Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love - Hardcover

Schur, Michael; Posnanski, Joe

Hardcover

ISBN 13: 9798217045112

Verlag: Dutton, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

USA TODAY BESTSELLER

NPR's Book of the Day

New York Times bestselling authors Mike Schur and Joe Posnanski travel the world in a hilarious and heartwarming celebration of fans and the things they love: baseball, basketball, chess, darts, football, futbol, Indigenous North American stickball, pickleball, WWE, Taylor Swift, Star Wars, and more.

Two great friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. And a bottomless appetite for experiencing sports. That’s what BIG FAN is all about.

Bestselling authors and podcast hosts Joe Posnanski and Mike Schur love games—almost any game!—and they bring readers to the front row (and sometimes even right onto the field). Whether ringside at WrestleMania in Las Vegas, singing along with the maniacs at the World Darts Championships in London, or just watching eight straight hours of football at a Buffalo Wild Wings in Dallas, they bring us to the very heart of what it means to love something so much it hurts.

Through crushing defeats and glorious wins, whether cheering penalty kicks with 65,000 fans in Liverpool or beholding a chess master castling in dead silence, BIG FAN is about why we love what we love and how fandom connects us in a time when so much else pulls us apart.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Schur is an Emmy Award–winning American television producer and writer. He created or co-created the comedy series Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place, and A Man on the Inside, after getting his start on Saturday Night Live and The Office. Schur lives in California with his wife, Jennifer Philbin, and their children.

Joe Posnanski is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of nine books, including Why We Love Baseball, Why We Love Football, and The Baseball 100. He has won two Sports Emmys, been named National Sportswriter of the Year by five different organizations, and, most proudly, was inducted into the National Polish-American Sports Hall of Fame. For this book, Mike challenged him to watch and participate in a pickleball tournament, a sport he loathes. Posnanski lives in Charlotte, N.C. with his wife Margo and their ancient poodle Westley.

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Eight Hours in a Buffalo
Wild Wings in Dallas

Dallas, Texas

September 5, 2024

Distance Traveled: 2,478 round-trip miles for Mike;
1,872 round-trip miles for Joe.

Ask an American to name the most patriotic, stars-and-stripes, bald-eagle, We-the-People, red-white-and-blue, In-God-We-Trust, star-spangled-banner, land-of-the-free-home-of-the-brave, from-sea-to-shining-sea place in this whole gol'-danged United States of America. They might wax on about the stateliness of the Statue of Liberty. The majesty of the Grand Canyon. The history of the Liberty Bell. The deep sense of connection that comes with walking the Freedom Trail. They'd all be wrong.

The most American place in all the land is the Buffalo Wild Wings in Dallas, Texas.

Now, you may ask the question that has stumped historians for centuries: Which Buffalo Wild Wings in Dallas? There are five of them if you include the one inside the airport, which obviously you do. Then there are another six in Fort Worth, plus one in Irving, and one in Arlington, and one in Richardson, and one in Garland, and also one in Grapevine. There are, in all, 135 Buffalo Wild Wings in Texas, more than in any other state, more even than in Ohio, where the whole thing started when two guys drove around after an ice-skating competition but to their horror couldn't find a single restaurant that served wings.

Which takes us back to the essential question: Which of Dallas's Buffalo Wild Wings is the most patriotic, the most quintessentially American?

The answer: Any of them. All of them. They are all the most patriotic and the most quintessentially American.

We are sitting in a booth at any and all of them right now. This is the Buffalo Wild Wings that Google Maps assured us was closest to our hotel (roughly 1.2 miles closer than the next closest one). It's an hour before kickoff of the 2024 NFL football season. We are surrounded by thirty-five televisions, a couple of hundred beers, a thousand chicken wings (covered in one of twenty-six "signature sauces and dry rubs"), and ten million calories. The expansive BWW menu features brisket, tacos, brisket tacos, beer, batter, beer-battered onion rings, pickles, fries, fried pickles, nachos, hot chicken, Southern chicken, classic chicken, and, if you scour the menu intensely enough, two non-fried items that actually grow out of the ground -the celery and carrot sticks that come with the wings (upon request).

When we order the celery and carrots as our main entrée the waiter seems unsure if he's allowed to do that. He will have to ask a manager.

People apparently do not voluntarily order carrots at BWW.

To our left, a father sits with his two young sons. All three of them wear Chicago Bears jerseys and the resigned facial expressions of people who know that this Sunday (like most Sundays) probably won't go great. At the edge of the bar, a fan in a Bengals Joe Burrow jersey gnaws on a wing with a thick sauce.

Mike

I think it's Nashville Hot Sauce.

Joe

No way. It's Jammin' Jalapeño.

Either way, Fake Joe Burrow seems unfazed by the sauce's hotness or copiousness. He is eating eagerly and quickly and (dare we say) nervously? The game is starting soon. The season is starting soon.

There are other jerseys in the place, lots of them, and they match the jerseys we see on the screens. We might be the only two people in the place not wearing jerseys. A young couple sports New Orleans Saints jerseys; a woman sits alone at the bar in a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey; two guys wear Houston Texans jerseys. The Dallas Cowboys will not play for another three and a half hours, but already there are a number of Cowboys fans in here. Funny, though, the jersey that dominates the landscape isn't a Texas team. We may be 1,373 miles away from the center of Buffalo, New York-and by "center of Buffalo," we mean the Anchor Bar, where the buffalo wing was invented-but there are, by far, more Buffalo Bills jerseys here than any other.

Maybe all Buffalo Wild Wings patrons have a special connection to the motherland.

Mike

One by one, the thirty-five televisions flash to that camera angle of the kicker slowly walking back behind the tee and raising his hand. The players on the coverage teams stop jumping in the air and shifting their weight and settle into ready position. The Wild Wingers around us wipe their hands on napkins, lean forward, clap and whoop. Because finally, after months of training camps and predraft analysis and draft analysis and post-draft analysis, and talking heads reporting on how the rookies look in minicamp, and meaningless exhibition games that the NFL insists we call "preseason games" because that lets them charge full ticket prices for these meaningless exhibition games, the boring part is over.

Everyone in this restaurant and the America that surrounds us feels, down deep, that their team might win the Super Bowl this year. Or they might go 2-15-but it's actually fine because then they'll get a high draft pick and choose the quarterback who will turn the franchise around! We might be about to watch a dramatic last-second victory, or we might be about to watch our team's best receiver tear an ACL, or both. Everyone in this restaurant and the America that surrounds us overflows with hope and fear and excitement and dread.

Our worldwide journey into the heart of fanhood begins.



Joe

Mike and I are husbands and fathers and writers and all that stuff, sure, but really, more generally and more specifically, we are fans. That's what defines us.

We are the sorts of fans who wear the same clothes when our team is on a winning streak and will stay frozen in the same position on the couch when our team is in the midst of a furious comeback-not because we think we can make a difference (that's ridiculous) but because we know we can make a difference.

We are the sorts of fans who can tell you at any given time which baseball player whose last name begins with Q has hit the most home runs and the average weight of the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins offensive line and who was attempting to guard Michael Jordan when he hit that famous last-second shot against Cleveland in the playoffs.

We are the sorts of fans who will talk endlessly-and I do mean endlessly-about how much we'd like to hug Mookie Betts because he's awesome and we love the way he plays baseball and we're sure he'd be the best hugger.

In other words: We're lunatics.

Specifically: Mike is a Boston sports lunatic, which means that no matter how many championships his teams win-and Boston teams have won twelve thousand championships in the last twenty-five years -Mike will never stop believing that the worst is about to happen. Even as a never-ending duck boat parade ambles down Boylston Street, he feels entirely certain that tomorrow the ball will go through Bill Buckner's legs, the Patriots will get stomped by the Bears, and Larry Bird will throw out his back paving his driveway, causing the Celtics to go fallow for decades. Mike lives in a permanent state of terror.

Mike

Joe has been a Cleveland sports fan all his life, which means, in essence, that he has never been happy. He was born in Cleveland on a cold winter day one week before Super Bowl I, and though LIX Super Bowls have been played in Joe's life, there is no Roman numeral for how many his Cleveland Browns have played in. Joe's baseball team has one more name change in his lifetime-from the inappropriate "Indians" to the still weird-seeming "Guardians"-than it has World Series titles. Joe, too, lives in a permanent state of terror.

Joe

We believe there are billions of terror-filled fans around the world who are just like us. They may be cricket fans or team handball fans or hurling fans, but deep down, where it...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Dutton
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798217045112
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Dutton; https://www.penguin.com/dutton-childrens-overview/; ; Im Mittelfeld 25; K?ln; Deutschland; 51105; Deutschland