An ever- changing sports landscape


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On Wednesday, Forbes ran a story titled “The American Sports Fan at Ten,” in which Henry, a 10-year-old sports fanatic, talks about how his experience following sports.

It got me thinking back to my childhood, how I fell in love with sports and how much the sports landscape has changed since I was in grade school.

I have a theory that our prime sports-watching years are between the ages of 10 and 15, from the time when we gain a general grasp of the world and are introduced to the big domain of sports to around the period where we have to “grow up” and focus on our future. This is the time frame between being a kid and a “mature teen” or adult in which it’s perfectly fine to be naïve and stubborn.

Growing up in the Bay Area, none of my sports teams were very good. Thus, many of my prime sports-watching years were spent rooting for teams that never made the playoffs — or, in the case of the Sharks, always made the playoffs but choked every year. I caught the tail end of the Barry Bonds era with the Giants, but that team was stuck in his shadow and far removed from the World Series juggernaut they are today. The Raiders drafted JaMarcus Russell — widely considered the biggest bust in NFL history — and the 49ers were in the midst of nine straight years without a playoff appearance. The A’s were in a six-year drought themselves, and I would have laughed if you told me as a kid that the Warriors would one day be mentioned in the same breath as the 1995-1996 Chicago Bulls.

Thus, my threshold for success as a sports fan was very low. I thought championships were reserved for the teams I always saw leading off SportsCenter like the Lakers, Yankees and Patriots. The greatest success I experienced as a sports fan up until the age of 10 was when the Warriors upset the top-seeded Mavericks in the first round of playoffs in 2007 — before promptly falling in the second round and following it up with five miserable seasons.

And yet, I kept watching, irrationally consumed by the local sports scene — the living room remote might as well have been stuck on the 4-5 cable sports networks.

Nowadays, I am not as devout a sports follower. Obviously, being a sports editor at the Daily Trojan means sports is still a big part of my life, and I still keep up with my teams, but I don’t live or die with every game as I used to. Perhaps it’s because I have less time or because I’ve realized that the world doesn’t revolve around sports, that there are issues and topics in society that are far more important.

There’s also a feeling of nostalgia of the way I followed sports as a naïve 10-year-old. Growing up before the dawn of social media, my news came from refreshing the Yahoo! Sports team sites. High-definition was considered an expensive luxury, and when I wanted to record games, I used something called a VCR cassette.

Today, up-to-the-second news updates are available on Twitter. Scores are refreshed automatically on apps. Can’t make it home to watch the game? No worries—- — just use your smartphone to watch it live anywhere, anytime. Kids these days have it made.

In a similar sense, I feel a strange connection to the players I grew up watching, no matter how bad they were or how good they would become. Case in point: I remember Stephen Curry more for his first few seasons — when he struggling sharing the ball with Monta Ellis, was benched in favor of Acie Law in crunch time by Keith Smart and suffered ankle injury after ankle injury that put his career in jeopardy — than the superstar, revolutionary player he is today.

Believe me, I’m enjoying this Warriors’ historic run as much as anyone else, but for whatever reason, my main sports recollections stem from my early teenage years. The Warriors could win the next five championships and I would still be drawn more to those horrendous teams of the mid-2000s.

This is what happens when an “American Sports Fan at Ten” falls in love with the wrong teams at the wrong time. So, I would urge any 10-year-old kid out there reading this to start rooting for the Warriors. Or the Giants — after all, it is an even year.

Eric He is a freshman majoring in print and digital journalism. He is also the sports editor of the Daily Trojan. His column, “Grinding Gears,” runs Fridays.