Competitive pressures begin in the off season. The determined and committed athlete will devote themselves to build, improve and prepare both body and mind for the next challenge. Old injuries are overcome and past disappointments are pushed away. Age, our consummate enemy, is kept at bay another year. All off season pressures endured by an athlete are self imposed.

The preseason period imposes new strains upon the athletic psyche. The personal stresses of practices are now from both within and without; the athlete is surrounded by those who would best him, the hungry rivals eager to take his place on the roster and his starting position, or his hard won place in the coach’s favour. These triple barreled pressures continue without relaxation through the competitive season. Results may be glorious or dismal – there is no deflection of competitive stress whether the athlete is a member of an 80 man football team or a solitary cross country runner.

Stress is an ever present life force that is nurtured in both victory and defeat.

Stress percolates within every job on this earth, no matter how cerebral or how seemingly removed from the hurly burly of the world. Every activity has its distinct cycles of stress, conflict and renewal. Even the contemplative monks who devote their entire being to God must now and then feel the exquisite weight that falls with the quest for the perfect doing of His bidding.

All religions, both the divinely inspired and those that are proselytized in the arenas and the sporting palaces of this earth are built upon the promise of reward and the stresses created by its pursuit. The pursuit of goodness anywhere is demanding. The stresses of sport are as relentless and as purposeful as any televangelist.

The worshipper known as the sports fan is a separate species from the athletic competitor. They are the exception that proves my rule that sport is life. The sports fan lives and breathes the spirit of a team or an athlete as a year round and often obsessive pursuit. Time is set aside from daily life to watch, cheer, exult and commiserate with the fan’s fellow travelers. Being a sports fan can be an all consuming task.

It is the uniquely self imposed stress of being a sports fan that sets this remarkable calling apart from all others on earth. Nothing compels a fan to adopt a particular team or a specific athlete as their object of adoration. This is a unilateral relationship; the fan can leave at any time and many do. If a favorite player is traded, or if a team loses year after year, the fans move on to other, more attractive objects for their affection. A sports fan is at heart a self gratifying creature – it is all about them. They are not sport.

This is not an attack on the fan. Moths to the flame, the truest of fans worry themselves into a minor frenzy before a key game or contest. Cardiology researchers can predict the spike in heart attacks and strokes to a fraction of a percent in the cities whose teams are a part of a Stanley Cup or World Series. The pure fan places every ounce of their zest and their emotion into the event passing before their eyes on the television screen or the stadium. They are no longer the spectator or the cheering section. They are transported to a metaphysical part of the combat. Their stress is every bit as real and as sustainable as that of the athletes themselves.

The hardcore fans are sometimes an object of fun. Sports purists are disdainful of the wannabees, in their $200 replica jerseys, face paint, and a not always perfect knowledge of the rules of the sport they follow. The purist does not see the good humour in middle aged men removing their shirts to display a painted logo on an ample and hairy stomach directed at the nearest television camera. The hard core fan can look completely absurd in any language, in any sport.

I know because I have been a fan many times, as hard core as they come. I felt utter devastation when my first football hero, Leon “X-Ray” McQuay fumbled the ball as the Toronto Argonauts were driving to a Grey Cup championship in 1971. I felt worse when my next hero, quarterback Brian Sipe, missed Ozzie Newsome in the end zone in the icebox that was Cleveland Stadium in 1981, and my then beloved Browns slid into Lake Erie. I have also been transported to fan heaven. There was the supreme rush of excitement that exploded in my chest as Villanova’s Dwayne ‘D Train’ McLean carved up Georgetown in 1985, and again when the Lilliputian-like Vikings of Cleveland State pressed mighty Indiana out of the Syracuse Carrier Dome in the NCAAs in 1986. The rise and fall of a fan’s passion can rip from valley to peak and back again in seconds. It is as draining and as exhilarating as anything on earth.

A great fan is a loud, honest, and passionate voyeur.

The fan is not sport and their honest and abiding passions are disconnected from the exquisite and eternal struggle of the athlete that is sport. Athletes feel the pressure and the tension of competition through their direct connection, cause and effect, to a battle that engages body and mind – only an athlete will directly influence a sporting outcome. A great fan is a loud, honest and passionate voyeur.

The fan is a unilateralist. The professional sports organizations bleat slogans such as, “We love our fans!” These ring hollow with me – corporate sport maintains a fiction of fan importance to build profit, not to nurture a true and abiding personal relationship with its ticket holders. Enthusiastic home crowds are proclaimed as the sixth man in basketball or the 12th man in football – any such number that places the rabid fan within the game is a sophistry. The fan has no obligation. All allegiances are illusory. The fan can cheer against his team at any moment should he choose. Fandom is an entirely permissible and understandable self indulgence. It is not sport.

Are there lessons to be learned from face painted men and women dressed as animal mascots, screaming for their teams in the stadiums and the living rooms of the world? Only one: the cheering and passionate release of pent up worldly stress is an admirable and healthy thing. It may not be sport, but the fans make their own fun.