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A Fan's Life: The Agony of Victory and the Thrill of Defeat
A lifelong sports fanatic plumbs the depths of the fan mindset, tracking the mania from the gridiron to the national political stage and beyond.
The Pass. The Curse. The Double Doink. A sports fan’s life is not just defined by intense moments on a field, it’s scarred by them. For a real fan, winning isn’t everything—losing is. The true fans, it’s said, are those who have suffered the most, enduring lives defined by irrational obsession, fervid hopes, and equally gut-wrenching misery. And as Paul Campos shows, those deep feelings are windows not just onto an individual fan’s psychology but onto some of our shared concepts of community, identity, and belonging—not all of which are admirable. In A Fan’s Life , he seeks not to exalt a particular team but to explore fandom’s thorniest depths, excavating the deeper meanings of the fan’s inherently unhappy life.
A Fan’s Life dives deep into the experience of being an ardent fan in a world defined more and more by the rhetoric of “winners” and “losers.” In a series of tightly argued chapters that suture together memoir and social critique, Campos chronicles his lifelong passion for University of Michigan football while meditating on fandom in the wake of the unprecedented year of 2020—when, for a time, a global pandemic took away professional and collegiate sports entirely. Fandom isn’t just leisure, he shows; it’s part of who we are, and part of even our politics, which in the age of Donald Trump have become increasingly tribal and bloody. Campos points toward where we might be heading, as our various partisan affiliations—fandoms with a grimly national significance—become all the more intense and bitterly self-defining. As he shows, we’re all fans of something, and making sense of fandom itself might offer a way to wrap our heads around our increasingly divided reality, on and off the field.
The Pass. The Curse. The Double Doink. A sports fan’s life is not just defined by intense moments on a field, it’s scarred by them. For a real fan, winning isn’t everything—losing is. The true fans, it’s said, are those who have suffered the most, enduring lives defined by irrational obsession, fervid hopes, and equally gut-wrenching misery. And as Paul Campos shows, those deep feelings are windows not just onto an individual fan’s psychology but onto some of our shared concepts of community, identity, and belonging—not all of which are admirable. In A Fan’s Life , he seeks not to exalt a particular team but to explore fandom’s thorniest depths, excavating the deeper meanings of the fan’s inherently unhappy life.
A Fan’s Life dives deep into the experience of being an ardent fan in a world defined more and more by the rhetoric of “winners” and “losers.” In a series of tightly argued chapters that suture together memoir and social critique, Campos chronicles his lifelong passion for University of Michigan football while meditating on fandom in the wake of the unprecedented year of 2020—when, for a time, a global pandemic took away professional and collegiate sports entirely. Fandom isn’t just leisure, he shows; it’s part of who we are, and part of even our politics, which in the age of Donald Trump have become increasingly tribal and bloody. Campos points toward where we might be heading, as our various partisan affiliations—fandoms with a grimly national significance—become all the more intense and bitterly self-defining. As he shows, we’re all fans of something, and making sense of fandom itself might offer a way to wrap our heads around our increasingly divided reality, on and off the field.
- GenresNonfiction
192 pages, Paperback
Published September 5, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 2, 2022
A Fan's Life: The Agony of Victory and the Thrill of Defeat, by Paul Campos, looks at fandom both within sports and in society at large.
While the book holds together very well as a single examination of fandom, even when it moves out of sports fandom, I was like two very different people reading it. Both of me (what??) enjoyed it but for different reasons.
The sports fan, more on definition in a moment, spent a lot of time going into the past and remembering the heartbreaking moments. I seem to fall into a category that would include former diehard fans (such as Campos) and the casual fan. From my earliest memories until about age 26 or so I attended games, lived and breathed, for two sports franchises. The Baltimore Orioles and the Baltimore Colts. I think you can guess where I'm from, huh? At 8 years of age I attended all four games of the '66 World Series (my grandmother lived in Van Nuys so I had family to put me on and take me off the flight). There was no better (in my eyes) place to watch a game than Memorial Stadium. Within 9 months I became unusually jaded for some of only 10-11, 1969, January the (no way they can win) Jets beat my Colts in the Super Bowl and October the (no way they can win) Mets beat my Orioles in the World Series. I have never felt comfortable or confident when watching a game of anything (even tiddlywinks!). Traumatized, I tell ya, traumatized. Or at least it seemed so to me. When I was 26 the Colts ran out on the city and their fans in the middle of the night, and I quit being such a diehard fan for anyone. If they don't care, I don't have to care. So much for memory lane!
The other me, in looking at fandom, my own, Campos' Wolverines fandom, and the many stories that illustrate it for others and how it has become the way we conduct government and politics, is also jaded. But where I am powerless to keep sports teams from being evil, I can become more of an activist and try to right the ship that has almost floundered completely due to politics as (empty-headed) fandom. The analogy is spot on, and the chapter where the full argument is presented, I had to read twice.
I would recommend this to both the sports fan as well as anyone curious for how to understand at least some of what has gone wrong in the country.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
While the book holds together very well as a single examination of fandom, even when it moves out of sports fandom, I was like two very different people reading it. Both of me (what??) enjoyed it but for different reasons.
The sports fan, more on definition in a moment, spent a lot of time going into the past and remembering the heartbreaking moments. I seem to fall into a category that would include former diehard fans (such as Campos) and the casual fan. From my earliest memories until about age 26 or so I attended games, lived and breathed, for two sports franchises. The Baltimore Orioles and the Baltimore Colts. I think you can guess where I'm from, huh? At 8 years of age I attended all four games of the '66 World Series (my grandmother lived in Van Nuys so I had family to put me on and take me off the flight). There was no better (in my eyes) place to watch a game than Memorial Stadium. Within 9 months I became unusually jaded for some of only 10-11, 1969, January the (no way they can win) Jets beat my Colts in the Super Bowl and October the (no way they can win) Mets beat my Orioles in the World Series. I have never felt comfortable or confident when watching a game of anything (even tiddlywinks!). Traumatized, I tell ya, traumatized. Or at least it seemed so to me. When I was 26 the Colts ran out on the city and their fans in the middle of the night, and I quit being such a diehard fan for anyone. If they don't care, I don't have to care. So much for memory lane!
The other me, in looking at fandom, my own, Campos' Wolverines fandom, and the many stories that illustrate it for others and how it has become the way we conduct government and politics, is also jaded. But where I am powerless to keep sports teams from being evil, I can become more of an activist and try to right the ship that has almost floundered completely due to politics as (empty-headed) fandom. The analogy is spot on, and the chapter where the full argument is presented, I had to read twice.
I would recommend this to both the sports fan as well as anyone curious for how to understand at least some of what has gone wrong in the country.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
January 1, 2024
I first found Campos as one of the writers on the political blog Lawyers, Guns, & Money, whose Warren Zevon-derived name still strikes me as one of the best blog titles ever. As befits a law professor, his posts are always well-crafted and erudite, leavened with all sorts of apt quotations and allusions, but his wry sense of affectionate humor at the many absurdities of modern American culture is not unrelated to his obsessive fandom for Michigan Wolverines football, one of the premier teams in America's weirdest and greatest sport. As a devout Texas Longhorns fan I appreciate and sympathize with his complex relationship to what can be a deeply irrational and unhealthy sports mania, but the draw of the book, which is really more of a loose collection of essays, is in how Campos eloquently connects the subterranean currents of fan emotion that make you yell at the TV to the parts of American society that emotion touches, which these days is basically everything. Youth, aging, love, hate, wealth, poverty, education, capitalism, honor, shame, optimism, nostalgia, technology, traditionalism, politics, entertainment, meritocracy, oligarchism, globalization, parochialism - all of these things and more are present in college football to a degree unmatched in any other American sport
I finished this book on November 24th, the day of Michigan's victory over Ohio State and the day before Texas's victory over Texas Tech, which allowed our respective teams to cruise to their increasingly inaccurately numbered conference championship games, and as of writing this review we are both in the playoffs. Winning felt good, but as Campos accurately explores here, it only fed the hunger for more - fandom is its own drug addiction. This is a thoughtful look at an unhinged pastime that some of us simply can't get enough of, and a good reminder that "sticking to sports" is actually a mandate to broaden your focus, not to limit it.
I finished this book on November 24th, the day of Michigan's victory over Ohio State and the day before Texas's victory over Texas Tech, which allowed our respective teams to cruise to their increasingly inaccurately numbered conference championship games, and as of writing this review we are both in the playoffs. Winning felt good, but as Campos accurately explores here, it only fed the hunger for more - fandom is its own drug addiction. This is a thoughtful look at an unhinged pastime that some of us simply can't get enough of, and a good reminder that "sticking to sports" is actually a mandate to broaden your focus, not to limit it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews