Column: ESP-Em
Your favorite athletics team is not a personality trait.
A personality trait is defined as a person’s patterns of thought, feelings and behaviors, as defined by the Diener Education Fund. Common traits can include introversion versus extroversion or optimism versus pessimism. There are all kinds of personality tests, from the Myers-Briggs to the Enneagram to the Big Five test to define your personality.
A preference between the Warriors versus the Cavaliers, on the other hand, is not a personality trait. You do not have an Enneagram type 12 because you love Tom Brady more than any other player, or an ABTC Myers-Briggs type for “Anything But The Cowboys.”
Sports are intended for entertainment, but they have been taken much further than that. People have made their favorite teams a part of their identity and the outcome of games and seasons a part of their emotional well-being.
There’s little more annoying to me than someone who keeps their favorite athletics team in their social media bios along with other traits or major parts of their life, such as their relationship or their job or whatever else they keep on there.
Rooting for your favorite teams and players is an integral aspect of sports, but your arbitrary preference in players, the colors on their jerseys and their location should not define you.
I’ve been told in a previous relationship that not rooting for my significant other’s favorite teams and college would be a legitimate deal breaker. Before that, I wasn’t aware that a completely arbitrary preference for a sports team had such a severe impact on my desirability as a person or my character (It doesn’t).
There are countless videos of fans beating each other up or of dads throwing bowls of chips across the room because his favorite Steelers lost (Sorry, Chad).
Sports fans can be nasty people, and it’s all because their team lost a game or had a bad season. For a team that has no actual effect on their person and a game or season that will never alter the trajectory of their life.
It’s important to stop taking sports so seriously, and to stop melding your identity with your favorite team.
This isn’t to say that it’s bad to be a sports fan. I love sports and I have my favorite teams and a couple of favorite sports. But I do not identify as a sports fanatic, or as a Liberty fan or Jason Witten fan.
I don’t let the outcome of a game bring me down, and I don’t hold onto one or two wins to give myself bragging rights until the next season. It’s a terrible way to live, basing your happiness off of a game you have no control over and basing it upon a team that will make mistakes and will lose.
Because, unlike a job or a person or a relationship with Christ, you will receive no fulfilment or joy from watching a football team win. There is no reward in watching your team win a game you’ll likely forget in a few weeks, and there is no benefit to being identified by your favorite sports team.
I’ll repeat it again for the people in the back: your favorite sports team is not a personality trait.