Welcome to the Confessional Room. I’m going to let you in on a little secret, one that listeners of the show I co-host are well aware of: I sometimes wish I had been born into Philadelphia sports fandom. I know, I know. It’s bad. But I’m trying to be honest and vulnerable with you, so just give me a second. 

This isn’t something I felt as a youth, when the Cowboys were throwing parades. Not only because the team was winning, but because I would watch the celebrations on television, and it looked like pandemonium. Every adult I knew was obsessed with the Cowboys, I thought, and that worked out well for me, owner of a lunchbox with an image of The Triplets on it. It wasn’t until I was probably a teenager that reality started to sink in: oh, we’re thought of as one of those sports towns. Fair-weather, soft, all sizzle, no substance. It took me a second to put all of this together. We are a metropolis of sprawl, of transplants. We lack a robust public transit system to games to get rowdy aboard. Our stadiums are not in bustling, walkable areas, limiting the rowdiness.

Then I learned what pregame and stadium experiences were like in Philadelphia. It was like I was watching a different sport, one much more akin to the college game: I would hear about opposing team buses getting pelted with objects, and I wanted to be a part of that. The fans truly seemed to live and die with their team. The same could be said for Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Seattle, Green Bay, and a handful of other NFL cities. And then you start to learn about how sports works in the rest of the Western world, particularly European soccer, where supporter groups are akin to labor unions, collectively wielding power and making their voices heard. But the Philadelphia example has always been front and center, as we probably see as many of its games of any team not named the Cowboys.

I’m not saying it’s impossible that a Philadelphia team would have done what the Mavericks did in trading away the city’s favorite son. But it’s as close to impossible as possible. Why? Because 76ers fans would have rioted. Quite literally. Their home games would have had interruptions during play for weeks, and I genuinely believe there is a chance the organization would have had to consider playing a couple of games without fans. (Obviously, the financial considerations would have been steep, but I still think their hand would have been forced.) You don’t become a respected voting bloc without there being a little fear of how you might react.

That is not a dynamic I have ever really been a part of as a sports fan in this town, and this has always bothered me. I grew up in a boisterous home and family; a very “F The Man” situation. It was an environment where getting loud about what you saw as unjust or unfair was kind of the animating principle. For better or worse, we made noise. 

There wasn’t an “aha” moment where I realized that fandom in Dallas was deservedly derided from a national perspective. And it isn’t fully fair to treat fans here like a monolith. I’ve had some of the best times in my life celebrating with hardcore fans in the sports temples of this city. But it’s like there aren’t enough of us, or something. It just feels like ownership and management groups in this city often take fan support for granted, operating with a “well, what are they going to do about it? Most people just want to come to a social event” attitude. And, unfortunately, it appears they’ve usually been correct about that.

But not this time. The response I have seen from this city over the past two months has made me proud to be a Dallas sports fan. I’m no longer a fan of the Dallas Mavericks, but in that process, I gained a lot of respect for this place, for us. I’m not “going to get political on you” here, but I think we all generally share the frustration of being disconnected from the decisions that ultimately decide the shape of our societies. This is eerily similar to the global financial news of the day, but the fact that Luka Doncic will wear purple and gold tonight at the American Airlines Center is the result of one person’s unfathomable actions. This is not complicated or complex, and frankly, the older I get, the more common this seems. Most colossal f-ups get examined to a degree that grinds the story to dust, when the story is straightforward: some guy got really mad at work. I just read a fantastic book about the lead up to World War I, and let me spoil it for you. That whole thing? It’s mostly about a bunch of guys who were really mad at work. 

In general, these organizational failures are about personal insecurities. Usually, those personal insecurities result in private in-fighting and, eventually, firings or resignations. When a power vacuum arises, though, it can cause nuclear damage. And that is all that happened here. I will never get to watch Doncic in a Mavericks jersey again because Nico Harrison was mad at his job and in my view, was too weak to address his anger in a healthy and productive way. His professional failings eliminated a lot of joy from my life: joy that I shared and intended to continue to share with friends and family.

And, of course, it wasn’t just the trade. If you do something remarkably stupid because you’re mad at your job, the stupid thing you’ve done is just the beginning. Then, because you’re still mad, you go ahead (with the help of your boss) and perform a case study on how not to handle a public relations crisis. You trash one of our heroes directly (Doncic) and one of them indirectly (Dirk). 

Basically, if you’re still someone who supports the Mavs, you have decided there is absolutely nothing the team could ever do with regard to handling the basketball team—let’s exclude non-basketball situations—that would result in your withdrawing that support. If that’s how you feel, that’s how you feel. 

I do not feel that way. I will never support the Dallas Mavericks as long as Harrison and Patrick Dumont are involved. That personal decision will not affect those two individuals or their operation in any way whatsoever. Ironically, I have always been in the camp that you can’t just jump ship on your home team, no matter how dire the straits. The reason for that was loyalty, the virtue represented on Dirk’s statue outside of the AAC. Again, if you still feel Dumont and Harrison deserve your loyalty, that’s your choice.

There is no question I was more comfortable making this decision because of the collective response to Harrison’s failings. I’ve never witnessed fans in this city stand up like this, and people much older than me who have seen a lot more have echoed similar sentiments. It might seem like faint praise to congratulate the fan base for bucking back when all it took was the most illogical, disrespectful trade in the history of sports. But I don’t care. I’ve enjoyed watching, and being a part of, a group of people that loudly said, “You thought it was going to be one way, but it’s the other way.”

So now, about tonight. I will be attending, just as I plan to at least once a year when Doncic is in town. The tickets will not be cheap, but this will be the only occasion I will go to an NBA game in Dallas for the foreseeable future. Watching Doncic in person is worth putting money in the Dumont coffers once a year, as much as it pains me. It will be like my own Mavericks “Dia De Los Muertos,” when I celebrate and remember the past. I not only won’t be cheering for the Mavericks; my sole purpose for being there is to support Doncic and witness his mastery in person, as was previously a regular part of my life. I want Doncic to channel the disdain I have for his former employers into scoring many, many baskets, making passes only an alien would attempt, and talking trash to Mavs fans (and hopefully their owner) the entire time. I never want that to fade. Every time he returns to Dallas, I want him to know that a significant part of that building swore off ever fully loving the Mavericks again after he was done the way he was. And I want him to know that none of us swore him off, too.

I’d certainly rather have Doncic playing for, rather than just in, Dallas. But if nothing else, I have learned something about us over the last couple of months. I’m as proud to be a former MFFL as I was to be an active one. There are a lot of us, and in return for the joy Doncic brought us, I hope he feels that loyalty for three hours tonight. It’s the least we can do.

Jake Kemp covers the Cowboys and Mavericks for StrongSide. He is a lifelong Dallas sports fan who previously worked for…