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Let's talk about the collective we.
Not the collective Wii. Not the collective wee. Not the collective oui-oui .
Us, aggregated.
Answer the seemingly oxymoronic group self-awareness question of the day: If sports fans in the state of Utah were lumped into one conglomeration, what would emerge in a composite portrait?
Confronted by that query, one sports big-wig with whom everyone around here is familiar immediately said: "Fans in Utah take everything personal."
That's a jumping off point, then, for our common corpus.
It's our justification for spending $100 on a ticket, $10 for parking, $8 for a hot dog, $5 for a beverage, and $40 for a T-shirt, all while a bad economy beats the mother goose out of us.
We care about our teams. What we root for is profoundly ours, and every opponent that comes in here is somebody else's, which makes it, them, the enemy. Circle the wagons, LaVerl, grab some double-barreled happiness and get ready to fight because the confounded Lakers are ridin' in.
A cultural anthropologist once told me that sports teams are the modernized incarnation of feudal armies of the past. They represent and defend the local community by going out and doing battle with the Oklahoma Sooners, the Oregon Ducks, the San Antonio Spurs.
That's a concept, said the big-wig, fans in Utah have thoroughly embraced. They are us, we are them, except they, in some instances, live in Palm
It's not just the hug, it's the zest and zeal of that hug that's one of the characteristics that makes us unique, even though, at times, it's a bit extreme, almost passionately unhinged.
"Teams, like the Jazz, BYU, Utah, are real important to the fans here," said Cougar athletic director Tom Holmoe. "There might not be as much going on, so it's like in the South, where you have Alabama football. We're similar to that. This is important. That increases the intensity. It is real personal to some people. Those fans make the world go 'round."
Jerry Sloan said it this way: "You want fans to care."
Not a problem here.
Think back to NBA playoffs past, when referees have made calls, even good ones, against the Jazz. We react with outrage, on nearly every whistle, as though Joey Crawford and Steve Javie are part of a vast conspiracy concocted by grand-puppet-master David Stern to keep the small-market Jazz in their proper place.
Admit it, some of us actually think that way.
When did we get so paranoid? When Dick Bavetta and Michael Jordan and Bryant Gumbel and Barry Switzer and the BCS started plotting against us.
It's one of our charms, and we wear it like a badge of honor.
Soft, but not too soft
Other places have their charms, too.
A few weeks back, Norman Chad wrote a column about New York sports fans. His conclusion: He can't stand 'em.
He put it this way:
"I love New York; I hate New York sports.
"New York, at any given moment, is the greatest city in America. Best walking city. Best street beat. Best music. Best theater. Best nightlife. Best mass transit. Best newspaper. Best centrally located park. Best scaffolding. Best knish. Best pastrami. Best bagels. Best pizza. Best roasted nuts. Best Italian food. Best food period. Best of almost everything.
"You can find the worst of many things in New York, none greater than its myopic, provincial win-it-all-or-else compulsion with its professional sports franchises. The town goes on tilt any time its title-contending teams don't win the title."
Utah's pizza isn't as tasty and its tilt threshold is not anywhere near so steep.
We are happy just to have our one main pro team make the playoffs. Season after season after season. Granted, there was a lot of hope and heartbreak when the Jazz lost to the Bulls two years running in the NBA Finals just over a decade ago. Remember that? Back when people were naming their kid "Jazz" or "Stockton," and responsible adults were practicing all kinds of playoff rituals, from wearing the same lucky jersey to hanging Jazz banners outside their homes to having pregame Jazz sex, in order to ensure victory?
Man, those were the days.
But since then, if the Jazz do enough to make the first or second round of the postseason, a lot of us go home satisfied. Too satisfied.
This market is, indeed, soft. We are soft.
But not as soft as we once were.
There are things that tick us off.
Lack of effort ticks us off. Frequent bench time due to injury ticks us off. Ambivalence about the community ticks us off. Narcissism, at the expense of the rest of the team, ticks us off. Carlos Boozer ticks us off.
Fans here are toughening up.
When the Jazz were struggling Friday night against the Clippers, allowing easy layups at the defensive end, people started to boo the home team. It happened again Monday night in a loss to the Rockets, fans streaming out of ESA early.
New Yorkers would be proud of us. We're all grown up, off getting disgusted and booing and stuff.
Engaged and enraged
I've made it a recent project to sit in the stands at Jazz games, at Utah games, at BYU games, at Real Salt Lake games. Some of the things said, chants yelled and complaints uttered, were darker by far than anything ever written in this space.
Various degrees of futility were met with over-the-top personal affront. I heard one guy use combinations of vulgarity aimed at Boozer that were so creatively vile, they wound up being hilarious. I heard a middle-aged woman at a Utah football game use terms that rhymed with brother-trucker and dock-pucker.
University of Utah athletic director Chris Hill sees fans here, as he put it, "caring more and more, they're more interested than in the past." He said sports outlets/inlets such as newspapers, radio, and Internet have enabled fans to have more ways to communicate with one another, keeping us "engaged."
And, in some cases, enraged.
Disrespect, especially when it involves college football, is a huge issue here, although we have no problem disrespecting one another. Utah fans loathe BYU fans, BYU fans loathe Utah fans, BYU sucks in every way, Utah sucks in every other way.
But the BCS is the Evil Empire, a force that unites the red and the blue, turning our disdain away from each other and toward a cartel that blocks the forward progress of everybody here.
We hate the BCS. On a sliding scale, it falls somewhere between gun control and Kobe Bryant.
Our conflicted portrait then has the following brush strokes:
We are somewhat soft with our pro teams -- but getting tougher -- and harder on our college teams. Half of us are too easily satisfied with the Jazz. The other half would swap out a family member for a title. We are paranoid. We circle the wagons. We get outraged at officials and their stupid calls against us, even when they're correct. We don't trust outside authority. We appreciate professionalism and loyalty and hard work from athletes. We are utterly nauseated by slouches and money-grabbers. Overall, we're making great progress in that the line between our love and hate is growing ever thinner. We take things personal. We care. We care more than we should.
Yeah, that pretty much nails us.
GORDON MONSON hosts the "Monson and Graham Show" weekdays from 2-6 p.m. on 1280 AM The Zone. He can be reached at gmonson@sltrib.com.
