In defense of the bandwagon Patriots fan

Those of us who are real fans believe we’ve earned our place in the stands. With a Puritan resoluteness, we grimly endured year after winless year. I was there for those 39 years the Bruins didn’t win a Stanley Cup. I’ve spent vacation days under the broiling sun watching the Patriots at training camp – and have a signed Pierre Woods  shirt  on my wall to prove it. I watched the ball go through Bill Buckner’s legs in real time. So when the teams finally started winning, it felt like I was, too.

 And then the pink hats came and crashed the party. It all started with the Red Sox in 2004 (look up “bandwagon fan” in the online Urban Dictionary and one definition will say it’s anyone who started following the team after the World Series that year). “The John Henry ownership group came along and succeeded in turning Fenway from a place to see a ballgame into this tourist destination,” Boston comedian and sports commentator Jerry Thornton once observed. “It became baseball’s Magic Kingdom, and the girls’ pink Red Sox hat was its Mickey Mouse ears.”

 The problem with fair-weather fans is that they get to partake in all of the fun without any of the heartbreak. And there’s just something about that that seems contrary to our New England nature – like our buttoned-up Puritan forefathers, we tend to think you shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy anything unless you first suffer for it. And now that we’ve become the first region in history to win championships in all four major sports within a decade, New England is attracting bandwagon fans – and their critics – from all over. The Web is full of sites spewing vitriol about the late-to-the-gamers, from “I Hate Bandwagon Fans” Facebook groups to wikis on how to spot them, as if they were cancerous lesions.