SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Big fans can get a bad rap. Millions of us blend into everyday life, but then we think of - I don't know - football fans are stripped to the waist in zero-degree weather, clad just in streaks of paint and their team colors, cheering, crying, hoping, praying, shouting to the heavens in exaltation, despair or anxiety. Let's ask Joe Posnanski to read the dedication to the new book he's written with Michael Schur, "Big Fan."
JOE POSNANSKI: (Reading) This book is for everyone who has ever sat or stood alone or with 50,000 other people at home or at a friend's house or in a stadium, wearing a lucky hat or jersey or T-shirt and looked at the score and checked the clock or the inning and closed their eyes and clenched their hands and clutched their head and thought, please, just this one time. I'll never ask for anything ever again. Please, please, please.
SIMON: Joe Posnanski is a bestselling author and sports reporter, often named sportswriter of the year. Michael Schur is a television writer and producer behind "The Good Place," "Parks And Rec" and more. Their book, "Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, And The Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love." Joe Posnanski and Michael Schur join us from St. Louis. Thanks both very much for being with us.
MICHAEL SCHUR: Thanks, Scott.
POSNANSKI: Our pleasure.
SIMON: Why do you say that (laughter) the Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant in Dallas is the most American place in all the land?
SCHUR: Well, when we started this book, we wanted to cover a lot of different sports, and we knew we had to cover American football 'cause it's the dominant sport in this country. And Joe said, we should go to the most American place in the world, which is the Buffalo Wild Wings. Like, that's how fans watch football. And we went to the closest one, and we sat there for eight hours and watched football without a break for the entire day.
POSNANSKI: Fans from every team. Every team was represented, and you could tell what team they were rooting for 'cause every other person other than us in there was wearing a football jersey.
SIMON: As you note in this book, the defining feature about fandom is we are powerless, aren't we?
SCHUR: (Laughter) Yeah, that's part of the appeal, for sure. We talked to a professor named Daniel Wann, who teaches at Murray State and has been investigating academically the concept of fandom for a very long time. And he said that one of the key aspects of fandom is that we are risking a little bit of our emotional and psychological health on something over which we have no control, and that there was - it's a little bit of gambling in a way on our happiness. And that's what makes it thrilling. It's also what makes it crushing and disappointing at times. But without that sense of powerlessness, you don't get the same roller coaster.
POSNANSKI: Yeah. And I think the only thing that we slightly disagreed with Professor Wann on was that it was only a little bit of our emotional - like...
(LAUGHTER)
POSNANSKI: ...So many of us have - you know, Scott, you've been a Cubs fan forever that - I mean, the amount of emotional pain that you had to endure.
SIMON: Since 1908. Go ahead. Yeah.
POSNANSKI: What it felt like in 2016 when they finally win it, that's at the heart of what we were looking for.
SIMON: Tell us, please, about the World Darts Championship at what's called the Ally Pally in London. I gather it looked a little like Halloween night.
SCHUR: Yes. So this is the way this book came about was a friend of mine sent me a video from the World Darts Championship. And what I watched was two sort of stone-faced stocky Brits throw darts at a dartboard from 8 feet away. Behind them in this enormous arena, thousands of people are losing their minds, like dumping beer on each other's heads and throwing napkins in the air with every toss. And also I noticed they were all in costume. They were dressed up like Harry Potter or the Jamaican bobsled team or some other crazy costume. I thought, like, this is an event I've never heard of. I don't know really what's happening, but I suddenly got the urge to investigate them and the concept of fandom. And as I had that idea, I thought, well, I've got to do this with Joe. He's been my friend for 20 years. We are obsessed with sports to the same degree, more or less. Our first big trip was that we went to the World Darts Championship at the Alexandria Palace in London, and it was every bit as insane as it appeared to be on that video.
SIMON: You did see a great darts champion do something amazing, didn't you?
POSNANSKI: We did. We saw Luke Littler - yeah - become the very first - I mean, he was 17, although he looked 58. But he was 17 years old, and he won the World Darts Championship, and it was quite amazing. I mean, everything about the whole experience was truly incredible. And it also was not coincidentally, by far, the most alcohol per capita of any fan sport that we've ever been to, which is quite incredible because, you know, fans can drink a little bit. Basically, at the World Darts Championship, they sell pitchers of beer, and from what I could tell, there was not a single glass in the entire place. So that's the kind of consumption we were talking about. But it was amazing. And then the surroundings were unreal.
SIMON: Yeah. Let me ask you about chess fans. Are they necessarily less - I say this respectfully - crazed?
POSNANSKI: Just a little. Just a little bit less crazed. Chess is a, quote-unquote, "spectator sport" where the spectators are not allowed anywhere near the actual tournament because the players demand complete silence. So you have to watch it on a television across the street, and there's somebody that has to explain to you what each move represents. But yet even there, you could feel the connection to what it is that people are rooting for. They're rooting for, of course, their favorite player, but they're also rooting for, like, a moment. Sometimes there's a move that is so brilliant. It is just like watching, you know, Steph Curry make a 40-foot shot or watching, you know, Shohei Ohtani hit a home run. To them, they get that same emotion out of it, but it is very quiet.
SIMON: Let me ask you both a question we probably wouldn't ask somebody who is a fan of opera or classical music or live drama. Are our lives, your lives, richer for being fans?
SCHUR: For sure, they are. Are our lives richer? Oh, 100%. I mean, that's one of the things when we were talking to Professor Wann of Murray State. He -I at one point said something to him that I've thought about from time to time, which was, would my life be better if instead of being a fan of a specific team in any given sport, I were simply a fan of the sport? And he said, absolutely not. He came down on me like a hammer and said, Look, if you had never been in love with anyo#ne, there would have been fewer days when you were sad or felt grief or pain, but there would also be far fewer days where you felt the greatest heights of joy and exhilaration, and the same is true fandom of anything.
These things that we loan our passion to, those things provide for us something that nothing else can provide, which is those moments, those highs, the Cubs winning in 2016, the Red Sox winning in 2004, for Joe, the Cleveland Cavaliers winning in 2016, these moments are irreplaceable and they're nonrepeatable. You can't find them anywhere else. And so I've devoted most of my life to sports fandom and fandom of a number of other things, and I can't imagine what my life would be without that fandom.
SIMON: Michael Schur and Joe Posnanski, their book, "Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles And The Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love." Gentlemen, thanks so much for being with us.
SCHUR: Thank you, Scott.
POSNANSKI: Our pleasure. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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