...for the Beavers. If you can't stop simple run plays then you don't deserve to win. It does hurt, but it's almost better that they lost big and not on some last-second field goal. It really seemed like I was watching a different team out there; the offense was fine, even though having Quizz would have given us a run game and might have changed things, just like a couple blown calls could have changed things. But it wasn't close enough for those kinds of excuses to register much validity. You don't give up 700 yards and win a game.
Plus, we've won the last two against the Ducks, so they were kind of due. It looked like the extra week to prepare really helped, given the way they picked apart our defense. And that was no coincidence. The Ducks did not want to lose to us three straight years.
So no Rose Bowl. It was a good season, though, and once again Riley's team over-performed. At the beginning of this season I thought it would be a rebuilding year. I'm just hoping that one of these years we'll be able to put it altogether and make a more dominant run for the Roses, in a year when the Pac-10 is a bit stronger.
Alas, I'll end with a philosophical question. Is there anything else in life comparable to sports, in that it matters so much (to some people at least), but over which you have no control whatsoever? It doesn't matter how hard you cheer or how much your care, what happens on the field will happen regardless of the intensity of your fanhood. I would love not to be a sports fan, but I'm beyond having the luxury of choice in that matter; it sure would save me a lot of time and heartache, especially given the fact that basically all my teams suck, and probably always will.
And I still hate the Ducks. But what fun is sports without an enemy to loathe?
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- Sam Schwartz
- This blog is thematized around my primary interests: literature, politics, American culture, and family. I've recently become a father to Ada Violet Schwartz (she has her own blog [see below]), and I've spent the last 10 years with my wife Michele, roaming around Oregon, Tennessee, and Arizona. One of my primary reasons for starting this blog is that I've never spent much time writing anything other than academically-oriented literary criticism; I'm hoping that engaging with other topics will enliven and improve both my prose and the thought behind the prose.
4 comments:
I find it interesting that you feel you have no choice but to be a fan. I still struggle with the illogic of fanhood. Some days I’m able to convince myself that I’m beyond the reach of sports. I’m able feign indifference for a while, but inevitably I soon find myself emotional invested in the outcome of a game, to the point where I cannot watch. When it’s not one of my teams, it is almost always a game in which the heavy underdog manages to compete with the obnoxious favorite (e.g. Duke, Lakers, Yankees, Notre Dame (in the past, of course)). That emotional involvement will start to wan if I see (or think I see) a lack of “heart” in the players. If they don’t seem to want to win, why should I care if they win. (This explains why I generally find collegiate sports more compelling than professional sports.) But, what has always bugged my about being a fan is that the joy of winning is always less than the pain of losing. It feels like an investment that is never fully rewarded.
That is undoubtedly true, since I think sports fans usually expect their team to win, or eventually go deep into the playoffs, even if statistically, winning the championship of any league is highly improbable. And if you expect to win, or at least have legitimate hope of winning, it lessens the impact when your team actually wins. Since being a sports fan is essentially irrational (given that it makes you believe wins and losses are less arbitrary and prone to chance as they actually are), it makes sense that despite being rarely rewarded for our fandom, we always return.
Maybe a bit like sex...no matter how many time a desire is quenched, another desire replaces it.
Lastly, I think sports is the main vehicle in America for expressing your geographic pride. If the South had had the SEC after the Civil War, Reconstruction might have been much more rapid.
For me I think that being a fan of sports goes back to actually being an athlete once in my life. Because of my experiences, I know how much it means to win and just how much "team" means to you when you are really invested. It's the same reason why I always cry at sports movies, no matter what sport because I've been in those situations and I can feel what they are feeling.
I think the best sports movies are always baseball movies. I wonder why that is. Though I'd love to see a more unconventional sports movie now and then that actually dealt with the banality of losing (and even of winning), in which the team loses and learns no lessons. Actually it might be kind of funny.
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