Today, on #LinguisticsWithSlava
The Russian word for a sports fan is "bolel'shchik." I'll explain in a minute. But first, did you know that for a long time Americans had no word for it?
Sports fans appeared in the US in the 1850s, but the word didn't come about until early XX c..— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) November 24, 2021
Per a professional sports journalist and Russian expat:
Until baseball began to proliferate in NYC and people began to support teams from their neighborhoods, their only interest in sports was betting. The concept of following a team over a period of time with nothing at stake except emotional investment was utterly new…
So, for a long time, folks who weren’t into this culture, just assumed these were some new type of gamblers. This is how they were described in newspapers. Eventually, the word “fanatic” was used.
This, of course, tells us something about the prevailing emotion in the stands…… or, rather, how they were viewed by outsiders. American sports fans were, first and foremost, explosively emotional and, to others, irrationally so.
Interestingly enough, in England, the word “supporters” is used for those who are more serious and invested into the culture…The word “bolel’shchik” tells you all you need to know about the Russian approach. We did adopt the English word (in the form of “fanaty”), but it describes soccer hooligans exclusively.
“Bolel’shchik” is ours. Oh so very, very ours.
The root word is “bol”, which means “pain”“Bolet” is a verb derived from it. Its meaning is “to be ill.” Therefore, “bolel’shchik” is someone who feels constant pain and/or is very sick. However, the word applies exclusively to sports supporters. A regular ill person is “bol’noi.”
How Dostoyevskian is this shit?The prevailing emotion of a Russian football fan (and this is where the word originated) is, of course, pain. Constant, unyielding feelings of sickness and discomfort that can only be understood if you ever sat on a wooden bench to watch a 0-0 slog in half-frozen mud in Saratov.
To support a sports team, in Russian culture, primarily means to experience pain, to be emotionally unwell, to subject one’s mental health to voluntary mistreatment. To be unhealthily addicted to something bad.
Don’t ever ask me why I root for the Buffalo Bills and Sabres again.
opiejeanne
Slava explains it very well. As a longtime fan of the Angels baseball team and and a fairly recent fan of the Seahawks football team I can say that I understand this completely, although the pain usually isn’t in my rear from conditions he describes.
And I hope everyone had a nice day today, either with friends and family or alone.
burnspbesq
Russian football (soccer) fans are some of the sickest fucks in all of world sport. Fans of Zenit St. Petersburg are especially notorious for their racism; they boo their own players of African descent.
They would fit in perfectly at school board meetings in suburban Dallas.
Darkrose
Early on, baseball fans were called cranks. An example would be Katie Casey, from “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”. Miss Kate wasn’t interested in her boyfriend taking her to a show; she wanted to go to the game. It was New York in 1908, so I like to think that she was a Giants fan.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@burnspbesq:
It’s funny how the Soviets would’ve had the world believe they were so egalitarian, isn’t it? “But you lynch negroes”, indeed
eclare
I had a nice Thanksgiving with most of my relatives, my second cousin came down with flu this week, so his whole family stayed home. We all ate too much, yakked our heads off, it was wonderful. All vaxxed.
Chewing on some Tums…
burnspbesq
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
“Animal Farm” is proof of how completely Orwell understood the Soviets.
JCJ
@opiejeanne:
Yeah, as a life-long Purdue Boilermaker fan who has seen several teams implode in the NCAA hoops tournament I am very familiar with this pain…
West of the Rockies
@opiejeanne:
I grew up in Fullerton, an 8 mile bike ride to “The Big A”. Fregosi was my first sports idol.
burnspbesq
@JCJ:
I’ll see your Purdue and raise you Everton and the New York Mets.
JCJ
@burnspbesq: Everton I’ll agree (Go Toffees!), but I remember the heartache of my brother from the Cubs collapse in 1969 and the Miracle Mets.
eddie blake
oh, so they’re talking about the knicks.
got it.
yes. constant pain for just about two decades.
LeftCoastYankee
If there’s a German word for Schadenfreude aimed at yourself… that’d be a good description of being a sports fan.
opiejeanne
@West of the Rockies: I fell in love with the team in the 1970s, but the Dodgers were my first baseball love; I was 7 when they announced the move to LA and I began reading the sports page almost every morning before school. Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Johnny Roseboro, Johnny Podres, Duke Snider, Peewee Reese, Gil Hodges… And the following year they got Maury Wills. I listened to almost every game on the radio, many times with my dad in his workshop, while we played with electronics.
And the announcers, Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett. What fun!
West of the Cascades
As a Buffalo Bills and Sabres fan since 1971, this explanation is extraordinarily satisfying.
opiejeanne
@burnspbesq: The Mets were the spoilers when I was a kid, so many years ago. Amusing and, at the same time, annoying.
mrmoshpotato
Go Cubs! (what’s left of ’em, about halfway through the season, then completely fall apart!)
And how the fuck did the Bears almost lose to the Lions yesterday?!
NotMax
Bonus (and delicious) multi-hour nap sneaked up on me late this afternoon, so only began cooking the meat a half hour ago. Luckily it’s an Instant Pot recipe, so whole shebang will be done in about a grand total (includes searing meat, sweating onions, mixing cooking liquid/spices and cooking at pressure) of maybe an hour. In fact the beep signalling countdown of the pressure timer (set at 33 minutes) just sounded. 3½ pound boneless leg of lamb. Simple garlic mashed potatoes to accompany can be whipped up in the meantime.
West of the Rockies
@opiejeanne:
Vince remains the gold standard. Dick Enberg was very good, too.
West of the Rockies
@mrmoshpotato:
I had an aunt who lived on Waveland just behind left field back in the 40’s-50’s.
Hoosierspud
@mrmoshpotato: My sentiments exactly!
HumboldtBlue
Slava, like a million other latecomers, had never heard of Philadelphia or its fans before opining.
I will, however, and for ever more, stand my ground on the fact that the Buffalo Sabres franchise — during its only years of success when they had a Cup run or two with a dead goat’s head– abandoned one of the best uniforms in all of sports.
It was a crime to the eye. To the sense of uniformity. To humanity.
HumboldtBlue
The website loads like molasses again.
NotMax
Topically, whaddaya gotta have?
;)
mrmoshpotato
@West of the Rockies: Cool!
mrmoshpotato
@Hoosierspud:
About the Cubs, Bears, or both?
burnspbesq
Futility, thy name is Duke football.
mrmoshpotato
@HumboldtBlue: Well, it is November going into December.
NotMax
@HumboldtBlue
Site has intermittently been playing tortoise for weeks. Oddly, more frequent a happening since the ads went poof.
James E Powell
The Cleveland Browns play in FirstEnergy Stadium, also known as The Factory of Sadness.
sab
@James E Powell: I am married to a rabid Cleveland sports fan. Cavs, Browns,
IndiansGuardians, Monsters. He loves them all, and pain and disappointment do seem to be the central aspect of his experience.I wish my mother was still around to see the
Indiansto Guardians transition. She would have loved it.oatler
When I see a particularly noisome political opinion in the Guardian UK I check out the person’s comment history and sure enough 90% of it is football- related. Football hooligans indeed.
JoyceH
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Sort of a segue, but it’s always struck me as sort of anomalous how the Soviets, who were all about Workers and Factories and Tractors, etc, nevertheless kept up those utterly elitist ballet companies and the theaters they performed in. Watch a video of a ballet in the Mariinsky theater, and you’d think you were back in Tsarist days, with all the gaudy over the top splendor.
Who went to the ballets, I wonder? Did Muscovite factory workers get really into ballet, or was it all the party elites?
raven
@JoyceH: We just watched “The Courier” and ballet had an interesting role.
Captain C
@burnspbesq: When I was settling on English teams to follow, I specifically noped on having Spurs as my sole #1 due to the fact that I already had the Mets in my life.
(I wound up with 6 teams, at the time spread over 5 levels—my soccer fandom goes Cosmos-Ajax-closer to TREE3 complicated than you would expect in football fandom.)
p.a.
As a Patriots fan since the day they drafted Stanford’s Jim Plunkett and Randy Vataha, my message to you all is: things CAN change. You just have to decide to cheat better.
ThresherK
@Darkrose: Crank is supposedly derived from the German krankheit, a cold (illness) in the head.
Apocryphal, maybe, but I like it too much to stop.
Gvg
When I began to be a Gator fan, we were just being lead out of always losing when we thought we were going to win a championship. I watched Spurrior retrain the fandom into not wallowing in past losses and expecting jinxes. He did a kind of brainwashing of the fans in a healthy way. I realized that the old fans enjoyed rehashing the stories of losses in a miserable kind of way. He said he had to teach the team not to be sure they were going to lose to Georgia. It seemed to me that he also had to do it to the fans and sports announcers. When I started UF, the whole month before that game was full of a listing of all the “heartbreaking” losses to Georgia in past decades in the whole sports section of ALL the papers in the state. Eventually I noticed that those misery sections also had a lot of ads which means retailers thought that section got the most views that month. The Gators won and kept winning and our rivals started to self sabotage in expectation of the losing. The stories in the sports section changes and the past agony stories died out. Also the October sports sections got smaller and had fewer ads. It became fun to browse sport sections in our rivals states. I think the fans had a harder time giving up self pity than the team did though. They really wallowed in those stories about the time the Bulldogs destroyed our chance at the championship. Never seemed to occur to them that maybe their team wasn’t actually as good as their egos yet.
Gvg
@JoyceH: I don’t know that Russians view ballet as elite like we do. I think it may be more intwined in their culture than ours. Assuming another country is like yours is incorrect, but I don’t know Russia beyond a few snippets.
Feathers
@JoyceH: As someone who studied Russian back in the Cold War days, but never made it there, the tickets were not expensive, but more people wanted to go than there were seats, so hard to come by.
The other thing to realize is that the training was (and is) paid for by the state, so the dancers themselves came from very ordinary, often impoverished, backgrounds. So that was a sign of solidarity as well. It was also keeping the cultural greatness and heritage of Russia alive.
BC in Illinois
A story about Cubs fans, which I told on this blog in 2016:
My Son in Law is a lifelong Cubs fan, who has raised four little Cubs fans to know the song, the chants [“Let’s go Cu-u-ubs!”], and even some of the players. So 2016 was a great thrill for that household.
The next week, Donald Trump was elected. My daughter talks about taking the kids to school and meeting other parents who were in tears. At home, the 4-year-old sensed that something was making people sad. At one point, she asked about a voice on the radio, “Is that Donald Trump?” Her mother said “No.” “Are they talking about Donald Trump?” “Yes, dear, they are.”
So the 4-year-old thinks about how to cheer people up and make them feel better. Her solution?
“I’m so happy that the Cubs won! We should tell everybody that the Cubs won!”
+ + +
We live in St. Louis.
Sherparick
@JCJ: 52 years later & it still hurts.
Uncle Cosmo
Similar to the national obsession with chess – something else that represents the near-pinnacle of achievement (intellectual as opposed to artistic) in the world.** Excellence in either was held up as a statement that a proletarian society could claim standing among the culturally respectable societies.
** NB top-level chess was absolutely dominated by Soviet players and teams from the end of WW2 until Deep Blue ended the era of human dominance by curbstomping Kasparov in 1997. Every finalist (champion and challenger) for the world chess championship was from the USSR (except for Bobby Fischer between 1972 and 1975) and in every Chess Olympiad team tournament the USSR did not boycott, the only real drama was which nation would finish second. This level of achievement was specifically promoted by the Soviet hierarchy, which developed rising talents and compensated them like sports heroes or rock stars.
dnfree
@opiejeanne: I’m so old I still think of them as the Brooklyn Dodgers, rivals of the detested Yankees in the 1950s. I’m always a little surprised if sports news filters into my bubble and I’m reminded they’re in California now.