It’s a big time for sports fans. The College Baseball World Series is in full swing, the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Finals are both happening during Summer Game Fest, and EA Sports’ largest sports title, EA Sports College Football, is right around the corner.
At this point, But Why Tho? has been around for almost nine years. We cover anime, film, television, video games, and comic books, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that folks who love that media enough were probably considered a “nerd” at some point. As a millennial, I spent much of my youth loving things that weren’t quite mainstream yet. And naturally, lines were drawn in the sand.
The jock-nerd binary has eroded over time.
So what do you do when you don’t fit neatly inside those lines? At times, loving sports while attending film festivals or games media events can feel like a solitary experience, even while surrounded by hundreds of people. During the finals of any given sport, it can feel even more isolating when you want to talk about the team that you deeply love, and everyone else around you wants to talk about the latest RPG.
In fact, until maybe the past couple of years, if I tried to talk about sports, it was immediately met with a look of disdain. As if bringing up the NBA Finals made you an alien. But the reality is that the athletes we root for are more like us in their hobbies and interests than expected. Even more, the athletes are our age, and in many cases, they’re younger.
To understand how much the jock and nerd binary approach has eroded over time, all you have to do is look at the collaboration nights being held at major stadiums, the celebrations that they perform, or the way they introduce themselves. The kid Naruto running at school is now on the Carolina Panthers, and the kid who loves playing Magic is now a Super Bowl champion.
Sports fans have returned to an era of caring, not so different from nerds.
Instead of celebrating the overlap, we shrug it off. We nerds act as if someone sporty doesn’t like video games, tossing them into a maligned group of ball-game gamers, as if sports video games don’t take strategy and don’t scratch the same role-playing itch as the latest prestige AAA release.
The less we try to be cool for our own perceived peers, the more we can start to realize that being a nerd is just being passionate. Sportspeople are nerds too, and when we realize that, it’s easier to find common ground and understand that passion is ultimately about community.
Currently, after a decade of “nonchalant players,” being too cool to care about winning titles or trophies, NBA fans are mostly celebrating the return of caring. While not everyone may be a fan of the San Antonio Spurs 22-year-old phenom Victor Wembanyama, the one thing most agree on is that he has passion. He isn’t nonchalant; he doesn’t pretend that he is too above crying after a big win, or imitating the Eren Yarger bite from Attack on Titan (something he did after his team punched their ticket to the NBA Finals).
A little kindness goes a long way to break down stereotypes we hold based on each other’s hobbies.
It’s not only okay to like sports and be passionate about them, but it’s also necessary for us to care about things again. Dismissiveness, selfishness—all of that is what happens when you shut down conversations at a table when anyone wants to celebrate the thing they love. It’s time we stopped living the 80s stereotypes popularized by the wildly outdated Revenge of the Nerds and started embracing the fact that sport is just another form of expression.
Sports fans have debates about the GOATs, anime fans ask who can beat Goku, and video game fans can spend hours just explaining Final Fantasy. And the cool thing is that some of us do all three. To be a community, you need to be there for others and uplift them. It may not look the same for everyone, but we’re all having similar spirited discussions.
While it may have been hard for people who were considered nerds growing up, we have the chance to break that cycle. If you’d take the time to hear about someone’s favorite game, you can take the time to hear about their love of the Seahawks, Spurs, or any other sports team that makes them excited.
A little kindness goes a long way, and breaking down the stereotypes we hold about each other based on hobbies is a good way to start.