The Fans Are What Make This Bucks Title Special

If we learned one thing about sports during the pandemic—other than the fact that, if their financial well-being is even slightly threatened for half a second, every sports league will power through the worst public health crisis in a century like a linebacker in the open field—it’s that sports need fans. Try going back and looking at highlights from any game played after Covid hit in 2020. It feels antiseptic and artificial, like it’s a simulation of a sporting event, or a glorified scrimmage, rather than a live one. The clank of foul balls off empty metal seats, the shrill squeaking of sneakers on the hardwood, the maddening, droning fake crowd noise, everything about sports without fans made the games smaller and more inconsequential. It made them feel like they didn’t count.

On Tuesday night, the Milwaukee Bucks beat the Phoenix Suns 105-98 to win the 2021 NBA Finals, thanks mostly to an otherworldly performance from Giannis Antetokounmpo, a two-time NBA MVP who nonetheless looked like he’d unlocked some skill level heretofore unavailable to those of mortal flesh. It was a terrific, sometimes transcendent series, with two well-coached, hungry teams. But I suspect the lasting takeaway, outside of Giannis’ confirmation as an all-time great, will be the fans. I do not remember hearing a sports arena louder than Milwaukee’s poorly-named-but-likely-still-shaking-this-morning Fiserv Forum last night. I do not know what the rapture will sound like, but it has to be something like this, yes?

The Milwaukee Bucks are one of the NBA’s longest-suffering fanbases, a loyal and vast gaggle of Midwesterners in a basketball-mad state that have gotten used, over the last 50 years, to seeing other, flashier, warmer cities celebrate, often with players who had bolted from Milwaukee. The original sin was Lew Alcindor, as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was known when he played in Milwaukee, leaving for multiple championships in Los Angeles four years after winning the Bucks a title; Ray Allen would eventually follow a similar path to the Celtics and Heat. The Bucks have not been a sad-sack franchise like, say, the Knicks; they’ve been regular playoff participants for most of those 50 years. (They made the postseason year every year in the ‘80s and only had one major drought from 1992-98.) But they never made it very far in the playoffs, never reaching even the Finals despite making the postseason 27 times. Bucks fans are forever being thwarted.

Suns fans can relate—they still have never won a title, ever, and who knows when they’ll ever get this close again—but this is the sort of breakthrough that rarely happens in the NBA, or in sports. It usually is the Lakers, or the Patriots, or the Red Sox, or a team whose fans get to debate whether this title was better than that title. It’s a title that every fan of every sadsack team dreams about, when all the frustration is released, when all the stupid time you spent following this stupid team every stupid year … finally pays off. When that one special player shows up, and stays, and wins.

It all comes together, and 50 years of being thwarted, of watching everyone else have fun without you, it all vanishes, and also you’ve just gone through one of the most harrowing periods in global history and now you’re suddenly shoulder-to-shoulder with tens of thousands of people who have gone through all this with you for all these years, and after not being able to unleash it all for so long, now, now you can. This is the time to lose your goddamn shit.

Years like this are always a little bit more special. It can be fun, I guess, to see a LeBron James or a Tom Brady add to their historical trophy case, but Milwaukee’s win is rarer, and more pleasantly regional. These Bucks, and Giannis specifically, are intricately tied up with the larger Wisconsin community; remember, the Bucks were the team that decided to stop playing in the bubble last year after the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. Giannis is beloved in the area in way few others are in any city, largely because of the sense, one also held by Giannis himself, that he has grown up there, that he has matured into the player and person he is with the entire city alongside him. This is a player who once hitched a ride with fans because he ran out of cab fare.

These are the titles that tend to last. The 2016 Cubs. The 2010 Saints. The 2004 Red Sox. The 1994 Rangers. The teams that reward long-suffering fanbases with the fruits of their labors. If the Browns or Bills ever win the Super Bowl, if the Maple Leafs ever win the Stanley Cup again, if Georgia wins the college football national championship, this is what it will feel like: Like an entire geographic region is euphoric, drained, restored.

That it happened on the heels of a time when there were no fans in the stands at all, with the games occurring in large petri dishes, made all those screams louder, made it all hit that much harder. What are sports supposed to be about? Teams win, teams lose, players succeed, players fail, everybody makes a bunch of money and the machine keeps rolling along. But moments like this, when it all comes together, and after decades of waiting, your feet rise above the ground and your brain falls out of your head and all the hairs on your body stand on end, this is the pinnacle. Fans are what sports are. And fans don’t get happier, and sports don’t get any better, than what Bucks fans and Giannis are getting to experience right now. Someday this could be you, and your team. It might not be. It probably won’t be. But it could be. And that’s why you keep watching. That’s why we all do.

Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, national columnist for MLB, a writer for Medium and the founder of Deadspin. Subscribe to his free weekly newsletter and buy his novel “How Lucky,” out from Harper Books now.