Imagine if you could watch sports without context, if every game were as simple as "I hope my team wins." You'd never worry about off-field exploits, or how much money a particular player is making, or which team feels disrespected, or how the stadium was financed. It would mean a lot less work for my fellow sports writers, but I sometimes think it might make for a better world.
I see this while watching sports with my two sons -- 3-year-old William and 1-year-old Wynn -- the most fun part being that they have no idea what's going on outside of the specific game they're watching. They usually don't even know the names of the players. They only know the team they are rooting for, and (sometimes) whether or not their team is winning.
Can I tell you I love that? If our team wins, we are happy. If our team loses, we are sad. And then it's time to read a book and go to bed. It is sports at its most pure. If only life could be so simple.
Of course, we have sports obsessions at our house in Athens, Georgia, and like most childhood obsessions, they are seasonal: The fall brings Bulldog football; the winter, Illini basketball; the summer, Cardinals baseball. But one sport transcends seasons: USA Soccer. Born out of the thrill of last summer's World Cup, William now does the funniest thing when he sees the American flag. Whether we're at a game or just walking down the street, when he glimpses Old Glory, he jumps up and down, yelling, "The national anthem! The national anthem! Hey Daddy? I BELIEVE I BELIEVE I BELIEVE THAT WE WILL WIN! NATIONAL ANTHEM!" This is entirely my fault; I plead guilty.
So it has been an absolute delight to discover that my boys -- William, mostly; Wynn, like little brothers since the beginning of time, will just do whatever William does, but more clumsily -- are more excited about the Women's World Cup than just about anything else on the planet right now.
Oh, they're so excited. William wants to wear his kit every day and paint his face. On Memorial Day, every tribute he saw ended with, "Soccer, Daddy, soccer?" The minute the USWNT took possession during the send-off series match with South Korea, William began running along with the U.S. players, shouting, "Run run run run GOALLLL!" (If only there had been a goal; they're still a little confused by ties, but hey, I'm American, so, so am I.)
And just Monday, in the opening 3-1 win over Australia, my son got a little obsessed with Megan Rapinoe, screaming, "Yellow! Yellow!" every time the blond midfielder touched the ball. I felt bad for him that he missed Rapinoe's terrific second-half goal; with a 7:30 p.m. ET start, halftime meant bedtime. (It's the only thing my son liked more about last year's men's World Cup than this year's women's tournament: I didn't make him go to bed in the middle of any of last year's games -- those games ended in time for dinner.) Still, I heard him yelling, "Yellow! Yellow!" from the next room before he dozed off.
It was unadulterated exuberance -- what sports should evoke. There is no sense that the World Cup the women are playing is in any way different than the one the men played in last year. To my boys, they are the same team; my sons scream for Alex Morgan and Abby Wambach at the same piercing decibel levels as they did for Jermaine Jones and Clint Dempsey. There is no notion of gender in their fandom. There is no sense that this tournament is somehow secondary. They just see America, and they still believe believe believe that we will win.
It's a delight -- refreshing in every way -- to see this through their eyes. Children, before the corrupting influence of adulthood, are fans the way we're all supposed to be fans. My kids don't know the history of women's sports, all the ugliness and struggle that athletes have had to overcome to achieve the undeniable momentum of the past decade. They don't know that the Women's World Cup doesn't yet hold the cultural cachet of the men's event, or how FIFA has insulted the women's game by making them play on turf, or that every woman who has made it to this tournament has had to fight and scrap a little bit harder just to have the opportunity to be here. They don't know any of it, and if they did, it wouldn't matter -- they just want their team to win. They just want to scream and yell for America. We adults accumulate our prejudices and preconceived notions over decades and toil desperately to shed them. Kids just don't have them. They point us in the right direction.
And that has made me a better fan. I've always enjoyed women's soccer, but I'll confess: In addition to the inherent fun of the games themselves, watching has always had a subtle self-congratulatory vibe to it; I'm eating my "cultural vegetables" and I get to feel superior to those unenlightened dolts who can't get into this. (Which is, in its own way, condescending -- not just to the dolts, but also to the players.) But my kids don't even know to feel superior. They have no idea what smugness or self-righteousness even is, thank God. When you watch the game the way they do, all that I'm being a good person for watching women's soccer right now falls away, and you concentrate solely on the wonderful game. We should all support women's soccer -- not because it's in some sort of Good Medicine zone, but because it's fierce and competitive and rollicking and a damned blast.
My kids are, in their way, honoring the athletes the way all athletes, men or women, want to be honored: by just worrying about the game itself and clearing everything else out. Sydney Leroux isn't out there thinking of herself as a cause; she's trying to win. After all, these games are, simply, beautiful games. That's enough. That's all that matters. My kids remind me of that.
They are going to get older, and as they learn about the real world, it will bring to them all the soiling influences and thorny complications I can't protect them from, no matter how much I wish I could. But I can get this part right, simply by following their lead. They love the USWNT. I love the USWNT. Fandom, at its very core, is seeing the world through the eyes of a child. And as it turns out, that's a better world indeed.
Now come on, let's go win this thing. America! National anthem!
Will Leitch is a senior writer at Sports On Earth, culture writer at Bloomberg Politics, contributing editor at New York Magazine and founder of Deadspin. You can follow him on twitter @williamfleitch.