I wake up at 5:56 am on a Sunday. Exactly at 5:56 am.
I set it for that time so I can have as much sleep as possible. I’ve had to alter my alarm from that apocalyptic iPhone noise that makes my heart go a million miles an hour every time I hear it, to one that’s an almost-welcomed sound of birds chirping. Upon smacking unceremoniously at the screen of my phone to turn said alarm off, I stumble out of my bed. I grab my glasses because I am blind without my contacts, and I wonder if this was really worth it.
Down the dark hallway, I slump down on the couch, and turn on the TV with a few minutes to spare before the start at 6:10 am. I log into my social media, hoping enough brain cells have powered up to help me liveblog and make a few memes I’ll find reposted without credit on Instagram in a few hours. Such is the nature of a race weekend for a sports fan like me. In this context, a Formula One racing fan.
And I know I’m not alone. I know I’m not the only one who makes the very conscious, very voluntary decision to wake up at unearthly hours, to stay up till the moon is up, to spend inordinate hours viewing their sport of choice often because of the simple fact that they want to and that it makes them happy. When you love something, you make certain choices. And yeah, that applies to sports.
Here’s to the early mornings. The voracious arguments on Twitter and in the comment section of Instagram posts. The overwhelming glee of a last-minute win. The exaltation of players and teams and drivers as gladiators battling in the aged Coliseum of Rome.
We love it. We’d die for it. It’s a venom we’re immune to but also a drug we can’t get enough of. It’s vastly painful, unendingly frustrating, and wonderfully challenging.
It’s like cracking open your ribcage and holding your heart in your hands in front of you, vulnerable and unprotected from external forces. Open to the violent stabs of grinning competitors but also ripe for the blossoming infection of the one team or one person you will choose as your own.
It hurts. Its highs are oh-so-high and lows find their home at the bottom of the ocean. How lovely.
But I must finish the story. I sit on my couch, the lamp next to my head the only light around me, the rest of the house quiet and dark. The white light of the TV seems to bore into my eyes and seep into my brain, and sound slightly fuzzy in my head as I fully wake up from my sleep. I’m still in pajamas, because who in their right mind would fully change their clothes just to move to their couch? The glare on my phone causes me to scrunch my eyes and wrinkle my forehead, and I’m jealous of my European viewers who find themselves watching races at a convenient time. I sit there, and I watch.
I say all of this like it’s a hardship. Like I didn’t dig myself this grave and willfully lie in it. I did. I know. I’m sorry.
It doesn’t always feel worth it when we don’t get the outcome we hoped for. When our team loses, when they’re leading only to choke at the end. When our favorite driver crashes, or narrowly misses the podium. Worst comes to worst when they retire, and we’re forced into a very brutal and harsh reality that they are not around anymore. That, my fellow sports fans, feels like a death, even for the living.
But when it works out — when we get the very thing we begged and pleaded and prayed for — it feels so worth it. It feels like you’re standing on the tallest mountain and nothing, absolutely nothing, can touch you. It’s consumable power that turns people into everything from love-drunk fans whose only brain activity consists of celebrating their win to smug, arrogant shit-talkers going out of their way to rub it in the faces of the losing team. I have most definitely been both of those but perhaps that is not something I should so freely admit.
But what is it to be a fan? It may be all those things listed above, it may be less. It’s something though, and it is something special. It is, at the very least, a global community that exhibits the human spirit and the urge for competition and growth.
I had not experienced its true fullness until I attended my first Formula One race in 2014. At 15 years old, I was naive and completely ignorant of what it felt like to attend a sporting event with fans numbering half a billion across the globe. I stood on the baked concrete below a stage, my 5-foot-4 frame struggling to give me any power among the towering men around me. The person on the stage asked a simple question — “Where are you all from?” to the crowd, and I listened to nearly 30 countries listed as people proudly shouted their home town, waving gargantuan flags and tugging at the collars of their t-shirts with wide smiles. I wasn’t confident enough to yell out the predictable, “America!”, as we were quite literally in Texas, but I remember the moment in full nonetheless.
It sticks in my head because I felt my narrow world open up, I felt at home. I felt like I belonged and could be myself to the fullest sense. Like I had nothing to fear. And that is rare.
A few years later, I sat on the bleachers, waiting for a race session to start. My father was still parking the car in the lot, so I was alone. I didn’t take note of the men talking next to me, having an animated conversation about something I can’t recall. But then one of them spilled his beer of my foot, profusely apologizing to me when he realized his mistake. I didn’t mind, assuring him the shoes were not valuable enough to make an issue about. He recognized the jersey I was wearing — a Ferrari one, specifically for driver Sebastian Vettel — and exclaimed that he was a fan of him as well. He was not from America, he was from India, and had traveled to Austin, Texas with his brother to see the race. It was with great excitement that we conversed, with mutual respect and immediate camaraderie because we were simply the fan of the same driver. When the race was over, he grabbed me by the shoulder and consoled me for the poor result of our driver. I don’t remember his name, I don’t even know if he told me. But I remember him to this day and tell his story repeatedly.
My experience is not exclusive to an F1 race, nor is it something only experienced at sports events. It is part of being a fan, of finding other fans, and of finding community with those fans. That exists everywhere, and is special, memorable, and never loses its charm.
Whether I am sitting on my couch at an hour too early for my body to be fully aware of what’s going on, or hunched on the cold metal bleachers tensely watching the on-track action, I am at home, in some form. The people I converse with online daily, the friends I have made while waiting in line to buy overpriced merchandise at a racetrack, even those who comment about the sticker of race cars on the back of my phone all build out this feeling around me.
As I write this, the sound of Sebastian Vettel’s voice fills my ears. He’s not with me in person, no, but he gave a rare candid interview on a podcast that offered a few insights into his notoriously private persona. I am nearly in tears as I listen. My fingers shake slightly as I tap the keyboard, somehow managing to focus on what he is saying as well as type this out in a coherent manner. What I am struck by is the familiarity of those guttural noises leaving his throat, flowing into that microphone and magically coming through my earbuds to me.
I feel I know him.
Like he is my friend. In my head we talk every day, I say hello and he says it back. While this is a foolish reality and I have never met him, I can assume I am not alone in my construction of a separate world where I am someone different. Where I am what I want and I have been able to look him in the eye and tell him I appreciate him and think the world of him.
If you read this and feel this borders on obsession, it’s nothing I haven’t heard before from brutal Twitter warriors who take my gender as a marker of someone emotional, infatuated, and irrational.
But I hope you can understand this by extending the definition of fan from something casual, basic, and only present on game days, to something people live and breathe and embody. It is very much an extension of ourselves. It is a membership, a community with strings wrapping around the world, and it is a home. It is a world I claim as distinctly my own but simultaneously share with so many people.
To finish, a word of advice. Don’t ever let anyone tell you it isn’t your team, your driver, or your player. Refer to your team as “we”, say that that driver or that player is “mine”. Claim ownership in the things that you love, and do not be afraid of the passion you have. Share it, live it, explode with it. Let it run from your heart and fill your head, let it wash through your soul and enhance your life because we are only on this earth for a short time. Do not hide your passions. Find what you’d die for, and live for it.