To some people, sports allegiances are curious things – remnants of an odd evolutionary instinct to form tribes and throw stones at the other hominids who live over the hill. To others they’re a chance to join something larger than themselves that has no moral, theological or financial backstory. Something with heritage and pageantry that provides a weekend diversion whose importance seems terribly vital at the moment, but means little in the end beyond diversion and hail-fellow-well-met bonding with likeminded supporters. It’s going to be a great game, eh? Pass me a stone.
I suppose I fall into the former camp, since I don’t follow sports any more and cannot graph my emotional state to coincide with the fortunes of the local teams. But if you can’t understand the pleasures of a good game and what it means to people, you are, to use the term preferred by sociologists, a wet-blanket wiener.
I went to the Gopher-Bison game with my Dad yesterday. He’s a Bison booster. I should be a Gopher; I attended the U, and I’ve been here longer than I lived in North Dakota. I could have donned my anthropological cap and found it all terribly amusing: fight fiercely, costumed representatives of my preferred, arbitrarily delineated political sub-group! But from the first seconds of the game I wanted the Bison to win. It might have had something to do with the Underdog Mystique – even though the Bison were undefeated, they’re from humble NoDak, and have nothing at home like the grand Dome in which to play. Their marching band was small; the Gophers marching band poured out of the tunnels like army ants, hundreds strong. The Bison had no flashy graphics to reward their first downs, no cannons, no hometown announcer rooting for their triumphs.
But they were the Bison. That was the name in the paper when I grew up, the name on the fieldhouse down the street, the name on the radio on autumn weekends. You find yourself choosing between your adopted home and the state where you were born, and a decision about you never expected to care one whit is made without hesitation or effort. GO BISON.
When Tyler Roehl made his first 70-plus yard run for a TD, my dad said: he’s from West Fargo. Imagine that! A kid from North Dakota, playing for the University of North Dakota, the way you think it’s supposed to be. You could put yourself in his shoes, running through enemy terrain in the big house in the big city; what a wonderful moment in a young person’s life. You could build a three-unit sports-bar operation in Fargo out of that achievement alone.
The Bison have “22 fewer scholarship players, (and do) not have one player who was offered a scholarship to Minnesota.”
Heh.
Team names
I have always been amused by the names that universities give to their teams, apparently without thinking about how it looks in re other teams. UMTC has a rather unfortunate choice. I would think that yesterdays game when Bison played against Gophers would be a rather lopsided game. In regular Big 10 play, I am not sure that I would want to watch a UMTC, UW Madison ( YAY!) game. Badgers vs Gophers sounds like it would be a short, and from the Gophers point of view, very exciting game. Not, perhaps, the sort of thing you would want the children to see. And how humiliating for UW when Minnesota wins, Mighty Badgers brought down by mere rodents! Now UW Madison (YAY!) vs University of Michigan Wolverines, that sounds like a game that would be Fought Fiercely, as Tom Lehrer would have it.