Michael Schur, Joe Posnanski explore the meaning of fandom in ‘Big Fan’

Michael Schur and Joe Posnanski are award-winning writers and New York Times bestselling authors who co-host the podcast The PosCast. 

Schur is best known for his work as a TV writer (Parks and Recreation, The Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), not to mention one of the creators of the iconic Fire Joe Morgan blog. Posnanski was a longtime sports columnist.

Now, for the first time, they collaborated on a book. Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love explores what it means to be a fan. While it’s mostly about sports, it also touches on pop culture. The book will be available for purchase on May 19 and includes a foreword from Tom Hanks. 

We caught up with Schur and Posnanski to discuss their new book.

Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

How did this idea come about?

Michael Schur: “I got sent a video by a friend who said, ‘Hey, you’ve got to watch this. It’s hilarious.’ It was from the World Darts Championship in London. It was fun because I only knew, like, 70% of what was going on. But the most fun part was the shots of the fans. The fans are going bananas with every throw. They’re all in costume for some reason, which was difficult to understand. They’re dressed as Minions and Harry Potters and stuff.”

“I just had this feeling that fandom is a very intense pathology shared by a lot of people. And I certainly have it. I realized in that moment that Joe has it too. I had this idea. We should go to all these events all over the world, not the Super Bowl and the World Series, but weird sporting events, and write about them.”

What was your reaction, Joe?

Joe Posnanski: “It sounded like the most fun thing in the world. I distinctly remember him saying, ‘I have this feeling these people are just like us as fans. They feel the same things we’re feeling. Here’s this sport we don’t really understand, but this feeling I do understand. We should go chasing that feeling.’ It kind of fits our friendship anyway. We just constantly push each other to do fun stuff.”

While this book is a collaboration, you did not always attend these events together?

Michael Schur: “We really wanted the book to have a bunch of different kinds of storytelling. Some of it was best when the two of us were together, but there were certain stories where I was like, ‘This fits Joe’s writing style better than mine, or vice versa.’ So the chapters have a different feel. Some of them are collaborative. Some of them are individual. We did one thing: we decided that we would each make the other do something they hate. ‘I know you hate this, but a lot of people love it.’ Maybe there’s value in going to see something and trying to identify what other people love about it. So, I sent Joe to pickleball because he hates pickleball more than anything in the world. He sent me to WrestleMania because I hate wrestling.”

Was that difficult?

Joe Posnanski: “It’s an ongoing discussion. I went to the Indigenous World Series Stickball, a wild event just outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Mike can come. Mike is very much a part of that chapter. And I would say the same things I said when Mike wrote about his incredibly intense NBA fandom. I’m very much a part of that conversation. So, I think what we realized early on was that if we went to everything together and wrote it the same way, it would begin to lose the magic we were hoping for. Each chapter has its own thing, but there’s a little piece of us in every chapter.”

What event did you both go to together that you both enjoyed?

Joe Posnanski: “The World Darts Championship. That was sort of at the heart of the book. We had to do that. We had an absurdly good time considering we had no idea what was going on. It was true utter chaos and mayhem. It was so absurd, so funny, and so ridiculous, but it was the perfect place to kick off this book for us, because this was obviously the inspiration for Mike. It was weirder than we thought it was going to be. I thought that was a blast.”

What was the strangest thing about it?

Michael Schur:  “We met a buddy of ours who has worked for a bunch of different sports networks. He is wired into all of these sports and helped us with a lot of logistics. He was like, ‘You’re going to the darts tonight. Are you going like that?’ We were like, ‘What do you mean?’ We were wearing jeans and T-shirts. And he said, ‘All right,’ like we were the weirdos. Then we got to the Alexandra Palace, where the darts are held. We were like, ‘Oh, he’s right. We are the weirdos,’ because every single person there was in costume.”

What were you hoping to achieve with Big Fan?

Joe Posnanski: “Mike’s a crazy Boston fan. I’m a crazy Cleveland fan. And it’s what we talk about all the time. I think we thought we’d go out into the world to see all these different kinds of fandom, again, not just sports. Star Wars fans, television fans, and fans of everything. And what is this going to tell us about our own fandom, why it matters so much to us, and what it does for us? We talked to a professor named Daniel Wann, who has spent his life studying fandom.”

What did you learn from Murray State professor Daniel Wann?

Michael Schur: “One of the things he said was, ‘Yes, there’s an aspect of fandom that’s about group identity. That’s obvious, right? It’s fun to be in a concert hall with 60,000 people who all love the same band. That’s a very simple and straightforward element of fandom. There’s another aspect to it, a corollary to that: sometimes fandom is a way for you to express individuality.’”

“We all know people who are sort of contrarians, or whose personalities are more in the challenger world. They grew up in Columbus, Ohio. They see everyone wearing red and white, and they’re like, you know what, screw this. I’m a Michigan fan.”

The book also covers music fandom. Do you have a fun example of it?

Michael Schur: “I interviewed my friend, Cord Jefferson, who’s a screenwriter. He’s an enormous Steely Dan fan. It’s been a real sore spot in our friendship.  ‘That band sucks. How did you become a Steely Dan fan?’ So I decided to interview him about it. He said he felt like a weird outsider growing up. He’s a biracial kid who grew up in Tucson, Arizona. He (lived) in Saudi Arabia. He never felt like he fit in anywhere. And so he heard this music, and everyone was telling him Steely Dan sucks. The more people said that, the more he loved them. It was really wild. In my own life, I know multiple examples of this exact phenomenon.”

How did you get Tom Hanks to write the foreword?

Joe Posnanski: “Here’s the best part. Tom Hanks did not actually write the foreword. This is the ultimate flex. Tom Hanks wrote me; he’s written me several fan letters. There’s no other way to describe them other than fan letters. I told him about Big Fan before we even started on it. He wrote this truly beautiful letter about his own fandom, as a fan of hockey and Aston Villa. I sent it to Mike, just kind of as a funny, like, ‘Can you believe this? I’m getting this kind of letter from Tom Hanks.’ Mike said, ‘This would be a great foreword.’

“I’ve never met Tom Hanks. All I’ve gotten are letters from him. But we somehow got word to him, and he, within seconds, said, ‘Yeah, sure, go ahead and use it. Absolutely.’”