by Jose Mena
Something odd happens every couple of years in this country. We rise from the slumber of our Big Four sports and start deeply caring about events we know next-to-nothing about. Apolo Anton Ohno’s soul patch gains nationwide celebrity, Landon Donovan and Brandi Chastain become cultural icons and “fucking John Shuster” (former US curling skipper) becomes a popular refrain.
It’s doesn’t take a Ph. D. in sociology to figure out why this is. We’re Americans, and we like it when America wins things. Nationalism drives the Women’s World Cup ratings sky-high, all while Women’s Professional Soccer fails in this country. The same impulse that drives us into the streets to celebrate the killing of Osama bin Laden makes us really passionate about competitive swimming.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We haven’t had riots after two consecutive devastating losses to Mexico on home soil in the soccer Gold Cup, and while these games did little to lower the amount of anti-Hispanic racism in this country, at least they haven’t appeared to increase it. We don’t hate the Chinese because they managed more gold medals at the Olympics than we did, and we’re not demonstrating our pain over losing to Japan in the Women’s World Cup by burning Japanese flags and attacking Japanese-Americans. We’re generally pretty rational about our sports, to our credit.
What’s surprising is that we conflate sports with communal identity to begin with. We root for hometown teams, but the choice these days often feels arbitrary. When the Braves and the Phillies play, we’re not bringing up North-South tensions related to the Civil War or race relations. It’s just a NL East divisional matchup. Our sports don’t come with any meaning packaged on top of them, which is why we’re able to play soccer against Japan on German soil without talking about the Second World War.
Internationally, this is an aberration. Abroad, the team you support often ties much more strongly into your concept of who you are as a person and what you stand for. This poses difficulties for the American sports fan trying to get into, say, the Spanish La Liga. We’re front-runners, so 98% of us will choose to follow either Barcelona and Real Madrid; usually the choice is arbitrary or very weakly supported (I follow Barcelona because they play beautiful soccer and an uncle of mine grew up there; guess which is more important). What we’ve failed to realize is that El Clásico is in no way their Red Sox-Yankees match. We stumble by accident into years of political turmoil and social dissent: Barcelona FC is historically representative of Catalan nationalism, and, more importantly, resistance to Franco’s fascist regime. Franco had Barcelona’s president executed during the golpe and heavily backed Real Madrid. They call Barcelona més que un club – more than a club – and it’s not actually hyperbolic.
The Old Firm derby between Rangers and Celtic in Scotland can’t be mentioned without talking about Protestant/Catholic divides, the Northern Ireland issue and hooliganism. The derby della Madonnina in Milan between AC Milan and Inter Milan invokes class warfare. This phenomenon isn’t limited to European soccer – there’s a continual war-by-proxy between India and Pakistan staged through cricket matches. The closest example to home is the Montreal Canadiens, whose defiantly French name and heavily French-Canadian roster and management embody the identity of its city.
It’s tempting to think that we Americans avoid unpleasant overtones in our sport because of some exceptional social pragmatism or modernism. It’s tempting, but not entirely accurate. We’ve had our share of sports rivalries that are conflated with social issues in the past, and we’re lucky to have a number of mitigating factors that keep our sports wonderfully meaningless.
Most notable for their role in American race relations are the Boston Celtics. The Celtics drafted the first black player, sent out the first all-black starting five in the NBA and made Bill Russell the first black coach in the NBA. Russell was an outspoken black superstar in a predominantly white league for a city whose residents vandalized his house with racist graffiti. Russell’s myriad victories and decidedly anti-white stance made him one of the most polarizing figures in NBA history. Later, Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Danny Ainge would stir negative sentiment in the black community for their success in what was seen as a black man’s game. During the Bird era, Boston was notable for its racism, violently protesting busing desegregation, making Bird’s dominance rankle even more, to the point that Spike Lee was driven to run a photo essay for Spin in 1990 calling a black man wearing Celtics gear an "Uncle Tom". Now, in the age of Obama, the Celtics run out Ray Allen, KG, Rajon Rondo, Paul Pierce and Big Baby and nobody blinks an eye. Just as America’s coming full circle on the issue of race, so have the Celtics.
It’s telling, though, that perceptions of the Celtics have shifted so radically through the years. Fans have long memories, and conditions early on in the development of their fandom significantly influence their perceptions through the years. There’s also an element of institutional memory in fanbases, where grudges established decades earlier are maintained and preserved. It’s how the Philadelphia Flyers and Pittsburgh Penguins can remain bitter enemies through Pittsburgh’s time spent in the NHL basement.
More like the crosstown European rivalries mentioned earlier was the Dodgers-Giants rivalry. It, like the Milan derby, began in the early 20th century and it, like the Milan derby, split New York City along class lines. Manhattan elites were pitted against immigrant workers in Brooklyn. Jackie Robinson retired rather than be traded to the Giants, much like players are only very rarely transferred between Real Madrid and Barcelona. Like the Old Firm derby, the Dodger-Giant rivalry has a history of violence, with a brutal attack on a Giants fan in Dodger stadium just this year. While today the rivalry doesn’t carry the socioeconomic significance it did in the past, the class conflict present early on between supporters of these teams set the stage for the most intense rivalry in MLB.
Similar is the rivalry between the Cubs and the White Sox. It’s the same story: affluent North Siders pitted against immigrant and African-American workers of the South Side. The former City Series between the Philadelphia Athletics and Philadelphia Phillies seems to not carry similar acrimony; this appears to be the product of Connie Mack’s desire to make Shibe Park “for the classes as well as for the masses” and the A’s and Phils enjoying somewhat reciprocal success. There needs to be a sporting reason for a rivalry to emerge: the Giants and Jets don’t have a real rivalry because they hardly play each other and the Clippers and Lakers aren’t strong rivals because the Clippers have never been good.
It appears therefore that while we may have fewer modern instances of rivalries that carry meaning beyond sport in America, there’s nothing in our national makeup that makes us somehow more reasonable than the Milanese or Glaswegians. Two factors are at play here. The first is that during the nascent period of American sports, we were largely stable in terms of our society. The Spanish Civil War framed the early days of El Clásico; no such social upheaval influenced young American sport. Second, America is a very large nation, and instances of crosstown rivalries are few and far-between. We are allowed as fans to unite under the banner of our city; when two teams are in the same city, what unites fans isn’t something as innocuous as a metropolitan area. Fans are compelled to find common ground somehow, and in the absence of something as vacuous as common residence they’ll almost invariably find a more significant but more troublesome way to unify themselves.
At the end of the day, it’s not that we Americans are more advanced or pragmatic than our European counterparts. We’re just as prone to ascribing significance to sporting events that shouldn’t actually be there. The primary difference is that there are enough sub-identities in the United States that we are able to put insignificant facades on our sporting matchups, and I think we're better off for it.
Note: This post was conceived largely as a response to an article over at the Run of Play, which you can access here.
Addendum: America is also first and foremost a meritocratic nation. It is therefore wholly possible that our sport is imbued with far more cultural significance than European sport, because all we generally care for our team to do is win. That reflects a wholesale conflation of our national identity (to win is American and to be American is to win) with sport in all regions of the country.
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