanatic cleansing: Randomly turn and comment on this gentleman’s or woman’s dress attire. Do so throughout the entire event while switching comments from disgust to flattery. These efforts can be rude (yet wildly entertaining), but believe me, for the sake of getting back to true fan ethics it’s worth it; and most importantly, it works.