FANATIC: A person marked or motivated by an extreme, unreasoning enthusiasm, as for a cause.

Yes, it is true that the word fan is derived from shortening the word fanatic. I can attest to the connect between the two words.

More than 24,000 crazed, otherwise healthy people packed themselves into the Carrier Dome at Syracuse University last night to watch Syracuse sneak away with a basketball victory over The University of Connecticut. That may seem like a huge number for a midweek game between a highly-ranked team and one struggling to get any attention.

But it's only a shadow of what is yet to come. Tickets for the upcoming SU/Villanova game have been sold out for a week, and it is estimated that more than 34,000 people will return to the Carrier Dome to scream, eat Dome Dogs, abandon their usually civil proprieties, and demonstrate their most outrageous orange-colored attire. These attorneys, physicians, engineers, librarians, postal clerks, bartenders, CEOs and maintenance workers will scream together, embrace wildly even though they don't know each other, and posture for national television in garb and and decorum which may embarrass themselves when it appears on the sports page of their hometown newspaper. They are fans/fanatics. Nothing can stop them...except an occasional weak season.

There is something about being a sports fan that borders on insanity. It can be a temporary suspension of propriety, emboldened by a need to express one's devotion to a simplistic cause. But no matter how intellectual I can be about seeking the root causes of sports fanaticism,there remains something indiscernible...something raw and primitive inside a sports fan that emerges when donning an orange sweater, trudging blocks of city streets to get from a parking spot to an uncomfortable three hour seat, eating outrageously unhealthy food, consuming beverages which one convinces himself taste good, and releasing primitive behavior that has been forming for days prior to the game.

Fanaticism isn't restricted to sports, and it isn't always fun. I will reserve my Tea Party parallels for another posting. But for one evening, having driven six hours to get there, I found myself re-embraced by more than 24,000 best friends whose names I don't know, and who have never heard of me. I became a fan. I wasn't nearly as outrageous as most of my "friends" were. On a scale of 1-10, with one being boring and 10 being eligible for institutionalization, I was about a 2.

What fun, in the midst of economic, political, global issues that boggle the mind, to pull out my orange sweater and scream until my voice was raw. And now, back to normal....

Dictionary Credit: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved
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