What’s gained and lost in the fair weather

It does not fill me with any sense of pride to acknowledge that I watched just about every possession of Tyreke Evans’ Sacramento Kings career. And Francisco Garcia, Jason Thompson, Spencer Hawes, Quincy Douby, John Salmons (both stints), Donte Greene and Omri Casspi.

I had been a Kings fan since the days you couldn’t watch every possession of your favorite team, when a game on Channel 31 was a treat. The days of Walt Williams and Lionel Simmons and Wayman Tisdale and of course Mitch Richmond. Yeah, we had a team with a Walt, a Mitch, a Lionel and a Wayman. A Spud, a Duane, a Pete and a Jim too! What a time.

I remember the series against the Sonics: the Reign Man and the Glove. In retrospect, that team wasn’t any better than the mediocre Kings teams that preceded it. But the difference was the presence of hope in the form of a rookie Corliss Williamson, fresh off of a thrilling title run at Arkansas. As a kid who loved frenetic energy and awesome nicknames like “Big Nasty,” this was a triumph. I watched Game 3 of that series against Seattle in my living room, pouring sweat from the tension, with a French exchange student who huffed butane sitting on the couch, expressing wonder at the energy of the fans at ARCO Arena. (The Kings lost.)

Things got better, obviously, and so different. On the nascent basketball internet, the land of weird forums and chat channels, you’d see other obsessives talking about Keon Clark or Lawrence Funderburke. The Jason Williams-Mike Bibby trade: what a weird inflection point, where I remember debating it with co-workers and friends and not really interacting with internet content about it. But then came the “we’ll mow your lawn” billboard, and the Tyra Banks locker room thing, and Team Dime and … the blog era.

I launched Sactown Royalty in October 2005. It was actually my third attempt at a basketball blog, inspired primarily by the growing consort of baseball blogs (Grant Brisbee’s Waiting for Boof was a lightning strike to my brain) and the nascent community of basketball blogs. The first was something called Pick and Droll, which was general NBA and lasted exactly one (1) draft. Next was SACKINGSBLOG, which led into SB Nation agreeing to make me the founding editor of their second NBA blog. I had been a rather obsessed fan before all that. I watched the golden era truly end in ARCO Arena … for a watch party for the road Game 7 in Minnesota, the season that Webber returned from injury. A brutal experience, to be sure. But a year later, the obsession went to a new level as a devoted team blogger.

It’s hard to describe what the basketball internet was like before Twitter and podcasts. There had been forums and chat channels for obsessives in the past, but the blog and the comments section were revolutionary to me. A community of people as obsessed as me about the decision to sign GREG OSTERTAG, for heaven’s sake. People who didn’t just want to talk about whether it was time to trade Mike Bibby and Brad Miller, but who should win the starting power forward job between Shareef Abdur-Rahim and Kenny Thomas. People who cared as much as me (honestly probably more than me) about where Marc Stein ranked the Kings on ESPN.go.com. Or people who would freak out if Kornheiser and Wilbon mentioned the Kings on PTI, or if Bill Simmons made a joke about Dick Bavetta and 2002 in his column on Page 2. We were there when the Kings cheerleader scandal went what passed for viral in those days. There were people who wanted to talk about the Kings every single day of the year. It was amazing … and exhausting. Because I wanted to talk about the Kings every day, too. That meant watching every possession. That meant poring over college stats and international stats and every story about every potential King on ESPN and Yahoo! and the other sites.

During that time, from 2006-07 on, it also meant rarely celebrating Kings victories.

On my newsletter Good Morning It’s Basketball, I recently wrote about how the Kings’ famous 16-year playoff drought was so much worse than “16-year playoff drought” connotates. I won’t rehash the relocation drama again. But suffice it to say that it was every bit as all-consuming and depressing and exhausting as the 30-win seasons. More so, in many ways.

Once Stern and Vivek saved the Sacramento Kings, I was still all in for the Michael Malone and Pete D’Alessandro era, and all the way up to the beginning of Vlade Divac’s tenure. But it was all too much after everything that had come before. My second child was born around that time. My time was becoming more impacted every day. All of that is why I decided that I didn’t have the mental, emotional or physical capacity to remain obsessed with the Kings. I left Sactown Royalty around that time and honestly, legitimately, for the first time in memory stopped caring about the Kings on a daily basis.

I still wrote daily about basketball, so they remained in my peripheral consciousness. But they weren’t relevant on a league basis except when they were doing absurd things like “making the cap space trade with Sam Hinkie” and “firing legitimately good coach Dave Joerger” and “trading DeMarcus Cousins out of the blue during his media availability at All-Star” and “hiring legitimately bad coach Luke Walton.”

This year, the Kings pulled me back in for quite obvious reasons: the team is extraordinarily fun, joyful and interesting on every level. So many of my friends from the fandom stuck around, and reuniting on the Kings internet has been fulfilling.

But I will say that something has been lost for me. I have not watched every De’Aaron Fox possession in the NBA. In fact, it’s been nowhere close to that. I recently had to look up when Harrison Barnes arrived in Sacramento because I couldn’t recall, because I did not care when it happened. I was too busy monitoring whether the Lakers were actually going to get Anthony Davis, and whether Kevin Durant and Draymond Green were going to have a fistfight on the sidelines, and whether my daughter was ready for kindergarten, and whether I had my life in order. The Kings went from the center of my life to complete irrelevance to my day-to-day happiness or sanity. And I do not regret it, at all. It was what I needed, and still need.

Yet something has been lost. Disengaging from serious fandom has given this whole incredible season less visceral impact than I would expect it has given fans who stuck through it. To me, the trade-off was worth it for my own wellbeing. But there is a cost to becoming a fair weather fan: a loss of familiarity, some missing pieces of the lore, a little less catharsis. I will forever argue that fair weather fans are completely valid, and that there is absolutely no shame in being a casual fan of a sports team. How people approach their lives, insomuch as it doesn’t harm other people or the planet, is up to them. Why should sports be any different?

Having experienced it from both sides, though, I can confirm that the highs or lows are very different for us who show up in the sunshine than for those who live in it through the storms and the clear skies. If you have stuck through all this morass, you have earned every bit of joy that’s come your way and that will arrive on Saturday, on Tuesday and hopefully for two more months. If you’re just arriving to the fandom, or just coming back like me … well, we deserve some joy, too. Embrace it.