I inherited many things from my father, some more beneficial than oth-ers. On the positive side, there is my love of the life of the mind and a deep passion for liberal politics. Of more dubious benefit, my fondness for alcohol and anything fried and salty. But there is one gift from Dad that has truly helped define me: a crazy love of sports. My father was a fan, with an emphasis on “fanatic.” As such, my father passed on his Rules of Rooting, based on the premise that one can always find a reason to cheer on a team.
Rule 1: You support your own team. This may seem obvious, but being a true supporter is not for the faint of heart. Your team represents you and your philosophy. Sure, you root for the hometown team, or where you went to college, but if you have a choice in that, you should pick the team that needs you most (i.e., the losers). Not the perennial winners who are easy to love, but rather the scrappy also-rans. And when your team loses, over and over again, you wear those losses with a badge of honor and a certain amount of pride. Part of rooting for your team entails never giving up on them. You never leave a game early. Dad did not care if it was 20–0 in the bottom of the ninth, you did not leave. Some will say this is because you don’t want to miss that rare but amazing come-from-behind victory, but that is not the reason. You don’t leave because this is your team. They are playing for you and it is dishonorable to give up on them. If you do leave early, you run the risk of the ultimate insult: You are just like those Dodger fans, who leave early to avoid traffic. (Shudder.) If by some stroke of good fortune your team wins it all, you revel in it, but with a certain sense of embarrassment. We are not supposed to win—obviously there has been some mistake.
Rule 2: You can always root for the underdog. The lowest seed, the poorest team, the ones with no business being there. And if they win, you have the sweet feeling of scoring one for the little guy.
Rule 3 (and most sacrosanct): You always root against the Yankees. This rule may be modified, depending on season and sport, to substitute the Dallas Cowboys, Notre Dame, or Duke. The sad irony now is that my favorite team, the Florida Gators, has joined the pantheon of winning teams people love to hate. But that is the cross the true fan must bear.
After these rules there is a complicated calculus of rooting that could involve when the team integrated, does it have a black coach, is it owned communally (one can always support the Green Bay Packers). All part of his theory of “sports socialism.”
Having set up the parameters of fandom, I want to share three sports memories of my father. The first is from my sophomore year in college. This was not a great year for Dad, the last before he stopped drinking. But he was thrilled I was in NYC, and though my college (Barnard) did not have a football team, he was excited to support Columbia’s, so off we went each weekend to watch the Lions play. If you know anything about the years 1984–88 (my college years), you’ll know that Columbia lost ev ery single game it played. In fact, it broke the record for most consecutive losses in college football. This was my dad’s kind of team!
The second memory is from when he had lung surgery and was recovering in the hospital. It was during the Super Bowl, so Dad and I watched the game together. We ate salty snacks and rooted for the New England Patriots, complete underdogs and supposedly totally outmatched against the powerful St. Louis Rams. New England won, thus beginning a football dynasty we now root against—sports is very complicated.
The last memory is the Saturday before he died. The big bash for my stepmother’s seventieth birthday was winding down and we were sitting downstairs. I knew he must have been incredibly tired, but he turned to me and said, somewhat imperiously, “Now we will watch the game.” He had taped the Florida-Georgia football game (a huge rivalry) and wanted to share it with me, even though he knew who had won. So I watched the game, and my dad watched me, in my crazy sports-fanatic mode, whoopin’ and hollerin’, as my beloved Gators crushed the Dogs. I left the next day before he woke up; he died three days later.
So I think of my father now, as I root for the woefully inept Washington Nationals (my new home team), and bask in the glow of the underdog candidate becoming president, and I know he would be exceedingly proud that his legacy continues in me.