The Home Team

I wasn’t born a Red Sox fan. I adopted the Sox when I was in graduate school at Boston University. My classmates and I used to spend leisurely weekend afternoons at Fenway Park drinking beer in the bleachers and cheering on Red Sox legends like Carl Yastrzemski, Freddy Lynn, Jim Rice and Pudge Fisk. Specific “Fenway moments” – nail-biting pitchers’ duels, come-from-behind victories, home run balls just out of our reach in right field – cemented my love for the Boston Red Sox.

A couple of generations back, I think most sports fans cheered for the teams they grew up with. Americans moved less frequently in those days, and were less likely to relocate for school or work. So your allegiance to, say, the Philadelphia Phillies (the team I grew up with) was unlikely to be tested by a couple of seasons in Fenway. Before the age of mobility, you were born a Yankees fan or a Dodgers fan or a Cardinals fan, just as you were born right or left-handed. You rooted for the team your parents, friends and neighbors rooted for. The team the sports reporters wrote about in the local papers.

Today we get to pick our teams. We might stick with the team we were born with, or adopt a team we’ve come to love through a new experience in a new town, or through the fan allegiance of a husband or wife. And just as we’re less likely to marry a girlfriend or boyfriend from our hometown than we were a century ago, we’re probably less likely to “inherit” a favorite team.

I wonder if patriotism doesn’t operate on the same neural pathways as sports allegiance. Do our brains process love of the home team and love of America the same way? “Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, so maybe the answer is yes. And if that’s the case, is it possible that increased mobility – on an international scale – will start giving people the equivalent of Fenway Moments in countries far from home?

I thought about this as I sat down with a colleague from Bahrain and a French marketing director for a business meeting last month in Dubai. As we made small talk over Arabic coffee and juice, we compared notes on our lives as global citizens.

My co-worker wears a traditional abaya, but she was educated at Perdue and knows more about college and professional football than most American women I know. The marketing director told us that he’d been born in Paris, but had married a Tunisian wife and had lived for several years in Morocco. His children, he said with pride, were tri-lingual in French, Arabic and English. I explained that I was born in the US, but had married an Australian I met in London and that both of our daughters were born during our years in South Africa.

I have no idea whether our French colleague is less patriotic about France than the average Frenchman, and I’ve never asked my co-worker how she feels about Bahrain. I’m sure they both feel the same affection for their home countries that I feel for the United States. But I suspect that living and working abroad has changed the nature of our patriotism. When you come right down to it, it’s hard to chant “We’re number one!” when you’ve spent a lot of time in the other team’s dugout.