In Part 4 of a five-day sequence on how D.C.-area sports activities followers observe their groups, Rob Woodfork finds the widespread thread between a number of forms of followers.
Editor’s Note: This is Part 4 of a five-part sequence on what it means to be a D.C. sports activities fan in 2026. WTOP’s Rob Woodfork talked with dozens of followers — die-hards, casuals, transplants and individuals who barely watch — about how they observe their groups, what it prices them and what retains them coming again. Some of what they mentioned was about protection. Most of it wasn’t. Read all 5 elements and learn more about how this sequence was reported.
This episode might learn as a setup for a punchline at the expense of the good people who took the time to speak to me for this mission — catch them being phony, level, chuckle.
That’s not what that is. Everyone I spoke to, from the man on the road to the little sister I grew up with, was straight up genuine.
And, curiously, I discovered many parts of my very own journey in sports activities fandom.
I didn’t get D.C. sports activities as an inheritance like Danny Jolles did. I wasn’t born right here and my dad wasn’t a lot of a sports activities fan. But I discovered this ardour at 12 years outdated and it ran deep sufficient to steer an enormous a part of my profession.
And having a profession in sports activities reporting has shifted what was a die-hard D.C. sports activities fan into extra of an observer whose curiosity lies extra in telling nice tales than in any singular end result. Truthfully, even when I hadn’t landed right here, my relationship with sports activities would in all probability look extra like Javon’s.
‘Are they still terrible?’
I haven’t seen Javon since we labored collectively at an area sports activities speak radio station in the early 2000s. He’s now not in sports activities speak and he cites components resembling the NFL’s handling of Colin Kaepernick, and the commodification of sports activities (which we touched on in Part 3 of this series) as to why he’s transitioned from a die-hard sports activities fan to a extra informal client.
“Sports used to be a necessity and a way of life. Now it’s an escape, and one of the elements where I get a little bit of joy.”
A tidy story a few man who moved on and never a bitter one. Then I requested how he actually retains up together with his groups:
“When your team is bad, you just sort of check in: are they still terrible? OK, they’re still terrible.”
That is just not how a person who moved on behaves. That’s a man nonetheless phoning the hospital for updates on a affected person he swears he stopped visiting.
In Part 4 of his weeklong sequence, ‘DC Sports Reality Check’, WTOP’s Rob Woodfork talks with locals to see what sort of fan they are — and located a standard thread throughout the spectrum.
The connoisseur who skims
You bear in mind Ricardo, who follows his Carolina groups from up right here and reads about them continually. Ask him what he desires from protection and he’ll describe a connoisseur we met earlier this week: the deep dive, the breakdown, the form of evaluation a field rating can’t contact. “I love the dive into the games,” he instructed me. And then, a breath later, the different Ricardo confirmed up:
“I’m a skimmer. Get my attention from the get-go.”
The on the spot a chunk slows down — the on the spot it begins reaching for filler to stretch to a industrial — he’s gone, thumb already transferring to the subsequent factor. So which is he, the diver or the skimmer?
Both, after all. He desires the depth of a documentary delivered at the pace of a spotlight. He isn’t confused about what he likes. He’d simply by no means needed to maintain the two halves of it up subsequent to one another till any individual requested.
The proud fair-weather fan
Lisa, a schoolteacher and a D.C. native, doesn’t trouble with the costume in any respect. She’ll inform you precisely what sort of fan she is:
“I’m a fair weather fan — if a D.C. team is winning, I’m out there. I went to the Nats parade.”
No defensiveness, no little speech about how she’s secretly been there via the lean years. The Caps win a Cup, she’s in. The Nats win all of it, she’s at the parade. The groups slide again into the standings and she or he’s obtained different issues happening.
We’ve constructed a complete vocabulary for followers like Lisa — bandwagoner, front-runner, fair-weather — and we swing it like an insult. She simply nods and picks her signal again up. No costume to maintain straight.
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The nonfan with a again door
And then there’s Priscilla, who would object to being on this story in any respect — as a result of she’ll inform you (and does inform me, repeatedly) that she doesn’t observe D.C. sports activities. Not a fan. Not her factor. Except:
“I don’t feel any connection to D.C. sports except through you.”
The “you” is me; we’ve been pals since we have been 12 years outdated. And that seems to be the total on-ramp.
She couldn’t discover the Wizards in the standings, however ship her a narrative — this participant got here from nothing, this workforce’s a protracted shot — and she or he’s all the method in. Her fandom doesn’t run via the groups. It runs via the individuals who hand her the groups. Which appears like the reverse of a sports activities fan, proper up till you discover it is perhaps the commonest form there’s.
The ‘chill base’
The aforementioned Danny Jolles has a idea about D.C. sports activities followers he means as a praise.
We’re “a chill base,” he mentioned — a fanbase that takes its dropping gracefully:
“The Wizards stink, we all just went, ‘All right, have a good season, see you next year.’ We understood the assignment.”
He likes this about us. He’ll defend it. In his telling, it’s virtually a civic advantage — proof that D.C. retains its perspective whereas different cities lose their minds:
“Every athlete should want to play in Washington, D.C., because you won’t get booed.”
It’s a beautiful self-portrait in contrast with, say, Philadelphia.
Also, if you’ve been faithfully studying this sequence, it’s not fairly who we are.
Because this similar sequence is filled with D.C. followers who are something however chill. Andrew B. desires a broadcaster keen to name the Wizards what they are: the die-hards who’ve been conserving a ledger of each heartbreak for many years and the ones nonetheless mad a few title change.
Danny describes a metropolis at peace with dropping from inside a mission full of people that very a lot are not. He’s positive he is aware of precisely what sort of fan this metropolis incorporates. He’s simply as positive about himself — and that’s the place he seems to be onto one thing.
At each ends of the gulf …
Here’s the surprisingly widespread thread I discovered throughout these interviews: regardless of the gulf between non-sports followers and die-hards, at their core they each need the similar factor.
Danny ran a sports activities podcast for some time — Everything But the Scores — and the title was the complete thesis. What he seen was that the individuals who liked it weren’t all sports activities followers:
“The average person does not care about the defense the Commanders are planning to run … but the average person wants to hear about Jayden Daniels’ family and why he’s here … about Bobby Wagner and his journey. The average person just wants to hear about the stories.”
That’s the loudest die-hard on this sequence — the man who’ll root for a D.C. workforce that doesn’t even exist but — telling you the video games aren’t at all times the level.
And then, from the different aspect of the gulf, the one that proves him proper. My sister Lauren — who has about as little use for sports activities as anybody I talked to:
“I’m more interested in the people more than the sports.”
She’s describing, with out realizing it, the actual factor Danny and each die-hard on this sequence additionally stored circling again to — not the end result, the human being inside it.
And Lisa, the fair-weather fan from just a few paragraphs again, noticed the complete dimension of it the yr sports briefly went away during the COVID shutdown. She got here throughout a podcast about what that absence was doing to individuals:
“The loss that so many men felt — it really showed me … this is really a huge part of people’s being.”
Neither Lisa nor Lauren lives and dies with a workforce, however each noticed the dimension of the factor clearly.
In this episode, possibly the largest shock wasn’t discovering that folks had misjudged themselves. It was discovering that fandom is much less a hard and fast id than a sequence of fixing relationships — with groups, with household, with time and with one another.
Which leads us to the sequence finale. After 4 days of speaking about time, cash, habits and id, one query remained: What does sports activities give us that nothing else does?
Be part of the dialog! Share your ideas about DC sports activities in the WTOP app. Click on the suggestions button to go away us a voicemail or electronic mail (Apple | Android).
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