Today’s activities in Baltimore feature as centerpiece, attendance at a backyard barbecue structured around a football game. It’s Sunday, it’s fall, football is on, the Baltimore Ravens are playing the Kansas City Chiefs. There will be beer, grilling, and frequent trips to the restroom. Sounds like the kind of thing you’d do in a sports-crazy town on the weekend, one that started on Friday night, for then, Baltimore was in the feverish grip of the Orioles-Ranger playoff to determine the American League wildcard. Tonight, sports fans in Baltimore will execute a masterful segue from devoted following of the National and American Football Conferences to Major League Baseball’s American League Divisional Championships as the Birds take on the Yankees. Baltimore versus Texas! Baltimore versus New York! Er, Baltimore versus Kansas City! The stuff of long-standing, politically significant, emotionally charged historical disputes.
Or not.
Which is a long-winded way of saying I am confronted again with the mystery of how millions of sports fans, here in the US, and all over the world, develop long-standing, passionately defended and articulated, emotionally infused, personal allegiances with large, profit-seeking, corporate entities, an enterprise that should be–but most definitely isn’t–akin to finding someone to cheer for in a Ford vs. Chrysler encounter. (Sorry, bad example; if you walk through the parking lot of a NASCAR event, you will find many who can do just that.) I succumb to the marketing pitch all too easily myself. Somehow, despite all my misgivings about the Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn, despite its gentrifying, traffic-causing, neighborhood-destroying tendencies, I find myself making plans to go watch the Brooklyn Nets, cheap tickets for which will run well north of $50, looking forward eagerly to Knick-humbling, thinking about a Nets shirt and cap. They are, after all, a very cool black. Dodgers-shmodgers. Brooklyn has its ‘own’ team, hooray. Bring on the rest of the world. Or at least, bring on the other boroughs.
Disliking some teams is easy too: I reflexively loathe the Cleveland Indians for their mascot and the Washington Redskins for their name; I dislike the Boston Red Sox because, well, they’re the Red Sox. In the world of professional soccer, I take refuge in easy formulas like disliking English soccer clubs, thus transferring prejudices acquired in the world of cricket to a new domain. It seems all too easy. The Edgar Allan Poe theme of yesterday’s post reminds me that last year, when I asked my sister-in-law if she had adopted Baltimore’s football team as her own, her answer was, ‘Well, of course, how could you not cheer for the only team in the NFL to be named after a literary character?’ Which in turn reminds me an old rejoinder of mine when asked about my NFL allegiances: ‘Both New York teams, the Green Bay Packers, and no one from the NFC East.’ Why the Green Bay Packers? Well, how could anyone not like the NFL’s only non-profit team?
As this little collection of irrationally acquired prejudices shows, there isn’t much sense to it, and there couldn’t really be when easy tribalism is such a prominent motivation. The true wonder of it is how it builds and soars to the heights of quasi-religious fervor, expressed loudly in those gigantic, fueled-by-tax-breaks temples, sports stadiums, which dot the land whose dictator would be called coach.
Samir Chopra 
You didn’t mention the olympics, jingoism and what I think is the root of all of this: an intrinsic human drive to be part of the tribe which inherently means to have others *outside* of the tribe. We just naturally gravitate towards “us and them.”
While it may not reflect Reality, the fact of the matter is that the human mind absolutely loves dichotomy and has to, must, create it. Therefore, my team rules and yours sucks. The razor of discriminatory thought can and will be applied to ALL human endeavor and anything to which we give our attention.
You can look at every religion, every ethnicity, every nationality and see this expressed ever so obviously and ever so subtly.
Then there’s the Camero versus Trans-am debate. They were both GM-made models and essentially the exact same car except for superficial differences, but one was a Chevy, the other was a Pontiac (RIP) and many men and boys argued fervently that, clearly, theirs was the better vehicle.
I myself preferred the Trans-am.