Why a favored sports team losing hurts almost as much as physical pain

I don’t follow professional baseball very closely. I’m much more of a college baseball fan, the Oregon State Beavers being my favorite team.

But since the Seattle Mariners are the closest professional baseball team to Oregon, I was rooting for them to beat the Toronto Blue Jays for the American League Championship, especially since Seattle had never made it to the World Series.

When the Mariners lost 4-3 yesterday in the deciding game of the Seattle-Toronto series, after taking a 3-1 lead into the bottom of the seventh inning, I was only mildly disappointed. I could understand the pain felt by Mariners fans, though, because I’ve experienced the deep hurt produced by a favored team’s disappointing loss.

John Canzano, an independent sports writer

, wrote about this masterfully in a post on his Bald Faced Truth substack, “Losing Hurts Like a Broken Leg.” Here’s an excerpt:

Neuroscientists will tell you that being a die-hard fan triggers and engages the brain’s pleasure and pain centers. Your success or failure? The team’s success or failure? There’s a difference, but our brains don’t know it.

Being a sports fan makes you feel part of something bigger. There’s a community in it. It helps shape your social identity. The chemistry of it is wild.

Amino acid.

Dopamine.

The brain’s pleasure hub.

All of it gets involved when you’re watching a sporting event. The more emotionally invested we are, the deeper the feeling. Scientists have compared the euphoria and brain mechanisms involved with a big win to a cocaine high.

The same neural pathways are involved in a loss. Jon Wertheim and Sam Sommers wrote a book about it, called “This Is Your Brain on Sports.” Watch your team lose a big game? See your spouse fall and break a leg? Your brain responds the same way to both, even though one of them doesn’t actually involve a broken bone.

Buddhism, along with other forms of spirituality, teaches that our attachments and desires lead to suffering. Makes sense. If we don’t desire that our favored team win, we won’t be disappointed when they lose. However, I have no interest in giving up my attachment to my wife, daughter, granddaughter, dog, Oregon football team, and so many other things.

Feeling the ecstasy of your team winning an important game means that you’ll feel the agony of an important loss. I’d much rather love my wife, which means I’ll share her pains, than not have loved at all.

I enjoy the ups and downs of fandom.

So much so, I find myself rooting for teams I know next to nothing about, if they’re an underdog. Last Saturday I happened upon the Texas Tech-Arizona State football game on our television. I saw that Texas Tech was ranked in the top ten. Arizona State wasn’t ranked at all, yet was leading late in the game.

Instantly I became an Arizona State fan. In his post, Canzano refers to a book, This is Your Brain on Sports. A summary of the book describes why rooting for the underdog is so common.

No matter which sport you play, there’s generally a winner and a loser. But even when one team seems to lose all the time, they’ll still have devoted fans following them in every game. In fact, these fans can be even more passionate than those of other teams, since people love rooting for an underdog.

There are good reasons for this phenomenon, as it plays into our sympathy for those who are considered weak and our desire for the unthinkable to happen.

…An underdog scenario is appealing because it represents the possibility of an unlikely outcome, where a team or an individual might persevere in the face of a daunting challenge. This makes the game more personal, since we often think of our own situation in life as a similar battle.

For instance, when we try to get someone’s attention and sympathy, we’ll often portray ourselves as an underdog trying to overcome impossible odds.

This impulse also sets up an us–versus–them mentality that can lead to both cheering and fighting.

When our team does win, we feel the desire to join other fans and celebrate in the streets like it was a festival or parade.

But this tendency has its dark side as well, and it can easily turn to aggression against the fans of the opposing team or even bystanders with no interest in sports at all. In the end, our desire to belong often goes hand-in-hand with our desire to exclude.

Canzano tells it like it is near the end of his post.

That’s what happened to Mariners fans on Monday night. With every pitch, they inched closer than ever before to a World Series. Then, they watched the joy unravel when George-bleeping-Springer hit a three-run home run in the seventh inning.

In that moment, Seattle fans wrapped their heads around the crushing reality of having to go back to the beginning and start all the way over next year. Six outs later, the season was over.

Just like breaking a leg?

Try both legs.