A Fan's Life

Sports fandom is defined by obsession, irrationality, and a love of rabbit holes. But in 2020, most professional sports had few games and no fans present. This led lawyer and University of Michigan superfan Paul Campos to ponder the ways that fandom is conditioned by social circumstance and collective psychology. In limning the structural unhappiness of a fan's life, he found deep and resonant political and personal meanings to loving a sports team-some obvious, others revealed only over time. Campos's own lifelong obsessions help him index fandom-related manias and provides an entry point to grasping their history, nature, and surprisingly broad import--