Save My Tonic Water, Cheer for Harvard

Last Saturday, I was camped out on my trusty futon watching the Notre Dame-Michigan football game. Their rivalry is older than Drew Faust, and both teams sported throw-back uniforms in the hopes of recapturing past glory. The teams may be unimportant to you readers, but the takeaway is that my team (1) lost in heartbreaking fashion. To an impartial observer, it was a great game with little emotional consequence. To me, helpless on my futon, Michigan’s go-ahead score with three seconds on the clock felt as if somebody had taken a fist and tried to knock my stomach out of my body. I was briefly stunned, then filled with an unquenchable rage. My addled brain nixed the obviously dangerous displays of anger: punching walls (2) and/or my celebrating roommates, throwing my television out of the window, throwing myself out of the window. I punched a wall once and it didn’t end well. The problem was, my alternative tactic—yelling non-sensical strings of curse words (3)—did nothing to dissipate my rage. So I settled upon the only reasonable course of action available: spiking (4) the bottle of tonic water that had been sitting inoffensively on the coffee table in front of me. Surely throwing a carbonated beverage on the ground as hard as I could was the thing to do. As you physics majors (5) may have surmised, the bottle did not hold. Seltzer water exploded onto an entire side of my common room: the walls and couch, my buddy on crutches, our tastefully placed wall-hangings, (6) were all drenched. Well, that was dumb.

What led me to lose my mind and Hulk Smash the boring-but-necessary half of our future gin and tonics? And more generally, what is it about football teams that compels people to cover their faces (7) in unhealthy amounts of colored paint, yell obscenities at strangers (8), and pattern their entire weekends around a contest in which people throw, carry around, and kick an inflated piece of leather while garbed in excessive padding and spandex?

For me, it was because the months of lifting and practicing for hours on end had come to nought. Granted, I hadn’t actually been with the team for any of those things, but I felt as if I had been. This is my team. I have cheered for them ever since I was able to understand that the national anthem doesn’t end with “the land of the free, and the home of the Braves”. (9) Actually, I’m sure that my football fanaticism predates my understanding of national symbols (10). Those fat men with gold and blue on their faces that you see in the stands on national TV probably feel similarly.

Notre Dame is the team that I have cheered for through thick and thin, and the school that I ultimately spurned to come to Harvard. But the incredible fanhood that schools such as Notre Dame cultivate within their student bodies is what I feel that Harvard lacks most. There, they cheer for their team as a tangible, unequivocal show of support for their school. The name and color of their school sweatshirts is the same as that of the players’ jerseys. The students love their team, but more than anything, they love their school.

Football games are less of a big deal at Harvard. Students don’t live and die with the sports teams in the way our peers do at other schools. And this lack of passion represents more than apathy about football itself. This lack of passion cannot be explained away because we are “too busy to cross the river” or don’t know the difference between a fumble and a field goal. It can be explained by some combination of the hesitation we feel in admitting our Harvard affiliation and the tendency we have to focus on ourselves as individuals over the community. These reasons prevent us from publicly supporting our alma mater (11) in the way that people normally do, and the way that we should.

But it’s a new season and our chance to support our teams and the people representing our school. So go buy some face paint and a grill; we’ve got a home opener in a week, and we need to start getting rowdy. That’s our team that’s out there.

—Ryan D. Smith ’12 is a Psychology concentrator in Adams House. He is proud to have provided more sports commentary  in this single article than every previous issue of FM combined.

Endnotes:

(1) And God’s team, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.

(2) Drywall is just a pain to replace. As are knuckle joints.

(3) To be fair, they probably sounded more like angry animal noises.

(4) Not the “Oh yay! I just scored a touchdown!” kind of spiking. The “I want to break things” kind of spiking.

(5) Nerds. Just kidding, anybody want to help me on this PS2 PSet??

(6)  Three year-old posters

(7) And/or beer bellies

(8) Especially if they are wearing black and white stripes. (These are the referees for you non-sports people, and they are always wrong. This would have been a footnote within a footnote except my computer would have blown a circuit. When you’re a senior, even your computer is old.)

(9) Another one of my teams, of course.

(10) Priorities, people.

(11) Alumni donations don’t count.