One Year

Life is hard. Not exactly a ground breaking observation but an honest one. It is because of this simple reality that I have embraced the One Year philosophy, which simply means that I think every fan deserves at least one year of ultimate success during their fandom.

Over the course of time, sports have undeniably evolved into a major part of our culture by allowing us to escape real life. This escape allows us a way to emotionally invest large amounts of ourselves into a seemingly trivial event and thus artificially create additional life value and worth.

It doesn’t really have to make a ton of sense, it just had to be recognized. In other words, sports matter to fans much more than is logical because many fans assign some of their own personal worth based on how a particular sports team or event unfolds.

This wouldn’t be terrible if fans actually had a significant impact on a team’s performance, management or results. Unfortunately that is not the case. The overwhelming majority of all sporting outcome are completely out of the fans’ hands. Fans are a merely a passenger on a team’s season, unable to impact it in almost anyway. This fandom and obsession is an unfortunate reality, not a logical decision.  

This is why I cling to my philosophy. Life is hard enough without something as random as sports making it worse.

People will disagree with my hope and philosophy for a myriad of reasons. Frankly, I don’t care. No matter what factors led to one team being more successful than another, I still typically want the longest suffering fanbase to win. I do not blame the Charlotte Bobcats’ fans for the poor management style of Michael Jordan anymore than I applaud the fans of San Antonio for the amazing “discovery” and development of Tim Duncan.

To understand the true value sports can create in one’s life, talk to a diehard BYU football fan and see how long it takes for 1984 to crop up. Strike up a conversation with a Mets fan and you will probably end up discussing the Amazing ’69 Mets. Even bring up 2004 or 2008 to me and I will talk for hours about the University of Utah football team and how the BCS screwed an entire fanbase out of a chance for even a split national championship. Sports fans love talking about these times when life is good and they absolutely cling to these times when life is bad.

My One Year philosophy isn’t perfect. Every year I root for my University of Utah football team to go undefeated and my Utah Jazz to win the NBA title. Assuming that ever actually happened, I would root for it to happen again and again. That is the nature of being a fan. I just hope that when if/when my Utes and Jazz lose, they lose to a team that is on its way up rather than to a team that never seems to go down.

If society is going to falsely assign even the smallest amount of self value based on a sports team, then I want everyone to have at least a single sports team or season to use to boost themselves up. It may sound dumb, but life is hard enough. Every little bit helps.