Susan Fanetti

In virtually my entire life, I have never enjoyed sports in any way. As a participant? HAHAHAHAHA. Though I work out regularly and have for years, I am possibly the least athletic person on the planet. I have virtually no spatial awareness. I’m clumsy. I’m slow. I’d rather be in a comfy chair beside the fire with a book, thank you very much.

Even as an observer, sports left me cold. My father was an avid sportsman/outdoorsman and sports fan, and an athletic-ish person (he played middling softball in an array of work leagues, played a decent golf game while he brokered deals on the links, and he bowled well in amateur club leagues), and he was a devoted, season-ticket fan of every 60s-70s St. Louis sports team, but WOW did he not have the patience to share that love with his daughter—or, frankly, even to think I should be interested. So I grew up mainly frustrated at how he hogged the TV room all weekend every weekend (except those he spent on his own sitting in deer blinds and jon boats). The man would watch any sports show. Even the fishing ones. AND THERE WERE CARTOONS ON THE OTHER CHANNELS. GAH!

Kids, in the olden days, families had only one television in the WHOLE HOUSE. It was an actual piece of furniture. Can you imagine?

So I grew up both excluded from and (consequently) disdainful of sports. That didn’t change as I grew up. My first husband was a sports fan, too, and watched a lot, but he had no patience to explain anything, either. I spent a lot of time finding other things to do so I wouldn’t bother him while he watched—or in the kitchen, prepping snacks when he had friends over to watch with him.

Now my husband of nearly 30 years and our youngest son are both avid fans of the Big 4 sports, but by the time we got together, I was somebody who called it “sportsball” and rolled my eyes at how excited grown men got at other grown men playing silly games for millions of dollars. I did my own thing while they watched games—and honestly, that was fantastic when I was writing 6-8 full-length novels a year. Lots and lots of time to myself, lol!

Through research for my writing, I got quite into MMA for a while, but I really can’t stand the UFC as an organization, so I gave up on that a while ago and considered my slight peek into the world of sports over.

But then a strange thing happened … I became a Swiftie.

I say “strange,” because pretty much everybody who knows me goes bug-eyed when they learn that I’m a Swiftie (I’m about Level 8; iykyk). I’m a punk/grunge girly, with a strong foundation of 60s protest folk (the gap between those genres is actually tiny) that became a general fondness for singer-songwriters. I’ve always enjoyed some pop music—I’m a big P!nk fan, for example—but I don’t have patience for bubblegum. On the radio, to me, Taylor seemed soft, bright pink, and sweet as candy. I know a lot of musicians, and a LOT of them really love her. I used to give them shit about it. I didn’t have any bad feelings about Taylor’s music; just did not get the appeal.

The stuff with Kanye was on my radar (I first learned of the VMAs thing from P!nk’s tweet about it):

Because I’m pretty plugged into pop culture in general, I sort of followed the Snake thing when it unfolded, feeling some feminist rage on her behalf, but otherwise, I devoted very little of my brain to Taylor Swift.

Then, on a sleepless night during the pandemic, I watched Miss Americana on Netflix, and she impressed the hell out of me. I’m of the “eat the rich” persuasion, I don’t think the world should have even a single billionaire anywhere, but I’m also of the “don’t fucking hold women to a standard you don’t even show men” persuasion. And since we live in a world where billionaires are so common plain old millionaires are barely edible, I’d say Swift is doing the billionaire thing better than most of ‘em. More than that, though, I discovered that her music is miles deeper than the bubblegum (or, in Swiftie parlance, the “glitter gel pen”) hits.

I decided to check out her albums. I started at the beginning and bounced off the first two, written when she was a teenager—and to this 60yo grunge fan, she sounds way too young in voice and theme. So I started at the back instead, with (at the time) Folklore, and that was it. The first time I heard “this is me trying,” I became a Swiftie.

Now I love her whole catalog, even the early stuff, which gains a lot of depth in the context of her whole body of work.

That’s the background to explain why I was right there in the thick of it when a certain tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs tried to give her a friendship bracelet with his number on it.

If you’re reading this, you probably know I’m a hardcore romantic. I was invested in that story from the go. When Taylor attended her first Chiefs game, I told my husband and son that I wanted to watch the game. They both stared at me like I’d grown several new heads—then my son laughed and said, “Taylor’s gonna be there, isn’t she.”

We’re from St. Louis, so, since Kroenke absconded with the Rams (and Bidwell with the Cardinals before that), the Chiefs are our closest thing to a hometown team, but nobody in the fam had ever been a Chiefs fan. In fact, after the Rams left, my husband turned from football entirely. He was pissed and decided he’d given his last bit of loyalty to a football team. But my guys love me, so they watched that game with me.

I was there for Taylor and Travis, but as we were watching the game, I asked a question about what was happening on the field and had my first-ever experience of getting an answer. Without snark! I asked another question, and you know what? They answered me. With sincere enthusiasm for helping me learn.

Now, to give my dad (and, I suppose, my ex) some grace, I’d tried to ask them questions in the time before DVR, so they couldn’t pause games to explain things to me. They had to miss a piece of the game to answer any question I tried to ask. Jim and Stefan, on the other hand, could push a button and give me a full class, with acted-out scenarios, to answer every question I had.

Once freed to ask questions, I had a lifetime’s worth. That first game took us about 6 hours to get through because we paused it so often. Same the following week. And the week after that. For that whole 2023 season, they gave me a master class. Not once did they make me feel like I was being a pain in the ass—in fact, they loved teaching me.

And I discovered I LOVE football. Like, how the fuck did I go almost 60 years on this planet thinking the guys in the helmets were mostly not very bright? How did I think they were just thoughtlessly crashing themselves into each other? This game is complex as hell!

I’ve done my autistic thing and dived deep, I’m still fixated and will watch basically ANY football thing, I’m on Year 3 of Susan’s Football Madness, and I’m still learning new things all the time. Holy crap, this game is awesome!

Now our Sundays are entirely devoted to football, from the beginning of The Red Zone all the way through Sunday Night Football. I love so many players across the whole league.

I’m not entirely sure I’m a devoted Chiefs fan. I’m there for Travis, but I feel some conflicts about other players and the team itself. When Trav retires, I’ll decide where my deepest love lies. Maybe I’ll be sufficiently settled in the Kingdom and remain a Chiefs fan? Maybe the Niners (the home team here, with cutie George Kittle)? Maybe the Bears or Colts? (the next closest to our hometown)? Maybe another team? We’ll have to see. But now that I’m here in NFL-land, I don’t see me heading for the exit.

As it turns out, starting to love football opened a door in my head—and heart.

You know what else is awesome? The WNBA. Taylor got me into football, and Caitlin Clark (a Swiftie herself) got me into basketball, but now those connections are only important to my origin story as a sports fan. They are no longer why I’m invested in the sports. The Fever is my W team, but Caitlin is not my favorite player. She’s in the top ten, but she might not crack the top five. I discovered a whole league chock full of powerful women I adore. Aliyah Boston’s is the jersey I wear, and I would give up an organ for Kelsey Mitchell.

I also caught the rugby bug during the Olympics and adore Ilona Maher (on the pitch and off), but watching rugby in the States is not easy. We had the streaming app for a while, but it turns out, to be able to make sense of a game you’re watching on TV, you need more than somebody with a camera on the sidelines doing their best to follow the ball. You need actual production professionals, and we’re not getting that in the US except for the Olympics.

So now I’m a rabid sports fan, watching podcasts analyses, playing in fantasy leagues, devoting whole days of my week to watching games like I’ve got money on the outcome (I don’t—I don’t gamble, ever), and people who knew me in the before times would be shocked.

My disdain for sports was rooted in the strongly gendered soil of my 60s-80s upbringing, the entrenched idea that things like football and basketball were only for boys and men to play or even enjoy. And those roots were thick and lasting, even as I shed most other such limiting ideas. But it’s women who brought me to sports—and the wonderful, evolved men in my life who have embraced this new love with me.

Just something I’m thinking about as football season gets underway—and Ms. Swift has herself a One True Love and a big ol’ diamond ring, not a paper one, on the finger they put wedding rings on. Love stories all around.

Especially in these times, we have to cling to the things that bring us the respite of delight.

I hope you’re having a great weekend—and if you, too, are a sports fan, I hope your team wins (unless they’re playing the Chiefs or the Fever haha)!

I’ll be back in a couple weeks with more bookish content.

xoxo
s—