The shifting sands of fandom: how toxicity has bled into sports following

Sport’s acoustic heart often resides within the claps that fans offer. The rhythmic fusion of two palms, multiple throats finding a common expression and the collective surge of adrenaline inspire athletes to check the elasticity of their limbs and the capacity of their lungs, and help them chase miracles.

A shared ecstasy binds the sportsperson and the adoring followers. On the flipside, despair quadruples too when a loss is encountered or an injury derails a sporting campaign. This symbiosis between the performer and the observers often gains a religious fervour and a hypnotic essence. You sense it when a musician performs at a packed venue or while a goal is scored in a football game at a heaving stadium.

Feeding the ego

Fandom also feeds the athlete’s ego, enhances confidence and, as cricketing folklore goes, made W.G. Grace tell an umpire: “They came to see me bat, not you umpire.” This reverence and affection, seasoned with the frisson of first-love excitement, makes fans idolise players, compare eras, and equally draw relief and joy from the performance of their heroes.

This leaning of self-esteem upon the player’s calibre is fine as long as performances follow an upward graph, but when the pencil dips, a dark sorrow squeezes inside. All fans are used to this roller-coaster ride. It is never easy but it is one thing they have made their peace with, at least that was the case a few decades back.

Cut to the present, fandom often means tight boxes, the kind that triggers claustrophobia and spreads cynicism. It is not enough to love a player unabashedly but that affection has to be made coarse with a counter-hatred directed at another sportsperson of similar stature, and it could be a teammate or a rival.

It is a situation in which to praise someone, it becomes essential to run down another personality. Duopoly in movies, sport and the larger arts is a reality. And duopolies catalyse intense rivalries between fans split down the centre. A genuine affection morphs into an obsessive sense of ownership and, in the long run, breeds toxicity.

In Indian cricket, the current joust is between the loyalists of Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli. One’s achievement is pitted against the other’s failure. One’s fitness is pitted against the other’s seeming lack of it. And a caustic one-liner like ‘make Yo-Yo tests mandatory for selection’ is flung around in social media. Despite all the woke-spirit rippling through X, formerly Twitter, equally it is a space for mean barbs hurled by fans masquerading under false names.

This fandom will keep an eye on all social-media handles, and the wife of the favoured athlete becomes a ‘bhabi’. A needless emotional intimacy is sought, the right to trouble the celebrity sportsperson for autographs and selfies is seemingly garnered, and equally, his or her rival is loathed.

Fans with fangs

Judgements are often aired without filters. The concerned athlete may not even know such a fandom exists but it does and often it bares fangs. If a collective rage fuels a false sense of nationalism while observing team-sport, an individual kinship bordering on the obsessive is sought to be the glue between the fan and his or her favourite star.

The pitfalls of the second-mentioned attribute has been dealt with in movies like ‘Fan’ in Hindi and ‘Driving Licence’ in Malayalam. The nationalistic fan like Sudhir Kumar Chaudhary, who blows a conch and daubs the tricolour all over his torso besides proclaiming undying love for Sachin Tendulkar, is harmless in the sense that he adds colour and passion to the venue. And his emotional graph won’t tilt towards the malicious word or the violent act.

But for the individual blinded by his love for that singular champion, everyone else in the sporting realm is presumed to be a parasite that has to be exterminated through bruising words and memes. It is a ghastly reality that has tainted the community vibe of watching sport.

The innocence of the old days is just a fading memory. An eye was kept on the John McEnroe-Bjorn Borg rivalry, the volleys between Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg, the race for opening honours between Sunil Gavaskar and Geoffrey Boycott, and the informal competition between the four great all-rounders — Imran Khan, Ian Botham, Kapil Dev and Richard Hadlee. All this did not cause acidity and the need to reach out for Gelusil.

Even in the Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal era, with its fandom split between aesthetic-precision and rugged-grace, the friendship the two shared, and the awareness that they shaped each other’s legacy, helped cool the tempers of their followers. But these are exceptions. Even if there are some abrasive turns, tennis does have a spine of friendship, evident in the sisterhood between Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert.

Amiable rivals: The friendship Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer share, as well as the awareness that they shaped each other’s legacy, helped cool the tempers of their fans.
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But present-day toxicity is real. Insults are presumed, insinuations are cultivated and strangely the failure of the rival is actively sought and then gloated about. In all this gutter-level discourse, the primary reason we all played and fell in love with sport is forgotten. It is also a subtext that enhanced Tom Cruise’s 1996 flick ‘Jerry Maguire’.

As a toddler kicking a ball or a child swinging a plastic bat, we first experienced the dopamine effect. It was all feel-good. At that time, applause did not matter, nor did a fat bank balance. ‘Dance like nobody’s watching, love like you have never been hurt’ is an eternal pop-culture saying. There is an innocence to this line that ideally should have enveloped sport fandom too.

However, in an ecosystem mired in nationalism, club loyalties, corporate ownership and the evolution of star-athletes as brands by themselves, the gentle follower liking the thud of red cherry on willow or the twang of a tennis racquet’s strings whispering to a yellow ball is becoming a rare species. Titles won, earnings secured are all that matter.

Manifesting the worst

Statistics and commerce are doing a tap-dance while the poetry in a forehand cross-court, the leap over a 110m hurdle and a cover drive is forgotten. The fallacy to presume that an athlete is a superman or superwoman and to portray everyone else in the same zone as a villain is a terrible manifestation of the worst of fandom.

At times, television channels, too, add to the fire, especially when they play up the Indo-Pak rivalry in cricket. The low-brow promotional campaigns are steeped in jingoism and feed those baying for blood on the turf. An emotional investment in sport and the resultant catharsis are two sides of the same coin, but to marinate that in hatred and spew vitriol on social media or in the comments sections of newspapers is terrible.

It is a sordid reality that genuine lovers of sport have to deal with even when the defining image for most of us is Federer and Nadal breaking down in tears while the former embraced his twilight.