Sports is a perennial subject in the GSE, and with good reason. Citizens of the Commonwealth are always down on their sports teams, although this problem infects the Eastern part of the state more than the Western. The Eagles haven’t yet won a Super Bowl, and must remember the pre-merger days for a championship. The Steelers, of course, have done much, much better, yet seem hampered a little by hard-luck image of the town in general. The Phillies must hearken back to 1980 in order to remember their one and only taste of victory, while the agony of defeat coats their mouths like recently digested ashes, covered in cheeze wiz. The conviction that defeat is an inevitable condition of life, like taxes, or gas after eating baked beans, weighs particularly heavy on the people of Philadelphia, but seems endemic to the entire state. Unfairly so, it seems to me. Let us not forget that the people of Boston were just as convinced of their own inevitable loserdom as those of Philly, yet we have seen how quickly this has changed. How many victory banners hang in the great sports arenas of, say, North Carolina? Or, for that matter, Nevada? What of those poor, benighted denizens of cities like Buffalo, New York, whose record of futility matches anything Philadelphia has to offer, and makes Pittsburgh look like the summit of Mt. Olympus by comparison?
I must say, though, that my favorite GSE sports memory was attending not a professional event but the last Penn State-Michigan football game held in Happy Valley, in late 2006. My girlfriend and I knew a professor at Penn State who had season tickets. As we got closer to State College, PA, we joined an ever-thickening throng of football fans, flowing to the valley like marbles rolling to the bottom of an empty soup can. By late morning the parking lot was full of tailgaters braving biting cold, and holding out against the creeping feeling that Michigan represented a juggernaut that year — with Joe Paterno and his team playing the levees to Michigan’s Katrina. Still, the throngs of Penn State students in their “White Out“ gear was an inspiring sight, and had there been a sober person within a mile of the unfortunately-named Beaver Stadium, I am sure they would have appreciated it all the more. That is success in sports, I think, more so than any victory by, say, a San Francisco team, whose exploits would be quietly applauded by the faithful between sips of chardonnay and nibbles on locally-produced, artisanal brie cheese.
Would victory change Philadelphia? Of course, in this city it is commonplace to say that the feeling of being losers is part of the culture – there seems to be an assumption that we don’t really WANT to win, that a championship and the good feeling that would result would be like Rocky going into the big fight as the cocky favorite. I disagree: the city hungers for a victory and wants, secretly, desperately, to shed its cloak of underdogness, to join the ranks of the sports victors. But it is a misplaced desire: the city, and the state, have long since moved on from their old reliance of these trappings of success, and if sports is not its forte, then it can easily find something else. Victory has not brought Pittsburgh nirvana, either: in the GSE, it’s the struggle that matters, not the ring.
1 Comment
February 9, 2008 at 2:21 pm
It seems like you are apologists for having teams that suck.
By the way, you guys don’t even seem to show up when you Google “Greatest State Ever”!