I’ve never been a sports fan. That’s a difficult confession in our culture, where Anyone who’s Anyone roots for Someone, where it’s friendly to be able to converse about “the game.” And for a woman, enthusiasm for sports, even knowledge about it, adds a kind of aura. Have you seen the movie Something About Mary? Cameron Diaz plays a Very Attractive sports fan, a very knowledgeable sports fan, and men are falling all over her.
I have a sister-in-law like that. She is Very Attractive, for starters, and, when she joined the family, the buzz among the six brothers-in-law was that she was a sports fan. Which she is. And she is very Very Cool.
But I am not cool, and my lack of sports-fanness is just one piece in the pile of evidence.
I have tried to muster it. Heck, I dated a pitcher/quarterback combo in high school and attended every football game. He taught me what a down was; he taught me how to throw a baseball (not like a girl), and for this I am forever grateful. But when it comes to watching games on television, I just can’t pay attention. I can’t feel it’s importance. I sit down with Bill, who is enthusiastically watching (he, too, has played his football and baseball), and I try to watch. But I find myself reading or writing. It’s what I’d rather do.
The fact is that I came from a family of readers and writers, artists, inventors, and builders. Not athletes. No one, neither on my mother’s nor on my father’s side, is an athlete. We’ve missed the gene.
And then we moved here, Bill and I, to Tobacco Road. Yes, this red-rich vein of southern soil has produced a string of excellent universities, each with a serious basketball team. NC State, Wake Forest, UNC, and Duke University, none of which had registered with any kind of significance ever before in my mind. But we came as Duke fans; we were fans going in. How could we help it? Bill was going to Duke, they had given him a scholarship. How could we not love them? Bill, of course, knew a thing about Duke’s basketball legacy, but I, of course, was clueless. That didn’t last.
The fact is that Duke University has an amazing men’s basketball team. A-Maz-Ing. And after living with a Duke student who was becoming, in no time, Enthusiastic; after camping out with him to get season tickets; after attending a game or two in the living, screaming fever of Cameron Indoor Stadium… Well. I was what you might call a Convert.
Plus, basketball is such a great game to watch. It is constant motion punctuated by the ball’s eager bounce. And the tension– the ready willingness of the game to turn, to trick and fool you, to hand the victory over to the Wrong Team at the last second– well. That can put one on the edge of one’s seat, so to speak. That can make one crazy. That can make one believe, Really Believe, that the game Matters.
And as a fan, I’ve had my moments of nail-biting tension, my moments of floor pacing, my moments of misery and Utter Rejoicing.
But here on Tobacco Road, with our arch-enemy, UNC, just, er, down the road, fandom takes on Whole New Meaning. It is meaning based on rivalry, and I know that this makes the game more fun. Heck, I was raised in Pittsburgh. But the rivalry here, the proximity so great…. Let’s just say that the rivalry can get ugly. It turns jealousy over a team’s success into ugly remarks about a coach’s countenance. It can become an argument of almost *almost* moral proportions.
And this is where I try to step aside. Because the fact is (dare I say it, my Duke degree not yet complete??) that I like UNC. I really do. And when they are not playing Duke, I’ll root for them. I live in North Carolina after all. The church I love was born on its campus. Many of my friends are UNC fans, and I wish them, and their team, well.
It was with this morally superior attitude that I attended, on Wednesday night, my first-ever game in the Dean Dome, poised to watch– and cheer for– UNC, to watch them trounce St. Louis.
I did fine. I really did. Okay. At first it felt weird. I mean, the stadium is so…. Big. So big and…. Blue. Powder blue. Yucky Blue. Blue that I’ll never wear, and not just because I don’t look good in it. But I got past it. I did. I’ll admit that, at first, it was hard to yell “Go Tarheels!” I can’t say that the words stuck in my throat, but they were Reluctant. I forced them. I yelled. I rooted for the Heels.
And they, for their part, showed me a good time. St. Louis (who wears, confusingly, a shade very like Duke-blue) pushed UNC’s young team Hard. They were fast, UNC was sloppy, and there were moments when it really looked like the visitors would take the game. But Roy got them in that locker room during half-time and gave them a good talking-to (and it must have been a good talking-to, despite the fact that he looks like everybody’s grandpa), because UNC shot from the locker room on a blast of hot air that they pretty much rode through the end of the game. Yep. They pulled it out, and they won the game, and we cheered and cheered and cheered.
I enjoyed myself thoroughly. And no one would have known, to look at me, that I’m a Duke fan. And then, at the very end, the stadium cried out its cheer, its end-of-every-game cheer, the one that ends with these words: “Go to hell, Duke.”
Oh, it didn’t bother me. Not really. I mean, that’s what sport is all about, right? Playing hard, playing well, and having a really great rival just to keep it interesting. I shrugged it off. They can feel that way if they want to. They can’t make Duke go to hell just by wishing.
Before I left for the game, I told my children (Tarheels all, if only by birth) that I was going to the UNC game. These children are Duke fans, dyed in the wool. Their father is an athlete, a Duke grad, a football-playing, Steeler-watching fan reared among the steel mills of western Pennsylvania. He has sport in his blood. So, apparently, do my children.
Yes, I told Emma Grace that I was going to the UNC game. She looked at me, blue eyes wide, and said, “Mommy, cheer for UNC.” I was surprised and impressed by her good sense and, perhaps, her own moral advancement. And then she made a little addition, just a slight addendum that made it clear, really, where she stood. “Cheer for UNC, Mommy,” she said, “but whisper.”
