The Joy of Disappointment

by J. Brown

My favorite sports team is the New York Knicks. The Knicks, for the lack of a better phrase, are not good. Over the past 10 years, they’ve made the NBA playoffs three times, twice losing in the first round. They’ve finished with a record above .500 only three times in the past 14 seasons. And Knicks fans older than me haven’t fared much better; their last championship was in 1973. As a fan, rooting for the Knicks has been a mixture of frustration, despair, apathy, false hopes and disappointment. 

It would be easy for an outsider to wonder why I cheer for a team that has given me so little to cheer for. The easy thing for me to do would be to drop them for a perennial winner (like the Spurs) or an exciting young team with newfound success (like the Warriors). To be honest, there have been seasons when the team was so bad that I flat out refused to watch them – I touched on that idea in a previous post. But I’ve been rooting for the Knicks since 1998. Over the past 18 seasons, they’ve become my team. At this point, it wouldn’t even feel right cheering for another team. I’m in too deep now. 

Moreover, I doubt that I would really be able to enjoy rooting for a team that was significantly better than the rest. One of the biggest reason we watch sports is for the mystery of the unknown. We’re intrigued by the idea that anything could happen. It becomes a lot less fulfilling to watch a team win when you already expected them to do so. 


To be transparent, I grew up as a Yankees fan. I remember watching their games on WPIX 11, before the WB existed. Posada, Jeter, Rivera, Bernie, O’Neill… those were our guys. At a certain point, though, winning just became an expectation, so much so that you’d find yourself more disappointed when they lost than you were happy when they won. I still followed them, though, even during college and their historic collapse to the Red Sox in 2004. Given my history with the franchise, you might imagine that I leapt with joy when they won their 27th and most recent World Series title in 2009. But there was no leaping, no hollering, no exultations of happiness. I simply smiled, and turned the TV off. Ironically, it was at that moment that I realized that maybe I wasn’t as big of a Yankees fan as I thought I was. For some strange reason, I actually felt less emotion watching them win than I did watching them lose in 2004. 

Perhaps sadness is just a stronger emotion than happiness, heartbreak more encapsulating than relief. I’ve realized that what endears us most to the teams we cheer for aren’t the moments of triumph, but rather the moments of anguish. It would be safe to assume that if the Yankees had beaten the Red Sox in 2004, it would have meant a lot less to New York fans than the actual win meant to fans in Boston. Decades of disappointment made them appreciate the championship more. It’s an interesting idea, but maybe it’s the losing that help us truly appreciate the winning when it finally happens. 

I’m reminded of the Kansas City Royals and the Golden State Warriors, teams that both won titles in 2015. The Royals hadn’t won a World Series since 1985, and the Warriors hadn’t hoisted a championship trophy since 1975. If you’re a fan of one of these teams and you’d endured decades – literally, decades – of losing seasons, watching them finally win it all has to be absolutely breathtaking. There must be a sense of validation that makes all those years of cheering for bad teams feel somehow worth it. It’s a feeling that Yankees fans or Lakers fans will never be able to truly appreciate. 

With all of this in mind, I recently decided to start following English Premier League soccer. I wanted to pick a team to follow, and the rules I created for myself were simple: don’t root for a powerhouse, but don’t pick a terrible team, either. Find a team with potential, but no real history of winning. Essentially, I wanted to cheer for a team that I knew would have to go through a few years of losing before earning the EPL title. It might sound silly to willingly adopt any team other than Arsenal or Manchester United, but I knew after my experience with the Yankees that I wouldn’t really enjoy watching them win if I went into it knowing that they were already expected to. 

I chose to root for the Tottenham Spurs, and they’ve improved progressively in the past season and a half that I’ve been following them. They’ve got some exciting young players, and they’re currently in fourth place with a solid chance to win the title by season’s end. And if they don’t finish in first place, that’s alright, too. Watching them get close will be enough to connect me to the team, and it’ll just make it that much sweeter when they finally do.