About a year ago, while watching his team lose a must-win game, a fan of the Dallas Cowboys named CJ Boyd removed his replica jersey, balled it tight, and hurled it off the balcony of his apartment in DeSoto, Texas. While his partner looked on, filming Boyd’s tantrum on her phone, he chased his floating jersey outside, where he picked it up to hurl it farther along the street. He was topless. It was winter. Boyd didn’t feel the cold, he told me, for misery. The clip of his outburst circulated online, and when I watched it I thought: Yeah, that captures it—the circular pain of a fully felt love for a sports team, the seeming impossibility of escape. In the video, Boyd marches up and down the street renouncing, then retrieving, the jersey, never able to throw it far enough to be free.
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