Like nothing else, sports fandom binds a community with the shared experience of hope, triumph and loss — a tribal thing that causes otherwise reserved individuals in Atlanta Falcons’ gear to high-five perfect strangers.
A study in the 1990s at Georgia State University found that fans of winning teams had a 20 percent boost in testosterone, while fans of losing teams saw a correlative decrease. This may be why, after the Falcons’ epic Super Bowl collapse, I suddenly wanted to take up knitting.
The other night, as gagging sounds emanated from the TV, I received taunting texts from friends living elsewhere who wanted to know what in the hell just happened.
“We’re Atlanta,” I said, giving them pretty much the same explanation as when Snowpocalypse went down in 2014.
Even when the Birds were up 25 points in the third quarter there was a looming trepidation: every Atlanta sports fan drawing breath knew something awful could still happen to them. (Studies also show that fans refer to teams as “we” in victory but revert to third person in defeat.)
Now that the Falcons have sealed an ignoble place in history for the worst meltdown ever, that ugly term is once again rising up: Loserville USA. Atlanta, as you most likely know, is the only pro sports city whose teams compete for a Participation Trophy.
In 169 collective seasons of pro sports going back half a century —the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL — Atlanta teams have won just one (1!) championship, the 1995 Braves. And that accomplishment is often derided with an asterisk saying “It was only the Cleveland Indians.”
For comparison purposes, Boston teams have won 10 championships in 15 years. In all four sports.
Still, the term Loserville seems a little harsh because Atlanta is also known as the Sports Capital of the World. You might not know that, because pejorative terms usually catch on better than marketing jabberwocky. But over the last couple decades, there was an effort for the latter slogan to catch on.
The Sports Capital of the World?
In the late 1990s, the Atlanta Sports Council, an arm of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, hoped to, in classic Atlanta understatement, market the term Sports Capital of the World as another way to identify The City Too Busy to Win.
Or was that Too Busy to Hate? Regardless, Atlanta is a busy town. Always has been. Almost two centuries ago a couple railroad tracks bumped into each other here and someone said, “This is as good a place as any to make money. And maybe we can fluff a few pillows for visiting businessmen and have nekkid ladies dance on their tables.”.”
Now, the first team to beat was the Indians — the real ones, that is. And after they got rounded up and sent off west, Atlanta took off until the War of Northern Aggression put a pretty good crimp on commerce.
The town getting burned to the ground led to the Phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes imagery and also cemented the slogan “Rise up!” which someone with uncanny foresight carved out for a team that would come along one day.
I digress with this history lesson to explain Atlanta’s need to try on big, fancy britches. It was this audacity that caused the city to put on a series of cotton expositions, including the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition, because Atlantans knew even then that this was an international city. And they’ve been saying so ever since.
‘Boosterism and commercialism’
This civic industriousness led to the World’s Busiest Airport (no hyperbole here); the first Southern town with major league teams (the Braves and the Falcons, 1966); and ultimately, a lone visionary on a shoestring budget who stole away the 1996 Olympics from Athens, Greece.
In fact, Billy Payne, the architect for that international theft, liked to call his big track meet “the greatest peacetime event in the history of the world.” So, in that sense, Sports Capital of the World is kind of modest.
Harvey Newman, a longtime professor of public policy at Georgia State University and co-author of the recent book “Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta,” said the city has long excelled at making the pitch.
“It’s been that kind of boosterism and commercialism — and the ability to roll up its sleeves — that has created the city,” Newman said.
Former Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen Jr., Newman added, “knew we’d get recognition by having Atlanta in the sports pages, even if we didn’t win.”
And sports has become big business in Atlanta. The Falcons are building a $1.6 billion stadium downtown and the Braves are constructing a $1 billion live-work-play complex in Cobb County. Both are tapping hundreds of millions in public funds.
All that helps drive fans to visit the College Football Hall of Fame and the annual SEC football championship. Also, coming up are the NCAA football championship next year, the Super Bowl the year after that and the Final Four in 2020.
‘Loserville? There’s some truth to it’
I called John Bevilaqua, a sports marketing guy with 40-plus years in town, who said sports is split up into emotion versus business.
“First, there’s the emotional side,” he said. He pointed to residents running around in team gear. “They’ve been waiting to say, I’m associated with a winner.”
It’s fun, it’s connective, it builds kind of a local patriotism.
But, he added, the local teams’ history “has been kind of tragic. Loserville? There’s some truth to it.”
Why is that? he asked, before answering: Transient fans. Short team histories. Amateur owners, although the Falcons’ Arthur Blank seems to be on the right track.
“But if you look at (Atlanta) as business, as hotels and restaurants and travel and as a giant economic engine,” Bevilaqua said, “well, that’s a different team.”
Certainly not the one that blew a 25-point lead.
