27
Winner of the Crazyhorse Nonfiction Prize
JESSE DONALDSON
Notes from a Congregant
On September 21, 2012, Texas executed
Rodney Wayne Harris, a car wash employee
who killed six co-workers after being fired for
exposing himself to female customers. If we can
put aside whatever debate might ensue about
capitol punishment, the violent nature of Mr.
Harris’ crimes, the fact that prosecutors were
able to remove all potential black jurors from
the trial, and the fact that Mr. Harris had an
IQ of 68; if we can allow ourselves simply to
say the issue of taking another person’s life is an
incredibly complicated moral issue, then we can
focus on Mr. Harris’s strange final words: “I’m
going home, I’m going home. I’ll be all right.
Don’t worry, I love ya’ll. God Bless and the Texas
Rangers, Texas Rangers.”
The beginning of Mr. Harris’s statement
suggests his belief in an afterlife—a home. He
instructs those gathered not to worry, as if he
is the person least affected by what is about to
occur. This rather open-handed sentiment is not
dissimilar from those expressed by numerous
death row prisoners before their execution; the
most common phrase spoken by such men and
women is “I love you” or Mr. Harris’s “I love
ya’ll.” The obvious curveball is this matter of
the Texas Rangers (the baseball team, not the
once-renowned wild west lawmen). Baseball’s
postseason was on the horizon, and perhaps in
his last moments, Mr. Harris realized he wouldn’t
be around to see his Rangers play another game.
Perhaps he meant to say the more direct, “God
Bless the Texas Rangers” but this isn’t what he
said. He addressed his “God Bless” to the family,
friends, Texas Corrections employees, and
families of his victims who’d gathered to watch
him die. Then, all of a sudden, the thought came
to him—a moment that isn’t rehearsed and
therefore gives a direct window into the mind—
“and the Texas Rangers.” What interests me about
this shift in his final words—beyond the initial,
cynical recognition that we live in a world where
men bless baseball teams the moment before they
die—is that Harris repeats “Texas Rangers” to
give it added weight. I imagine that first “Texas
Rangers” came as a surprise, even to Harris
himself, but the second “Texas Rangers”—the
repetition—this represents a moment of peace.
You can almost hear it if you say it. “God bless
and the Texas Rangers.” And then softer, like the
amen at the end of a prayer, “Texas Rangers.”
Sociologist William Spinrad, in his 1981 essay
“The Function of Spectator Sports,” writes:
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. . . the trivial but engaging experiences
of fandom are, in the truest sense, an
escape from profound personal and
social problems. Unlike most popular
culture involvements it is a viable escape,
partly because the experiences suggest a
caricature of so many unstated features
of regular societal processes. The result is
a respite, a small-scale catharsis. Since it
is not a genuine replica of the real world,
the direct impact on one’s serious behavior
is generally minimal. In this respect it
also differs from other involvements in
popular cultures, for sports fandom does
not produce any distortion of personal and
social perspectives.
Before Game 7 of baseball’s 2012 National
League Championship Series, my friend Serge,
whom I hadn’t talked to since 2007, sent me the
following e-mail:
I’m excited for tonight’s game. I’ve been
thinking of you through this series. I didn’t
think they’ d pull it off against the Reds, and
I thought Game 5 was going to be their last
high point of the season. Good luck. . . .
“They” is the San Francisco Giants. During
the Giants’ postseason run, I received countless
“thinking of you” messages from friends and
family. People I had fallen out of touch with
texted, e-mailed, and called after months and
years of silence. The same thing happened in
Notes from a Congregant
2010 when the Giants won their first World Series
during my lifetime. My wife, Becca, thinks this
a strange phenomenon. My normally dormant
phone suddenly comes to life—not because of
anything I have accomplished, but because I am
a fan. Without the Giants, I wouldn’t be back in
touch with Serge or any number of people from
my past. I don’t have Facebook, I don’t Tweet,
and I am (admittedly) not the best at returning
calls.
And so while I basked in the glory of the Giants
2012 comebacks and eventual World Series win,
I also tried to figure out when the Giants became
synonymous with me. The Giants. Jesse. Jesse.
The Giants. These are pretty direct cognitive
leaps for anyone who knows me, and yet, outside
of that circle of friends, those two things mean
nothing put together.
Surely my fandom has something to do with
the years between 1987 and 1991. I was in Little
League then and baseball obsessed. I spent my
days hitting whiffle balls and pretending I was
Will Clark. Will “The Thrill”—Giants’ first
baseman and owner of the prettiest left-handed
swing in baseball. Whenever San Francisco
traveled to Cincinnati, an hour and a half from
where I grew up, my father would drive us to
Riverfront Stadium to see a game.
In the blistering heat rising from Cincinnati’s
artificial turf field my fandom cemented because
we were outsiders. I had a Giants T-shirt and my
dad an “SF” hat. In a sea of red, we wore orange
and black. People booed and taunted us, which
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only strengthened my resolve. These were our
Giants.
My dad likes to tell one story in particular
from that time. At a game the Giants were losing,
Cincinnati’s star shortstop, Barry Larkin, started
walking toward first base after a borderline 3-2
pitch. He made it a couple steps before the umpire
dramatically called strike three, and when Larkin
turned to protest, I, a normally shy kid, stood up
and yelled, “You’re going the wrong way, Larkin!”
All the Reds fans in our section turned and then
started to laugh. Crazy fucking kid.
The word fan derives from fanatic. In its
noun form the OED defines “Fanatic” as: A
mad person. In later use: A religious maniac. And
what is sports’ fandom if not a replacement for
religion? My admittedly naïve understanding of
faith is that it brings the believer some form of
solace, and following Giants baseball brings me
great comfort. I can recite lineups and pitching
rotations like litanies. I analyze the team’s
statistics with the fervor of a theologian studying
the Bible.
There have been times in my life when I
sought comfort in a more traditional higher
power. I prefer compline services where a choir
performs chants from the High Middle Ages and
there is no sermon. I leave these services carrying
a measure of peace I didn’t before entering the
church, but when I return home a desk littered
with unpaid bills or a message from some person
I’ve disappointed or some other failure, that
peace often wilts.
This same sensation, this brief but fading
satisfaction, occurred when the Giants won the
2010 World Series. As the players celebrated and
sprayed one another in champagne and hugged
and cried tears of joy, I sat at a bar in Texas and
watched. Surely I smiled widely after the final
out and was more pleasant than usual in the
hours that followed. I suspect I was more likely to
offer strangers compliments or buy them drinks
or profess my love, but this was only a temporary
grace. The next day, after I’d exhausted the
internet discovering the tiniest details about the
team’s first championship since they left New
York, after I’d talked to my dad about the series,
my life returned to normal. I had classes to teach
and papers to grade. There were weeds in the
garden that needed pulling. A few days later, as
the Giants paraded down the confetti-strewn
streets of San Francisco, I sat in Houston traffic
on my way home from work.
There are drawbacks to fandom that often
involve the people closest to you. First off, we
should understand that fandom, as William
Spinrad points out, is a form of escape. And
what one is escaping matters. In my twenties
I was escaping a stuttering relationship and a
burgeoning problem with alcohol. These two
sides of the coin were, of course, related. My
drinking wasn’t the fall down stumble and slur
variety, which made it all the worse when my
then-girlfriend noticed that I would reach for an
object—say a beer bottle—and miss it once before
getting my bearings, and taking another drink.
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She started counting bottles. I started hiding
them. On the night she discovered this, there was
a fight. Not a screaming and punching fight but
the sort of sad fight where you realize you are
both hurting one another for no reason and that
even though it doesn’t have to be this way, it will
continue until it ends. And so she explained to me
the ways in which I was hurting her and hurting
myself and I listened and didn’t apologize or say
much of anything before she left the apartment
crying. By the time she came home, I’d finished a
six-pack and fallen asleep on the couch. The next
day I was watching the Giants play the Dodgers
when Cody Ransom, a career minor leaguer who
never seemed to live up to expectations, lined a
pinch-hit single up the middle to win the game.
It was a moment of unadulterated perfection, of
beauty, and I found myself cheering to an empty
room. I was happy. And then I started crying. I
knew this was wrong—that I was betraying the
woman I lived with by giving more of myself to
the Giants than to her. All she wanted was for me
to express some emotion over the ways in which
we were failing one another, to show her that I
cared, but I’d been unable. I gave my emotions
to the Giants instead. And this, I believe, is
where Spinrad gets fandom wrong. He claims it
“does not produce any distortion of personal and
societal perspectives” but at that moment I was
house-of-mirrors distorted, a shell of the person I
believe myself capable of being.
In 1962 the Giants came within a couple
feet of winning the World Series. Down 1-0 in
Notes from a Congregant
the ninth inning of Game 7, with two out and
runners on second and third, Willie McCovey
drove a line-drive bullet into the glove of Yankees
second baseman Bobby Richardson. “Nobody
could hit a ball as hard as McCovey,” my dad
says when I ask him about the game. His voice
starts to crack as he becomes excited and shouts
into the phone, “McCovey hit the ball so hard it
knocked Richardson down!”
The McCovey line drive haunted the Giants
fans of my dad’s generation. On December
21, 1962, months after the end of the World
Series, Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz, a lifelong Giants fan, drew three straight frames of
Charlie Brown and Linus sitting despondent on
a rock before Charlie Brown wails, with tears
streaming from his eyes, “WHY COULDN’T
MCCOVEY HAVE HIT THE BALL JUST
THREE FEET HIGHER?” Over a month
later, on January 28, 1963, the same exact comic
appeared again, only this time Charlie Brown
wailed, “OR WHY COULDN”T MCCOVEY
HAVE HIT THE BALL EVEN TWO FEET
HIGHER?” Schulz rarely made such direct
references to contemporary events in his comic
strip. The Cuban Missile Crisis, which began the
same day McCovey lined out to end the World
Series, couldn’t move Schulz to tear down the veil
between Charlie Brown and the real world, but
the Giants could.
In 2008, two years before the Giants won
the World Series, my father was diagnosed
with cancer of the vocal cord. His oncologist
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surgically removed the tumor and ever since his
voice has possessed a rasp it didn’t before. That
2010 World Series somehow seemed like a gift
to my father and me, some sort of compensation
for our years of loyalty. We met in Atlanta to
attend a pair of post-season games; we wore our
black and orange in a sea of blue and red clad
southerners brandishing Tomahawks—outsiders
united again.
I can’t separate the Giants from my father,
can’t separate my own childhood infatuation
with the Giants from his. He listened to every
game on the radio, cut out box scores and pasted
them into a book I now own. I suppose he can’t
separate the Giants from his own father either.
And so on and so forth. We begat begat begat.
And when the time comes, I will explain to my
own children why we Donaldsons root for the
Giants. I will explain that once they were the
New York Giants, that their great-grandfather
watched Christy Mathewson pitch at the Polo
Grounds, that their grandfather watched Willie
Mays patrol centerfield. I will tell them that
when the Donaldsons moved west, the Giants
followed. I will explain that even though I grew
up in Kentucky, far away from San Francisco, I
too am a life-long Giants fan and so will they be.
Becca calls the peace after the Giant’s win
“Jesse’s Zen.” Despite caring little about sports,
Becca has embraced my fandom as a sort of
personality quirk. She’s even tried to turn
herself into a fan so we can bond through the
Giants. She’s learned the basics of baseball,
knows the players’ nicknames; she even found
a thrift-shop Giants’ jersey that she wears for a
laugh. But all this goodwill on Becca’s part has
a breaking point, and the long slough through
the postseason takes its toll. For that month my
life revolves around baseball, the quirk turns
into an unhealthy fixation. I schedule meetings
for work accordingly. I spend ridiculously long
hours reading and rereading baseball blogs. Our
dates are always burgers and beers at a bar with
the game on. I recognize that it all becomes too
much, that this devotion leaves little time in my
life for the things that really matter—family,
work, general mental health. I am, in many ways,
an addict. I cannot help but watch the games if
they are out there, and so part of me (a small
part but part nonetheless) actually roots against
the Giants getting to the World Series because it
would give me back my regular life. Those threehour time slots might be used for something
more practical, at the very least something more
personal. I sometimes rationalize my obsession—
it’s just sports after all—but I also feel on the edge
of a greater darkness. I guess I feel out of control.
Just before the 2012 post-season, I moved to
the West Coast for the first time. Aside from
getting used to the fact that everyone I normally
call is in bed before I eat dinner, the biggest
change I noticed is the number of Giants fans
around me. One would think this is a good thing.
The building of community is another way in
which sports fandom is not unlike religion—it
connects the individual fan to other “believers.”
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It forms a congregation of sorts. It is this aspect
of fandom that sociologists are most interested in
studying. In “fandom” the prefix “fan” still comes
from fanatic, but the suffix –dom comes from
domain, meaning “the domain of the fanatics.”
For context you might think of a Kingdom (the
domain of the King) or Freedom (domain of the
free).
The problem is I don’t enjoy being immersed
in this more populous Giants community. My
aversion is two-fold. First: I am forced to look
at other Giants fans and pretend as though we
have something vital in common. This is hardest
when the person on the other end of a “Go
Giants” is the sort of guy who might otherwise
call me “bro” or, even worse, “buddy.” Second:
it is proof that the Giants are not mine alone, or
not mine and my father’s. Those trips to see the
Giants play in Cincinnati made our particular
fandom seem special, but now that I live among
so many other like-minded souls—fans who
boldly promote their allegiance with jackets,
hoodies, ball caps—I witness each day just how
commonplace our devotion is. And when I try
to find commonality with these other fans, I
am often disappointed. They talk to me about
San Francisco. I visited their city once (and not
during baseball season). Or they ask me to tell
them the name of that pitcher again. Even when
I find a true fan, one who can recite the lineups
through the years, I only recognize in them my
own ridiculous obsession, which seems sillier
and sillier as the years pass by. I think of those
parents who tell their kids not to fill their heads
Notes from a Congregant
with song lyrics because there won’t be room for
anything else, which is of course bullshit, but
seems plausible enough that I worry that when
someone asks me a question like “Do you think
there’s an afterlife?” I’ll say, “Will Clark’s middle
name is Nuschler.”
This is the danger of becoming associated
with a sports team. To root for a team is to adopt
that team’s personality, at least in public. If my
friends think of me whenever they think of the
Giants, then I am representative of the team’s
values. Sometimes this isn’t so bad. The Giants
of the past few years have earned a reputation
for being slightly off-kilter. Brian Wilson, their
former closer, speaks like he’s in a comic book
and hasn’t shaved in years. Their overweight
third-baseman goes by the nickname “Kung-Fu
Panda.” Their star pitcher Tim Lincecum looks
more like a skater than a ballplayer. These are
qualities that I can root for because they make
the sterile world of sports a bit more human. But
there are other associations linked to the Giants
I’m less enamored with. Their fans are known for
being a largely white, largely affluent bunch more
likely to grab a California Roll and an Anchor
Steam at the ballpark than a hot dog and a Bud.
And they will forever be linked to Barry Bonds
and baseball’s steroids era. I lived in Brooklyn
for a few years and was heckled by passers-by
on the street whenever I wore my Giants’ hat.
“Steroids!” they’d yell. Or, “The Giants suck!”
Or they’d ask, “How’s it feel rooting for a bunch
of cheaters?” I still don’t know how to answer
this question. I am ashamed of Bonds and his
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drug use but that doesn’t have any bearing on
my fandom. I have no control over the team or
its players. My devotion is not contingent upon
their likability, nor how good they are in any
given season. I listened to almost every Giants
game in 2007 when they lost 91 games. This was
the end of the Bonds era—when I was heckled
most. The Giants were terrible. I guess what
I am getting at here is that my fandom is not
about wanting to be associated with the Giants,
about wanting to adopt whatever qualities define
one as a fan of this particular team, it just is, for
better or worse. Sometimes I think of it as a virus
I contracted from my father—a pathogen that
found a particularly suitable environment and
became so strong that I no longer possess the
strength to ward it off.
On the day after the Giants won the 2012
World Series Championship, their second
championship in three years, various friends
e-mailed their congratulations. I read through
sports blogs and websites, watched the highlight
videos. It was 2010 all over again. Later my father
and I had our final rundown of the season. We
talked about players we admired, the best plays
of the Giants’ unexpected championship run.
We generally offered our praise to the team,
and then Dad asked me, “How are things going
otherwise?”
Each time the season ends, I learn again that
I care more for the build-up, for the process of
being a fan from spring training until the last
pitch of the season, than the end result. Maybe
this is what true fandom is—a love of the ritual,
of holding onto the belief that somehow my
devotion has meaning—but if that’s the case,
it can’t help but leave the fan feeling empty.
Winning and losing don’t matter. At the end of
the season it’s the mere existence of the Giants
that I both miss and try to embrace.
Not long after the 2012 World Series, an old
friend from Kentucky called and we talked about
his kids and then the Giants and he said, of his
one-time fandom for another sports team, “You
know, I grew up.” I’d like to say I am doing the
same. At least until pitchers and catchers report.
And then. The San Francisco Giants. The
Giants.
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