Maybe you heard or saw or read that when Donovan Mitchell was introduced to the Vivint Arena crowd in his return the other night at the Jazz-Cavs game, he was cheered, not jeered.
The question arises: Moving forward will those cheers be forgotten, their echoes grow silent, transforming from cheers to jeers because Mitchell is playing for someone else now? Because …
That’s how it works in sports.
You’re with us or against us on account of the jersey you’re wearing, no matter that you’re the same person you always were. Next time, Jazz fans will scream for your competitive demise. No duh.
Causes pivots for thought about how the young Donovans should feel, the ones with Jazz-fan parents who were named upon their births after Mitchell, when the player was still balling out for the Jazz. Or the new Utah Mitchells, also named after the star guard. What about the family that named their kid after Gordon Hayward? What’s a Jazz fan to do over the long haul with that one? Wear it like a badge of honor? Keep it to himself?
Fandom is a funny thing, sometimes serious, sometimes silly, when it’s scoped and analyzed.
Nobody was exactly certain in the run-up to Mitchell’s return how he was going to be received. After he scored 46 points, he was cheered some more, particularly when in the postgame he hugged everyone in sight, the biggest ovation erupting when Mitchell, Jordan Clarkson and Mike Conley, old friends and teammates, folded up in each other’s arms in earnest embrace on the floor.
It was a nice moment for Mitchell, probably enhanced by the fact that the home team had just won in a stirring comeback. Not sure how it would have gone down had the Cavs won. It’s easier to be adoring in victory. And there were, indeed, a few boos scattered through the night, anyway.
A tender, healing goodbye it was for Mitchell, who’d said earlier that he had no idea how Jazz fans would react to him showing up in Cavs colors, spiced all the more not just by a few of his comments made since he’d left town, but also a lingering feeling around these parts that he’d prematurely disengaged himself from both the Jazz and Utah last season.
That was a big thing — Mitchell’s wandering eye.
Drained or not, he never asked for a trade, but he wanted a bolder marquee and brighter lights, it was said. He wanted Hollywood, not Hooterville. He wanted more than he had and he wanted it somewhere else. He wanted Broadway. He got Euclid Avenue.
Whether most of that was proved true or not didn’t seem to matter in some people’s minds, they could sense it. Even folks who liked him. It lit up even more among people who didn’t like Mitchell’s outspoken — yet completely appropriate and accurate — social and racial stances, especially in the wake of the Jazz’s first-round playoff exits.
Most significantly, he had been sliding down a slope transitioning from theirs to somebody else’s. And now he was C-Town’s.
It’s forever compelling to consider how and why sports fans pick not just who to root for, who to root against, but, more than that, who to take in as their own, who to keep as their own, who to love, who to reject, who to hate.
Use of that hate word is more spate, which is sports hate, not hate hate, an important distinction.
But in the swirl of emotion stirred by sports and, in many cases, mere perception of those who play them, folks often get caught up in that swirl, sometimes blinding them to what’s real, sometimes binding them to the same.
I was thinking about that upon Mitchell’s return.
When he bear-hugged not just former teammates and coaches, but ushers, security guards, fans, custodians, guys with mops, maintenance crew members, individuals who wore his old jersey and his new shoes, all of that seemed sincere.
Those who booed had their reasons, allowing them to fog over the fact that Mitchell had for a fistful of years helped sustain a franchise that otherwise would have lurched into losing without him.
No matter, when the whistle blew, the game began, he was playing for the Cavs now and thereby became a competitor to root against.
Sports really is strange that way. With the emotional swings, the love-hate, the spate, the us-versus-them mentality, the competitive exuberance, you’d almost think it was war out there or, even worse, politics.
The off-on switch that is so evident can be seen in the way fans around here treat athletes who transfer or coaches who move from Utah to BYU or from BYU to Utah. These individuals can be the exact same people they were before donning the other jersey, but suddenly they are to be … loved or spated.
I’ve asked sports psychologists and cultural scientists about this fan phenomenon and their responses explain a lot.
Without diving too deep into the dark waters of how the human mind works, essentially they said that partisans want to feel connected to the athletes who represent their favored team because those same athletes are representing not just a team, but … them. Usually it doesn’t matter if fans personally have little in common with their representatives, have dissimilar backgrounds, dissimilar interests, dissimilar human experiences, as long as they wear their team’s jersey, they are melded like longtime friends.
Those fans can overlook any number of behaviors, on the court, on the field, on the diamond, on the pitch, or off them, until their reps no longer represent … yeah, them. Then, all allegiances, sometimes all respect and decency, no longer exist.
That’s what made the crowd’s warm reception of Mitchell so noteworthy.
One expert on such matters said these athletes, whether they are collegians or professionals, are like feudal knights in feudal armies of medieval times marching off or staying home to defend their city-state against the combatants of other city-states.
“It’s a modern-day representation of that,” one cultural anthropologist said.
And that’s why fans can root for someone who they used to boo when they carried someone else’s flag and why they can boo someone they used to honor when the right flag was in hand. Even those who respectfully paid tribute to Mitchell on Tuesday night booed him lustily when he went to the line to shoot free throws on a number of what they deemed bogus calls. It’s why they laughed at Mitchell when he launched an airball.
But, according to one psychologist, it’s even more personal than just that.
He said an athlete who plays for your team isn’t simply a part of your rooting interest or your community, that athlete is a part of you.
“Fans like to connect with athletes and sometimes those athletes and the teams for which they play become part of a fan’s identity. It can become a strong bond.”
That’s why babies, and sometimes dogs, cats, beloved pets of all kinds, are named after players, those bestowing the handle not necessarily thinking about what happens if that player leaves on his own or is traded.
Perhaps it was even stronger in the old days, back before free agency took hold of pro sports and more recent old days before transfers became all the rage in college sports.
Either way, when the Jazz take the court against the Cavs or any other opponent, they are yours and you, apparently, like to think you are theirs.
They are us, we are them. But … not really.
Mitchell, then, belongs to others. The cheers were likely a one-time wave goodbye. And moving forward, he’ll be treated as such, even by the respectful. Now the niceties are done. The hugs from the crowd are finished. Forget about them, forget about him. He’s vapor now, somebody else’s friend, somebody else’s feudal knight.
Except, maybe, for folks — God bless ‘em — like the little Donovans and young Mitchells.
For everybody else, there’s a thin line between love and spate.
And Mitchell crossed over that threshold to applause when he exited his former home the other night, a home that, turns out, was never really his. It was only rented.
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