I don’t have a great memory for names or even specific events. My wife and I joke that she has to remember the things that happened in my life because her memory is a steel trap and mine is a bit of a sieve. But many of my earliest, clearest memories from childhood are tied to sports.
I am 5 years old; it is the mid-1980s, summer, and we’re on the Cape visiting my grandparents. I am sitting with my grandfather on their screen porch as he listens to a Red Sox game on the radio. Out of nowhere, he starts angrily cursing out a player for an error. I wouldn’t really start following the Red Sox until middle school, but my fandom would be shaped by how much my grandpa cared about a meaningless game in the middle of the season.
It is the following winter, and everyone in my New Hampshire kindergarten is excited to watch the Patriots in the upcoming Super Bowl. I have not yet watched a single minute of Patriots football, but I—along with all of my classmates—am convinced they will win, comfortably. I don’t recall actually watching the Super Bowl (a humiliating defeat for the Pats), but that anticipatory feeling of being part of an excited (and irrational) group of fans lingers.
It is the spring of 1987, and my brother and I are sitting with our dad in the English department lounge at the college where he teaches, since it’s the only place we know of that gets cable TV. We’re watching Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish mix it up with the “Bad Boys” Detroit Pistons, and I have never hated anyone the way I hate Bill Laimbeer, who is all elbows and cheap shots. The Celtics will eventually defeat them but then go on to lose to Magic Johnson’s Lakers in the finals. These Celtics had won the title in 1986, but I have no memory of that; I have plenty of memories of how it felt to be heartbroken when they lost.
Like most sports fans, I could keep doing this for days. I can pin so many years of my life to significant games: the Patriots and Celtics and Red Sox, but also Notre Dame bowl games and Liverpool championships and U.S. Women’s National Team World Cup victories. All of them stand out from the general haze of my past.
There are any number of excellent books about sports that shine a spotlight on any one of these particular teams or seasons or even players, but the new book by Michael Schur and Joe Posnanski, Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love, is the best book I’ve ever read about what it feels like to be a fan. Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch is the definitive account of what it feels like to follow a specific team (in his case, Arsenal Football Club), but Big Fan is the new standard for celebrating the multifaceted nature of fandom itself.
Early in the book, Schur and Posnanski (or Mike and Joe, as they refer to themselves throughout) give their basic thesis for why people become sports fans: “No. 1: Life is boring, and sports provide entertainment; No. 2: Life is chaotic, and sports provide order; No. 3: Life is lonely, and sports provide community.” Over the course of the 400-plus pages of Big Fan, they bring their readers along on a series of adventures that show us all these elements—the entertainment, the order and the community—and we come to see that they are essential aspects of all kinds of fandoms, not simply for sports. Contemporary life can feel hard and chaotic; Big Fan, like fandom itself, introduces a bit of the countervailing joy we all need.
Of their three theses, the first and third initially struck me as almost self-evident. I like to watch sports in the evenings and on weekends when nothing else is going on, and throughout the week it’s fun to take little breaks from other tasks to read about my teams, or to listen to podcasts that cover them while running errands. Fandom helps fill the time. And when I am out and about wearing my Red Sox hat, strangers come up and chat with me about how the season is going (very badly, at the moment!); and there is very little that feels better than going to a home game for any of my teams and being part of a huge crowd celebrating together.
Big Fan has chapters that illustrate both of these points, like when Joe writes about watching Carlos Alcaraz play tennis and how that experience includes all the other tennis matches he’s seen over the years, or when Mike goes to Anfield for the first time to watch Liverpool play in person and incorporates the entire history of his Liverpool fandom into the reflection. As a fellow Liverpool fan, this was my favorite part of the book, since I could overlay my own initial fandom and my memories of specific matches on top of his similar experiences.
But it is point number two, about the order that comes from following sports, that stuck with me most. Much of my daily life is intertwined with watching sports. I started reading the book during the semifinals of the World Baseball Classic, watching Team USA barely overcome the Dominican Republic. I finished it during the opening round of March Madness. It’s almost embarrassing to admit it, but one of the most destabilizing parts of the early stages of the Covid pandemic was the complete absence of sports on TV. I had more time than ever, and the main way I usually filled and marked time was missing.
Before I picked this book up, I was already a fan of both Joe Posnanski, whom I consider the best sportswriter in America, and Mike Schur, who has made some of my favorite television shows, including “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place.” Schur’s first book, How to Be Perfect, is a supremely entertaining primer on moral philosophy and ethics. Posnanski writes the JoeBlogs sports newsletter and is the author of nine previous books. His The Baseball 100 is the best book about baseball I’ve ever read, and his Why We Love Baseball and Why We Love Football are both wonderful encapsulations of his approach to sports. No one does a better job of writing about how fun and joyful these games can be. Mike and Joe also co-host “The PosCast: Sports and Nonsense,” which is the best kind of “two friends talking about things they both enjoy” podcast.
But even if one is mostly unfamiliar with their other work, Big Fan will still be a supremely enjoyable reading experience. The book will land best with people who already understand fandom on some level, particularly (though not exclusively) sports fandom, but even people who look askance at the crazy passion of sports fans will be entertained by this deep dive into what fandom looks and feels like.
The structure of the book is unique: The table of contents runs to three full pages. Most chapters focus on attending specific sporting events, like the Olympic men’s basketball semifinal between the United States and Serbia, or the Indigenous Stickball World Series or the World Darts Championship; but the book is not only about attending events, or even solely about sports fandom. Chapters alternate between writers (they are helpfully labeled at the start as either “Mike” or “Joe”, depending on whose trip is being written about), but there are also chapters that move back and forth between the two.
Some chapters have the form of interviews (there is one between Mike and the screenwriter Cord Jefferson on Steely Dan fandom, and another between Joe and the writer Linda Holmes on Phillies fandom), and one that includes transcripts from a “Yankees Suck” group chat that includes Mike, Joe and the former major league baseball pitcher Brandon McCarthy. There is also a chapter co-written by Mike and Joe’s daughters, in which they each talk about their Taylor Swift fandom, as well as five interstitial sections between chapters called “Fan Mail,” where they invite friends to give paragraph-long reflections on things that they are fans of, like heist movies, table tennis, Bob Dylan and board games. All these different styles and approaches end up truly immersing the reader in the multifaceted nature of fandom.
They don’t talk about toxic fandom or what can happen when you give too much of your personality, or even just time, to a team or an artist or a political figure, or what happens if that person or team turns out to be corrupt, predatory or outright criminal. But there are plenty of other books that cover that ground. This is not a sociological study; it is a paean.
The chapters that work best are the ones where they steer completely into this kind of celebration, like Mike’s ode to watching Liverpool play or when Joe goes into detail about his love of magic and “the awe and astonishment of seeing someone do the impossible,” or where Joe and Mike undergo a quest to meet (and hug) the baseball player Mookie Betts.
Not every chapter works so well. The one about going to watch the World Darts Championship reads like an outsider’s perspective on other people’s shared joy and ends up feeling a bit like the authors are standing back, saying, “Look at these weirdos!” which, in general, is the antithesis of the kind of celebration they bring to their explorations.
But in general, Big Fan succeeds because it examines the various aspects of fandom in a variety of funny and surprisingly moving ways. Joe spends time with a blind woman who is a NASCAR fan, which leads to a reflection on the joys of listening to sports on the radio. Joe and Mike attend the National Sports Collectors Convention, which they use as an opportunity to dive into their personal passions for collecting everything from baseball cards to first editions of books to fountain pens. They also try to become fans of something new—they embrace the new women’s basketball league Unrivaled—and discuss the challenges of creating fandom out of whole cloth when a league has “no cities, no history, no rivalries, and no past.”
They also have chapters where they task each other with trying to become fans of things they don’t like. Joe has to spend a weekend immersing himself in pickleball, which, as an avid tennis player, he despises, and Mike has to go to Vegas for WrestleMania and a Dead & Co. concert at the Sphere. These chapters show that it is not necessarily easy to adopt others’ fandom, but it can still be fun and rewarding to try it out and attempt to understand why others might take to it even if we ourselves do not.
And this, ultimately, is the great joy of reading Big Fan. Certainly, there will be many readers like myself, for whom their entire personal history is tied up with their life-long fandoms—for a team, or a band or Star Wars—but there are also plenty of people who won’t identify with this kind of approach to life. Both kinds of readers can come to the book and, regardless of their personal relationship to fandom, still share in the joy of the “wonderful, impossible, incredible things” that Mike and Joe capture and reflect on throughout their 82,490 miles of fan-related traveling.
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