The weight of witness

Fandom as gaze, its power, and the new production value of opinion.

We were in Bickford Park talking about cults.

Jenner was in town from out west, Rachel was about to fly east the next day, and Richard had to go north in an hour, across the street to Christie Pitts for a date at an outdoor movie screening. It was the first time this summer we were all together, on a blanket far enough out in the field that we didn’t have to watch for stray balls from a little league baseball game. Rich and I had been the first to get there and on my way I’d stopped at the Koreatown Baskin-Robbins, thinking it a nice seasonal gesture to bring him a cone. It was less than three blocks but by the time I’d cut down from Bloor into the park I had pink drips of strawberry running down the knuckles of my left hand and pastel green drips of pistachio almond down the right. We ate the cones standing still, leaning dramatically forward, not speaking but laughing between desperate bites and corralling licks.

Cults came up a little later, from the prompt of dating gone awry. We talked about the other practices cults run close to, based on the qualities intrinsic to them. Fandom, I offered, in terms of its adherence to a set of beliefs, rules and rituals that reaffirm loyalty through mental and emotional ties. At an even more basic level, the desire to belong, to find community, stave off loneliness — to be seen.

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After the men’s American basketball team beat Serbia earlier this week, Kevin Durant took to Twitter. That’s nothing new. But Durant scratched at the surface of something that’s been happening in or to fandom, depending on where you’re standing. He mentioned idol worship, divisiveness stemming from wins and losses, disrespect from fans without consideration of the work it took, consistently takes, to get to the professional level and stay there. None of this is new to fandom, but the “egos” he prefaced as the cause are, at least in their platforms.

I think and write about fandom a lot because it’s fascinating to me, as an exercise, conduit, and near-living entity always going through new permutations. Fandom as visibility, wanting to be seen and wanting, as a fan, for other people to see the same things you are, has always existed in the wheelhouse of adoration, but social platforms have added another lens from which to watch, or be watched. It isn’t enough to be a fan, to perform fandom in its ritualistic efforts for yourself, because there’s now the ability (and pressure) to perform fandom as individualized authority. To watch basketball and have your first response, before easy awe or hangdog defeat, move to defensible opinion.

Opinions about sports are also nothing new, podcasts came before bite-sized video breakdowns optimized for social platforms, talk radio came before podcasts, columnists before talk radio. What Durant was getting at, I think, is the sheer saturation point we’ve reached. The production value of having an opinion. There has never been greater opportunity for visibility in fandom than now, even for athletes who aren’t Durant and don’t make it a habit to be perpetually online. Like everyone else, some athletes are good at setting barriers between themselves and the phones in their hands, the vortexes it can suck them into via idly tapping an app. Like everyone else, some aren’t. There’s the added layer that for athletes, the same production value of opinion is now at an all-time premium. While we’re potentially, maybe, slowing at the viability for every NBA player to start their own podcast — in the sense that every voice in the league isn’t necessarily cut out for a show — the inclination remains. Broadcast and media jobs, as a post-playing career professional route, remain viable and lucrative options. Moreover, in this world we’re making where everyone sees themselves as an individualized SportsCenter, athletes who can weave their voices into the 24/7/365 feedback loop of the game lend themselves back to relevancy. Back to the necessity of being seen.

A generous, as in benevolent, interpretation of what Durant was touching on and what I mean in this near-desperate compulsion to be seen — to be, really, perceived — came with Jayson Tatum these Olympics. Celtics and Tatum fans were seesawing on a spectrum from livid to forlorn, totally rattled, as to why Steve Kerr wasn’t playing Tatum in any of Team USA’s games.

It’s easy to make fun of Celtics fans, but what it made me think of instead was this anguish on behalf of another person’s visibility. Tatum’s fans wanted to see him play, see him on that international court rendered in its disruptive pastel colour-way. They wanted that for themselves. What they also wanted was the experience of watching him be seen, by ostensibly hundreds of thousands of people, and maybe new people, fresh eyes that had never set on him before. Tied up in that desire is a latent fear — completely ridiculous when you say it out loud — that Tatum will somehow be forgotten. Not bodily, not yet, but that his efforts on this stage, in these stakes, might turn so diaphanous without the weight of witness that he’d be counted out. It was a full, 360° theatre of perception his fans wanted — to see, to be seen, to be seen seeing — like the camera replay Olympics coverage was utilizing to slow down an athlete at their apex in performance and spin all around them in suspended motion.

At least, this is what I told myself, suffused with the ardor and earnestness of the Olympics themselves. Because why else would it matter, him not getting any minutes? None of this was for experience, and I didn’t see anyone lamenting the same lack of visibility for Tyrese Haliburton, who made the most of the time he had (and then made light of all the minutes he didn’t see).

Fandom is gaze. It gets tied up in a lot of feelings but it starts with watching, by seeing. I doubt that Durant, fluent as he is in engagement for its own sake, is uncomfortable with the proverbial third wall of sports fandom being broken. He’s been chipping away at it with the rest of us for a while now. I think we’re very good at watching, it’s the weight of being seen, or the consequences of breaking that wall, we’re just beginning to recognize.

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There’s a level of inherent, earned trust and camaraderie I have with people who, if not born into, have spent a subsequent number of years waiting for and then sweating through Toronto summers.

Nights that don’t cool, air that doesn’t move but grows fetid, denser, seems to press in around you. Nights where it’s impossible to move faster than a crawl, where you lurch onto the bus or train for its wash of air conditioning, or step into a corner store to dig around a chest freezer and find yourself working your nails into the dense layer of frost crawling up its sides like mould. Nights where walking 10 blocks takes you through three neighbourhoods and the flashes from 20 subsequent summers, roughly collaged, all sticky with sweat.

Here’s the train tracks that crown the Annex, where we climbed signal towers to drink with our legs swinging off as the trains roared by underneath and shook the platform, finding a few seconds of relief in the torrid updraft through the catwalk’s metal grating. Here’s the all-night car wash, the waft of petrichor mixing with roses from the meticulous gardens of old Portuguese men. Before Geary had anything but warehouses lining both sides of the street, our short-lived band practicing inside one of them every week, windowless rooms painted in loose themes ranging from “hell” to “Bob Marley” rented for three hours, and then bombing back down Dovercourt on my bike with drum sticks in my back pocket to find my friends scattered around the city, already three hours deep into their Friday nights. Here’s the apartment I lived in with Greg and Julian, where we shot so many expired Roman candles off the roof for the seven years we lived there that I’m sure we kept the convenience store that sold them to us in business. Here’s the pit where 888 Dupont used to be, where Marvin lived for a summer and the halls rang with buzzsaws and otherworldly singing echoing through the stairwells and sometimes, he said, ghosts, but more likely artists coming and going, moving in and ducking out in the middle of the night. Here’s the back garden I wound up in most nights one summer waiting to be let into a ground floor apartment less sweltering than my own only to peel myself away, repentant, in the morning. Here’s where I met Dylan for the first time at the beginning of one summer, both of us pulling up breathless on bikes. Here’s Vesta Lunch where we watched a raccoon do slow circles at the curb like it was parallel parking one night at 4am, rabid or hot as the rest of us. 

There are flashes, living in a city long enough, when every moment that happened within a dozen block radius of where you are collapses in on you at once. The pull and crush and dizzying stars in your vision a briefly overwhelming awareness of place, and yourself in it. I tend to feel it hardest, rended by it, when I wish I could express it all exactly how it feels to people who never knew me then, in any of those thens. Who might see me better, or to an accelerated complete, because of it. Modes of all the heartbreak that made me.