High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [28]
“But it’s the same players,” you persist, not wanting to make a fuss, but really. Once a galoot, always a galoot, it would seem to you. Nobody changes that much in two weeks, barring a religious experience, or steroids.
He sighs then, and patiently explains the hierarchy of loyalties: First you root for your home team. Then, if they’re out of the picture, you root for other members of your conference.
“Even the Sun Devils?” you ask, dismayed. The Devils are your hometown team’s nearest and bitterest rivals. The peak experience for a Devils fan is to sneak into Tucson and paint some important civic landmark such as the mayor in their school’s colors.
“If the Devils were the only PAC 10 team left in the tournament, then sure, I’d want them to win.” In an entirely even tone he says this perfectly preposterous thing, as if he is a chemistry professor announcing to an earnest, note-taking classroom that a new element in the periodic table of elements has been named after Donald Duck.
I’ve heard it many times. Not lately—it’s been years, in fact, since Devils or Wildcats or Buffalo Bills or anything in tight pants and a helmet came into my house, because no one here is that interested. We tend to hold with Lorena Hickok, a columnist in the 1920s for the Minneapolis Morning Tribune, who observed of college football that “you might just as well put in your time watching a lot of ants running in and out of their hole. That is, if there isn’t anything else you’d rather be doing right then.” I’m sorry if I’m tipping sacred cows here. I don’t mean to say I’m above watching organized sports. Possibly below it, for the fact is I’d rather watch ants. Draw your own conclusions.
But I am interested in sports as a concept, especially where it serves, like religion, as a touchstone for essential human longings. The entitlement to root for a different team each week is a little baffling, when held against other things we’re supposed to take as self-evident. Love is eternal, isn’t it? What is this slippery business, this hierarchy of shifting loyalties that glide in and out of place as methodically as the gears on a racing bike taking a hill? At first I suspected this creative fudge of allegiance had something to do with gender. I figured it was just one more, of those mysteries withheld from women but revealed to men in their tender boyhoods, along with oil level vs. oil pressure, and how to believe you still look fine in a swimsuit once you’ve acquired love handles.
Determined to get to the bottom of it, I phoned a friend who has season tickets and wouldn’t for love nor money miss an Arizona Wildcats game. And who is female. “Oh, no, I’d never root for the Sun Devils,” she said without hesitation. “As far as I’m concerned it’s Arizona or nobody.”
Why? It’s personal, she explained. After watching those six-foot-ten-and-still-growing boys play ball every Thursday night, you feel you know them. It’s like they’re your kids.
My friend paused; her tone was not all that maternal. “And let’s face it,” she added, “they’ve got great buns.”
She allowed that her husband didn’t share this outlook. “Oh, sure, he roots for other PAC 10 teams when they’re not playing the Wildcats,” she told me with a hint of scorn. “He’ll root for anybody.”
What is loyalty worth, if it’s situational? This trend I was uncovering among certain sports fans reminded me of the song that suggests, if you can’t be with your sweetie, you should love the sweetie who’s handy. Whatever happened to “I’d rather be blue over you than happy with somebody new?”
Unquestionably, things like loyalty and territorial attachment are situational, from Candlestick Park to the Halls of Montezuma and in places far more ordinary. Even a dog, whose species has cornered the loyalty market, will show this weakness. I used to have one like that. She was a shepherd mongrel with a wild hair, half coyote. Her coyote instincts served her well for a good lifetime, steering her clear of what