Why Are We Getting So Worked Up About Justin Bieber's Sports Jerseys?

From Esquire

Justin Bieber looks cool in a Pittsburgh Penguins jersey. Justin Bieber also looks cool in a New York Rangers jersey, and an Edmonton Oilers one. He has looked cool in a Cleveland Cavaliers tank, and a Barcelona top, and in any of about two dozen of the other teams he's repped from his endless rotating closet of sporting attire. He might even be able to look cool in a baseball jersey, were he to wear one-something almost no one has ever been able to do before in history.

This is, in part, because Justin Bieber, more often than not, ends up looking cool. Granted, that's something that's a lot easier to pull off when you have an endless budget, and wearing clothes is approximately 50 percent of your job description. But as a recent flair-up about Bieber's fair-weather fandom has pointed out, Bieber has been able to transcend what has long been considered a taboo of fandom fashion, simply because he doesn't seem to care all that much about the teams in question.

He defended himself in a Twitter thread last night, saying that, while he's most naturally aligned with his hometown Toronto Maple Leafs, he's really more concerned about how the jersey looks, provincial allegiances be damned.

And what's more-he doesn't really know all that much about the ins and outs of various teams. He's just a fan of the concept of sporting competition.

How cool is that? If that's not sports at its purest, I don't know what is.

Naturally, he came under heavy fire for his admission, which is the natural state of existing as Bieber doing anything. Balanced out, of course, with an equal helping of obsessive fawning.

"Justin Bieber, I say this as politely as possible...don't you ever fucking wear a Pittsburgh Penguin jersey again," wrote one critic on Twitter. "No you don't know enough. So stop putting your nose in things that don't involve you. You are desperate to be centre of attention," added another. It's a similar line of attack to the one often leveled at Drake, himself known for shifting allegiances, depending on whatever celebrity friends of his happen to be competing in a championship at the moment.

But ask yourself this: Which is, all things considered, the weirder way of thinking here? Being the type of person who puts on an item of clothing that looks good, because it looks good? Or being the type of person who applies a de facto aptitude test to anyone else for their sartorial choices?

Oh, so you're a fan of the Red Sox huh? What did Carl Yastrzemski bat in 1967? Thought so. It happens when it comes to music as well, any time a celebrity or a model stumbles out of a car wearing a vintage Metallica T-shirt or the like. "I bet he doesn't even listen to Metallica," we say. He hasn't accrued the threshold of experience points necessary to wear that particular item of stitched and screen-printed cotton.

But there is no such thing as stolen valor when it comes to sports fandom or fandom of any kind. This isn't the Marines. There are, quite literally, no rules about what anyone can or should wear.

Except for this one: There is nothing cool about being a diehard fan. Particularly when it comes to sports. Yes, supporting your favorite team is exhilarating and often thrilling, though more frequently crushing and monotonous. But it will never, ever be cool-at least not in the traditional, rebellious sense-to be a true believer for a sports team. Because it requires, in the type of all-or-nothing allegiance-pledging we're talking about here, subsuming your identity to a corporation that does not care about you, and exists simply to extract money from your wallet while convincing you you're part of a cultural identity group. This is why it's always so corny when you see a grown man wearing a jersey of his favorite team to the game. Intentionality matters here. That guy thinks he's on the team. He thinks he's authentic, that he's earned his mustard-stained, faded Jeter jersey.

Bieber, on the other hand, is self-aware enough to know he's not on the team and he never will be, and that his knowledge of its players and stats has no bearing on anything. Sometimes a shirt is just a shirt. The rest of us, the Real Sports Fans in our authentic jerseys, who live and die by the fortunes and misfortunes of the big strong boys out on the field or the court or the ice? We care way too much about what happens. Bieber doesn't care. And there's nothing cooler than that.

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