I'll confess something to you. I own a single piece of St. Louis Rams merchandise, a lowly t-shirt that I bought a few years back. It was a replacement for the Rams t-shirt that I had before it, which finally fell apart. Those two shirts got me through since my junior year in college.
I'm 35.
I never considered owning a particular amount of merchandise as a prerequisite for being a fan. Mostly, I'm just set in my ways. Only my wife, with threats, forced me to change in my wardrobe choices, convincing me that it was, in fact, perfectly acceptable to wear clothes that were not two sizes too large and did not have stains on them to work. Even that only went so far.
However, I'm not really here to talk about my preference for wearing plain t-shirts in warm weather and dark colored sweaters in the winter. I was really just making a confession about how I represent my fandom, my Rams fandom.
I chose to start a blog, and I feel like that was a pretty big commitment to take as a fan. I liked to write, and at the time, I was living in Washington, DC, I thought it would be a good way to stay connected. Obviously, I put a ton of time into said blog. Hell, sometimes I wish I just got a damn tattoo and followed someone else's web site. But that would be dishonest.
I can't let myself get down the rabbit hole of fan psychology. Besides, the federales have warned me before about pretending to be a doctor. The point I'm trying to make is that we all wear our fandom in different ways.
And I want to know how you do it, how you partake in being a Rams fan. Maybe it's an OCD-like game day routine. Maybe you named your child after Jack Youngblood. Maybe you still haven't washed that hand Eric Dickerson signed back in 1986.
Tell us about it, or, better yet, show us. Tells us about that routine or that once in a lifetime experience. Show us the professional face paint job you get decked out to watch the game in your basement. Show us that Trung Candidate tattoo across your back you got when you just knew he would be the next big thing. Post it in the comments, fan shots, link to it...do whatever.
I can rattle off stats all day, but when it comes right down to it, TST is a community of the fans, a very big and growing community of the fans.