Fred's Book Club: Root Fan or Die.

Welcome to another episode of Fred's Book Club, also called the Humpback Writers because it falls on Wednesday. And if you think that joke is a disaster, then you haven't seen the real disasters that have been seen by...

Joe Queenan, who has written for pretty much everybody from TV Guide to National Review to the New York Times, published True Believers: The Tragic Inner Life of Sports Fans as an ode to long-suffering sports fans -- a painful, awful ode. As with all of Queenan's writing, there's a lot of hilarity in this book, despite his perpetual agony of being a fan of the teams from his native Philadelphia all his life. And if you know about the Phillies (two championships in 136 years) and the Eagles (no championships between 1960 and 2018) and the 76ers (no championships since 1983) you know how he feels.

True Believers is a deep dive into some of the characteristics of the die-hard fan -- the willingness to defend and fight for and pay large amounts of cash to his beloved teams; the superstitions; the birth of fandom from childhood up; and the stupidity. If you've ever loved a team beyond all reason, ever quit following the team and kept coming back, ever said "Wait till next year" when there isn't a spark of hope in you that next year will be better, this book is for you. Even if you've finally given up and walked away, he has a chapter about that.

Don't think that Queenan calls all dedicated fans unrealistic or dumb. To the contrary. He writes that "it would be remiss to overlook the Manichaean nature of the true fan's relationship to his team. By this I mean that, while one is morally obligated to root, root, root for the home team, it is also perfectly acceptable to maintain a simultaneous hatred of the franchise and to curse the moment it first saw the light of day. I personally believe the Eagles and the Phillies have each taken about five years off my life through their vaudevillian antics down through the decades. As a friend once put it, the difference between the Phillies and the Third Reich is that after the Second World War, a few of the Nazis apologized for their crimes against humanity, while the boys in the colorful red pinstripes have remained obstreperously mute on the subject."

And don't think this is a book just for Philadelphia fans. In one chapter he discusses the woes of Jets fans, for example, describing the time "the Jets' ancient, mysterious, and very possibly insane owner Leon Hess went out and hired Richie Kotite to be his new head coach. In a remark so cryptic that cultural anthropologists will still be analyzing it centuries from now, Hess said, 'I want to win now.' Kotite, who had just lost his last seven games with the Eagles, thereupon guided the Jets to their worst season in history, winning just three games, and the next season, one. In Kotite's defense, it doesn't seem fair that a genuinely nice man who had survived brain surgery and four years in Philadelphia should then be asked to coach the Jets."

As I noted above, Queenan spends some pages looking into the origin of the suffering pastime of sports fandom, usually in childhood.

Fans' support must be based on one of two criteria. Either you grew up in a specific locality and inherited a congenital municipal connection to the team, or you grew up somewhere else but rooted for your father's teams. (In certain rare instances an exception could be made for supporting a team simply because your uncle Sal did. But only if he was your real uncle Sal and not some mythical figure you dreamed up to make your perfidy seem more palatable to your naive, gullible friends.)

After all, "it was morally unacceptable, an outrage against the laws of God and man, to root for teams with which these emotional or geographic ties did not exist. For starters, it weakened our national moral character by promulgating the notion that it was permissible to arbitrarily switch allegiances."

Without question, my favorite part of the book was Queenan's description of the turtle.

In a dark corner of my kitchen, right next to the radio, sits a hideous enamel turtle that has not budged from this position since October 1993. During that memorable year, or so I have come to believe, the turtle's uncanny telekinetic powers contributed in some way to the Philadelphia Phillies winning the National League Pennant. 

This is the kind of sports superstition everyone can admire. I know for a fact that when I was a youth, the Mets' Game 6 rally in 1986 was caused by me sitting in my house, on my street, on the edge of my bed, with my legs and arms wrapped around my old desk chair, watching on a blinkered old black-and-white TV. If I had gotten up during the rest of the inning, we would have lost. I was as much a key to the win as Knight, Mookie, and Aguilera. You're welcome, Mets fans.

And you know why the Beloved Mets have not won the World Series since? My family moved the next year.