In spite of how hard I try to keep my head in the sand where sports are concerned, I am attuned to what's going on in general, so I often can't remain totally unawares of even sports news. So I know that, for people here in Chicago, there is a big football game coming up between the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers.
Our local TV news reported from the Illinois town of Antioch, which is near the Wisconsin border. Evidently because of Antioch's proximity to Wisconsin, some of its denizens are Packers fans—and some are Bears fans. Friends and relatives are divided.
The news segment focused on a four-year-old girl, a Packers fan. The reporter asked her what she thought of the Bears. She said "Boo, Bears!" Clearly this little girl has to have gotten her views from somewhere, and probably not from intelligently following the sports scene. Children this young pretty much have the views and perspectives that are instilled in them by their parents.
It seems wrong to me to instill what, for a lack of a better term I have to call a kind of partisanship (although in this case in sports and not in politics) in a child who is too young to really know very much about the whole thing. Maybe it's part of the kind of pushing of children by their parents that you see in the very young "beauty pageant queens" (made famous or infamous when one such, JonBenet Ramsey, was found murdered a few years ago). I wonder what other precocious yet strong views her parents have instilled in her. Similar parental teaching has turned children into little racists and other kinds of bigots.
In this child's simplistic view of things, what can her view of Bears fans be but that Bears fans are bad people? Maybe right up there with potential child molesters.
In connection with one thing that's going on here--that is, loyalty to or identification with sports teams--look at my May 11, 2010 posting titled "Patriotism, Identity, and Self-Worth."
Update, August 2, 2011
I was reading an update on the case of Brian Stow, who was beaten outside a Dodgers-Giants game in San Francisco and has been in a coma ever since (for four months). A man named Sanchez is charged in the beating. I wonder whether Sanchez started (started his strong sports-team feelings, that is) like the four-year-old whom I posted about above.
Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein
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