It’s 11 p.m. on a beautiful October night of last year. The Yankees have just made another ridiculous comeback off Byung-Hyun Kim and the Diamondbacks in the World Series. As I’m about to head out to drink away my sorrows, I find myself checking away messages on AOL Instant Messenger. Naturally, I skip over all my boys and start checking the ladies away messages:
“Not here.”
“Out partying!”
“Leave one.”
“Let’s go Yankees, what a win!” I know this girl, very cute, but a sports fan to boot?
Could I have found “the one,” a girl at Georgetown that knows her sports? A true fan? Needless to say, my mind is quite preoccupied as I head out to a party. I walk in the door of the party, and there she is, wearing her Yankee blue and white, looking all sorts of slammin’. I figure I’ve got an in?we’re both sports fans. Even though I despise the very existence of the Yankees, I feel it’s worth talking Yankee baseball in an effort to find out if she is “the one.” I walk up, give her a sarcastic “Nice win tonight,” and we start talking baseball over a few drinks. But as the conversation goes on, all signs begin pointing towards “fake fan!” Finally, after I’ve had too much, I bust out the question, “Hey, what’s the starting rotation for the Yankees?”
“Ummm, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams.”
I learned a very valuable lesson that night: Our campus is littered with fake fans. Haven’t you noticed the increase of Patriots hats and jerseys this year? Not that I’m insinuating that all Pats fans are fake. I know two who were screaming and dancing in the Village B courtyard all night long after Adam Vinatieri’s field goal went through the uprights. But for every die-hard Pat fan there are 500 New Englanders who didn’t bother rooting for the Patriots through their tough times. All those years of losing made the Super Bowl victory all the sweeter for those dedicated sophomores, and I was genuinely happy for them, because they deserved it.
Fake fans are everything that is wrong about sports. They’re the guy who gets the courtside seats to NBA games and takes his girlfriend over one of his boys. Fake fans are the kids on eBay right now bidding on their Chargers and Panthers jerseys because their hometown teams are finally respectable. They’re the roommate that you hate talking sports to, because his every comment reeks of phoniness: “What’s up, oh wow my Bravos are on TV again, Chipper is so good!”
“Of course they’re on TV, they’re on cable every single night. You talk sports with me all the time, why do you act surprised when your Atlanta Braves are on television?”
Fake fans don’t break a foot celebrating a Saints overtime touchdown at Rhino’s. Fake fans don’t sit with 10 Eagles fans at Hoya’s on a Thursday night, even though their Kansas City Chiefs are getting their butts whipped at the hands of McNabb and the Eagles. These are true fans and true stories.
If you are reading this and are thinking to yourself, “Damn I’m a fake fan,” I urge you to change the error of your ways. Go to espn.com right now and sign up for ESPN the Insider premium service. Research your teams; know who the 53rd man on your football team is. Learn to eat, drink and breathe your favorite sports teams. I assure you, it’s worth it. Taking a road trip to Giants Stadium to see the Eagles win on Monday Night Football, then stopping at Pat’s Steaks in Philly on the way back to Georgetown?now that’s living. So what if it added an extra hour and a half to the ride and we didn’t get back till 6 a.m. It was the best tasting cheesesteak we’d ever had.
Fake fans, you have been warned. An anti-fake-fan coalition at Georgetown is in the works. If you decide to sport that new Ricky Williams jersey on campus, you better damn well be prepared to list his offensive line, or else you’re getting “Fake Fan” tattooed on your forehead. If you love rocking that old-school hat-jersey combo like the rap superstars, be ready for a serious question and answer session. Fake-fan ringleaders such as Puff Daddy, Nelly and Fabolous need to be sent where they belong: Fake-fanville, a.k.a. New Jersey. I heard it’s not that bad there. At least they’ve got lots of cute girls walking around in Yankee cut off tees.
