A couple of weeks ago, I wrote this Note about Timothée Chalamet’s lifelong obsession with the New York Knicks. Now, the team is only one win away from clinching its first championship since 1973.
It goes without saying, I have no interest in basketball.
But I love it when people love things.
When people are fans of something with their entire beings.
When they don’t downplay it. They don’t cringe.
They wear it on their sleeves.
And Timmy has always done this for the Knicks.
As a born and bred New Yorker, Timmy has supported the team since he was a kid, and this has resulted in some pretty funny old photos reappearing on our feeds, like this:
At 14, I was peak fangirl. But I would never, ever want people to know the extent of my obsessions.
Nicola Muthurangu-Hall and I have talked about this extensively on our podcast, Emotionally Invested Podcast , as both of us grew up living parallel lives just a few miles away, obsessively scrolling Wikipedia pages and making collages of our favourite celebrities.
I use it in jest, but even the term ‘fangirl’ infers that any such interests are just flights and fancies of young teenage girls. I’ve written about the infantilisation of teenage girls and their interests before, so I won’t go too much into that.
If you want to read about the power of teenage girls and their impact on the economy, check out this piece by Nia in Not Controversial:
Instead, I want to focus on the feeling I get when I see Timmy’s undying love for the Knicks. He wears the colours, he’s at every game (he even skipped the Met Gala TWICE), and he posts about them all the time.
Loving something so intensely has never been particularly cool. For boys, it’s a little easier, especially with sports teams. For many girls like myself growing up in the 90s, cutting out pictures of our crushes, making collages, sticking pictures on our walls and reading inside CD sleeves were all regular activities.
At the risk of sounding old, there were no social media platforms. It was not performative. It was a real, pure love. A never-ending source of dopamine.
Scouring Limewire for a bootleg of my favourite song I’d never heard before, uploading it to my MP3 player to listen to in bed over and over again.
Getting my Mam to drive me to the big Sainsbury’s on release day of a new album.
Flicking through DVDs in Virgin Mega Store, looking for an early feature starring my favourite actor.
All of these things were unbelievably satisfying.
Why?
Because they took time.
You had to work to get them. Now, if I want a new album or to watch a film, I can do it immediately. Don’t get me wrong, I love streaming shit. But part of me longs for that time when you had to wait to find something. Bring back the family computer.
And that’s why the photo of 14-year-old Timmy on a scavenger hunt to meet players from his favourite team has hit so hard. When you love something so, so much and you simply don’t care what people think.
Timmy fangirls for the Knicks, I fangirl for Timmy.
Everything is right with the world once again.
(It’s not, but you can give me this.)
I’m Ellen, and I write about mental health for the chronically online. I am a freelance copywriter, strategist and web designer, and I work from home at Content By The Sea. I have two rescue greyhounds, Potter and Harmony, and a human daughter.
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