Monday 9 March 2015 08:04, UK
Valentine’s Day is all about love - be it engagements, first dates and unrequited love.
With that in mind, US sports blogger Alex Ferguson looks at 10 groups of sporting fanbases that will continue to get behind their teams through the hard times and the good…
The Chicago Cubs have not won a World Series since 1908. They haven’t really been close to one since 2005, and lately they’ve spent oodles of cash on underachieving players and finished last in their division every year in the last five. Does that stop the fans coming? Does it heck. Wrigley Field is one of the most beautiful baseball stadiums in America and every year is also one of the best attended. And from personal experience, it’s a great day out.
The Packers have sold out Lambeau Field since 1960 and have an 81,000-person waiting list to buy a season ticket. The great thing about the Packers is that they are owned by their fans (last stockholder count: 360,584) and not a single owner, so everyone’s invested. And they haven’t even threatened to move, staying in their city since 1919.
Fans are said to be fun, friendly and deeply, deeply passionate. You’ll know that because even when it’s horrifically cold, they turn up. Generally wearing blocks of cheese on their head – their fans are nicknamed ‘Cheeseheads’.
They love the successes of the Patriots, but fans from New England live and die with the Red Sox. Even when the Red Sox continually broke their hearts, the fans stayed faithful.
Now they have had a bit of success since winning their first World Series in 86 years in 2004, the fans are now even more excited to see their team. Seeing them in the flesh is hard as Fenway Park is one of the toughest tickets in sports.
Even when the team is terrible, Toronto Maple Leafs fans flock to the Air Canada Centre. The city’s Blue Jays may have had their successes in the 1990s, but if Toronto were to win a Stanley Cup for the first time since 1967 or even a division title for the first time in 15 years, the city would probably explode.
A buddy of mine from Texas calls Texas A&M and their fanbase a “cult”, and it’s easy to see why. The student fanbase, or the ‘12th Man’ as it’s known in those circles, have singing, chanting and swaying traditions coming out of their eyeballs.
And the fanbase has remained faithful, despite not winning a national title since 1939. By the way: the Aggies had the whole ‘12th Man’ thing going for their fans way longer than the Seattle Seahawks.
The Knicks are a mess and have been a mess for quite a while. While current owner James Dolan is in charge they are a mess (he sent a rude letter to a fan telling him to go and support the cross-town Nets) and they will be even if they get to the play-offs.
This season they’ve only won 10 games, gone on some of the worst losing streaks in the history of the NBA, but still sell-out Madison Square Garden. That’s impressive.
If there’s a fanbase in the NFL that seems more cursed, please tell us. After the heartbreak of tortured play-off losses in the mid-80s, the Browns owner Art Modell, who incidentally gave Bill Belichick his first head coaching job, continued to break hearts by announcing that he was moving the team to Baltimore in 1995 just after they had made the play-offs again. The team fell to pieces and so did the fans.
Cleveland got a team back in 1999 but as a buddy of mine said: “It doesn’t feel like the city’s Browns”. And since their return, the fans have only seen two sides actually finish with a winning record. The ‘Dawg Pound’ is still one of the most passionate fanbases in football. Please, give them a break.
Every year, St Louis Cardinals' home games have been the best attended, topping the league in home attendances in 2014 with the stadiums (they’ve had a couple) awash with the red of the faithful thousands.
Despite winning the World Series in 2006, they’ve lost their last two trips to the ‘Big One’, and three out of the last four, but their competitiveness and commitment to a good youth system and to not overpaying players – they were only 13th-highest in payroll last year – is pleasing to see.
Pittsburgh Steelers fans are one of the NFL’s best-travelling fanbases. You can see them with their twirling ‘Terrible Towels’ and the yellow and black jerseys. Sure, some of that’s geography, as Pittsburgh emptied in the ‘70s after the steel industry collapsed, so people had to go and look for jobs, but most of that’s unbridled passion. And it annoys home fans too.
Witness this Denver fan who moaned about Steelers fans' presence at the 2005 AFC Championship Game at Mile High: “Armed with their terrible towels they turned Mile High into a neutral site,” he said.
Notre Dame, despite not having won a National Championship since 1988, is the biggest team in college football. You can see that when your team plays their team, and it’s ‘Irish everywhere’.
Every sports bar in America seems to be a Notre Dame stronghold, helped by the fact that it’s easily identifiable by being a Catholic school. The movie Rudy, about a boy who always wanted to play for the Irish, helped the myth of Notre Dame Football, too.
