If there is one truly annoying thing about the world of sports these days, it’s that no matter how big a team is or isn’t, its fans refer to themselves as a nation.
It actually goes back further than that. Back in the 1960s, the Dallas Cowboys started calling themselves “America’s Team.”
To be fair to them, the Cowboys didn’t actually originate the term. It came from NFL Films, but they certainly capitalized on it. In their heyday late in the last century, most pro football fans either loved or hated the Cowboys.
The first I recall hearing fans of a team referring to themselves as that team’s nation was the Boston Red Sox.
The idea of a Red Sox Nation made a great deal of sense for several reasons.
First of all, the Red Sox are the only baseball team representing New England, which more than anywhere else is a separate and self-contained part of the United States.
A nation.
Second, the Red Sox have a history that is almost Biblical. They were one of the greatest teams in the first part of the 20th century, but after they won the World Series in 1918, their owner sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. They never won another World Series for the rest of the century.
People called it the “Curse of the Bambino.”
Couple that with the Puritan history of New England that goes back to the early 17th century and there was a certain amount of almost religious suffering that went with being a Red Sox fan.
It finally changed in 2004, when the Red Sox finally won the Series and they did it in the most unlikely way. They became the first team ever to rally from a 3-0 deficit in a league championship series to win. Best of all, they did it against the hated New York Yankees.
So much for the curse.
In fact, between 2004 and 2018, the Red Sox won the World Series four times. In the first 23 World Series this century, no team had won as many times as Boston. That’s all well and good for Red Sox Nation, but in a strange way, it took away the mystique the team enjoyed between 1918 and 2004.
Just as the Chicago Cubs winning a World Series in 2016 for the first time in 108 years took away their mystique and made the Cubs just another franchise.
But in the last 15-20 years, all sorts of teams have been appropriating the “nation” monicker.
North Carolina basketball player Caleb Love announced he was transferring away and issued a release thanking the fans of “Carolina Nation.”
South Carolina basketball player Aliyah Boston declared for the WNBA draft and thanked the fans of “Gamecock Nation.”
I could give a dozen other examples — maybe even more — but that would just be repetitious. I suppose there can be a Carolina Nation or a Gamecock Nation, but call them what they are.
Lesser nations.