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Brian Phillips on rooting for the underdog in the NCAA tournament.
Excerpt:
Why root for an underdog? The desire to do so is ancient, of course — even older than the NCAA tournament.... Children, given a choice between two sports teams and no information, will almost always gravitate toward the one that’s winning. It’s only when you’ve seen a little more life that you start to pine for the upset.
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I keep thinking about a famous thing Roger Angell wrote about the Mets, back when they were a new franchise totally overshadowed by the Yankees.3 [fn3-So, uh, nothing like today, then.] Angell’s passage makes a simple point in a lovely way, like a lot of the best sportswriting. He’s been listening to some New Yorkers criticize the Mets roster — a bunch of bums, not fit to set foot in Yankee Stadium — and he writes:
I recognised the tone. It was knowing, cold, full of the contempt that the calculator feels for those who don’t play the odds. It was the voice of the Yankee fan. The Yankees have won the American League pennant twenty times in the past thirty years; they have been the world’s champion sixteen times in that period. Over the years, many of their followers have come to watch them with the stolidity, the smugness, and the arrogance of blue-chip stocks. These fans expect no less than perfection. They coolly accept the late-inning rally, the winning homer, as only their due. They are apt to take defeat with ill grace, and they treat their stars as though they were executives hired to protect their interests. During a slump or a losing streak, these capitalists are quick and shrill with their complaints: “They ought to do better than this, considering what they’re being paid!”
Suddenly the Mets fans made sense to me. What we were witnessing was precisely the opposite of the kind of rooting that goes on across the river. This was the losing cheer, the gallant yell for a good try — antimatter to the sounds of Yankee Stadium. This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us.
There is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. Isn’t rooting for the underdog more a matter of whom you choose to identify with than anything else? A matter of with whom you elect to make common cause? After all, what Angell writes is not quite true, is it? There is not more Met than Yankee in the cold-eyed executives and capitalists Angell pulls into his metaphors — or if there were, they would never admit it. There’s not more Met than Yankee in most 9-year-olds, who still believe that they’re going to be the president and a karate star and an arctic explorer. I wrote before that rooting for underdogs requires an outlook. This is also a simple point, but I think that the outlook it requires involves the recognition that the world is not transparent to your desires — that privilege is not always a reflection of merit, that the game is often rigged, that what you deserve is seldom what you get. Most of us learn this at some point. Some people never learn it, and they have been Red Sox fans for going on 10 years now.
What I’m saying is that sports, if you have any investment in it at all, is always a metaphor for something. You don’t root for underdogs if, because of innocence or its opposite, you see the game as a metaphor for the world as it ought to be. You start rooting for underdogs when you see the game as a metaphor for the world as it is. |
http://grantland.com/features/2014-ncaa ... gs-dayton/
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