I grow weary of being told I’m a gullible sap by some Toronto sportswriters because I don’t want this Leafs team totally dismantled, exiled or executed. Why is the proper model the New York Yankees? Are their fans happier than us? Why is their unforgiving relation to their team the model? When I lived in New York I had a regular appointment in the Bronx, so I often timed my travel to take in Yankees games. Even when they were winning, the fans seemed mostly miserable.
Teams are about community and they’re also about winning, but the two don’t always mesh. The players focus fully on winning, as they must, but the fans are about community, with the yearning for victory a component of that.
The core of professional team sports is a community’s ability to identify with a team. Winning enters in, but the relationship is key. There’s stuff you get from it beyond victory or defeat. You can win and have a crappy relationship, or lose and have a good one. The hell of the Brian Burke/Phil Kessel years wasn’t that they lost, but that often they didn’t seem to care. When Brendan Shanahan took charge here as team president, he said the essential thing was to be proud to be a Leaf. There’ve been few players who cared more about winning than Shanahan, but he got it.
Sport is a foretaste of a world in which virtue and merit are rewarded more consistently than they are in “real” life, but it’s also about learning to lose, which always happens more often than winning. So you yearn to win but must learn to lose. And hockey’s gods are more capricious than those of other games due to the uncontrollable nature of the puck and ice. This tests players, but also fans.
You fall in love with a team — but love means, as someone said, accepting the whole package. This is harder in the era of free agency. Previously, there was virtual serfdom but it meant players and fans were bound together for life. Ted Williams, the last .400 hitter in baseball, played in Boston his entire career and never won it all. Now players come and go, so the balancing act between the pleasures of familiarity and the bliss of victory gets undone. Winning is all that persists. But fans who wanted to win also wanted the team they knew to win.
This Leafs team reflects some of that familiarity because they came here in their teens; we watched them grow. John Tavares counts because he wore Leafs pjs. That intimate link is taken for granted elsewhere: the team as a palpable embodiment of a community. Even the pope has his team, a local soccer club in Buenos Aires, it grounds him. He hopes they win but he’s not gonna throw a fit if they lose. It’s like family.
Think about winning. If you don’t, are you a loser, or a winner who just hasn’t won yet — and may not, like Williams, within a lifetime’s finite bounds? The Boston Red Sox waited 86 years, generations of fans died, Williams was gone. Cubs fans waited 108. Were they gullible? No, they are legend. It’s like the endless NDP debate: do they want to retain their party’s purity, or do they want to win? It’s a false alternative. They want to win but as who they are, not some made-over facsimile.
There’s something missing in this Leafs team — Shanahan knows it, we all do — that would kick them over the top. But you don’t give up on your team as long as they don’t give up on you.
This article originally appeared in the Toronto Star
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