I probably won't actually watch the Super Bowl tomorrow, but for the first time in several years I think it's possible that I might. The last time I paid any attention to football was two years before they changed to eight divisions. (1999?) Not coincidentally, that was right about the same time I started watching baseball. Apparently I don't have enough sports attention to stay interested in more than one sport at a time.

Whereas with baseball I'm very much a one-team fan and I pay little attention to the other teams except as opponents of the A's, with football I followed all the teams. My formative years for football watching were my last few years in Anchorage, in the mid 1980s. The Seattle Seahawks are the presumed home team for Anchorage, but they didn't dominate television coverage the way I later found the Raiders and 49ers do in the Bay Area.

In those days there were usually four or five televised games per week, but since some of them had overlapping time slots you could only watch about three. I watched whichever games were available that interested me. Since it's more fun to watch a game when you're rooting for one side, I'd pick a favorite in each game. My preferences were based on a combination of contrarianism and arbitrariness. I didn't want to root for any team which was good at the time or had a reputation for being good historically (ie, Cowboys, Redskins, 49ers, Raiders, Steelers). Beyond that, I was guided by various trivial factors like which color uniforms I preferred, perhaps a player or coach I liked, or just some random association that lightly turned my fancy to one team over the other.

These affections, such as they were, evolved over the first year or two I watched and after a while the 30 teams fell into a sort of loose hierarchy of preference: strong likes, mild likes, strong dislikes, mild dislikes, and indifference. In that way I could have a natural favorite in almost any match-up. Because teams in the same division played each other most often, it was inefficient to like or dislike an entire division. The teams that I otherwise had little opinion about thus tended to fall in line to leave me with a nice balance of likes and dislikes within each division. (This never sorted itself out completely. For example, I liked four of the five teams in the NFC Central, and even the fifth (the Packers) I didn't dislike all that much.)

On the whole, my favorite teams weren't very good. Part of that was deliberate exclusion of all the most popular and successful teams, and even among the also-rans I think I tended to favor the underdogs. I distinctly remember one time when in all six divisions my favorite team in the division was in last place. (I guess that would have been the Seahawks, Browns, Jets, Cardinals, Lions, Falcons.) A few of my favorites were variable and went through periods where they were pretty good (eg, Cleveland, Atlanta). Others just stayed bad. Prominent among the latter were the Cardinals.

Although they weren't my only favorite, the Cardinals were the first football team I ever rooted for. I even remember the game. Well, sort of. I was in rehearsal for Fiddler on the Roof. That was after I graduated from high school but before I left Alaska, so it was probably around 1984 and I was about 18. Even then I thought of myself as a singer first, an actor second, and a dancer last of all, so I found it very strange — indeed, I still find it very strange — that I was cast in the role of the fiddler. I almost turned it down, but someone persuaded me to be more open-minded and just go along with it, so I did.

[Bonus reminiscence: In spite of being the title role (!), the fiddler isn't actually on stage much, and he doesn't speak or sing at all. I remember that during my idle time on performance nights I would often slip away into one of the piano practice rooms down the hall. (The venue was a college auditorium.) There I would play Debussy, which was my passion at the time. As often as not I was joined by the other person who had nothing pressing to do but couldn't go home, the costume assistant Alicia P, a quirky but lovely girl of about 16. She would listen to me with rapt attention, and though her young cheek was not particularly pale nor thin, her big dark eyes did on all my motions with a mute observance hang. I was too dense to realize she had a big crush on me, and when I did figure it out shortly after the show ended, I had the foolish notion that she was too young for me, seeing as how I was out of high school and she was not. In retrospect that distinction seems utterly ridiculous to me now — I can't have been more than two years older — but what can I say? I was young and stupid. I instead had a crush on the rehearsal accompanist, and she in turn had a crush on the guy playing Motel, which made me doubly jealous since that was the role I had hoped for.]

[Bonus mentoring: If any aspiring young opera singers are reading this, here is my sage advice. Don't date other singers. Don't date dancers or choreographers either, no matter how they may tempt you. If you must date an artist, at least aim for someone in the orchestra. Best of all, date the costumer. That's definitely the way to go.]

One Sunday afternoon in the course of the rehearsal process, several of us found ourselves with a large chunk of time to kill. Probably it was one of those all-day tech rehearsals with a long break in the middle. There was a small TV in a room somewhere where several were watching a football game. The teams were the St Louis Cardinals (this was before the move to Arizona) and the Dallas Cowboys. I knew nothing of any of this except that the Cowboys were famous, so I decided to root for the Cardinals. That Dallas was favored by a large margin, as well as by most of the people in the room, only affirmed my decision. (I also liked that the Cardinals quarterback had a cool name: Lomax.) As it turned out, the Cardinals pulled off an upset and won, and as a result they became my favorite team for the rest of the season as I slowly got into the habit of watching more games. In spite of that one upset victory, the Cardinals did not become good. In fact, the next year they got worse and stayed bad for as long as I was paying attention.

It is only just now seeping into my consciousness that the Arizona Cardinals are in the Super Bowl this year. I remember noticing someone rooting for the Cardinals in a playoff game a few weeks ago, and my reaction was, "Really? The Cardinals are in the playoffs??" Now my reaction to the Super Bowl is similar. Are the Cardinals actually good now? Or is this just one of those wild card flukes that we sometimes see in both baseball and football, where a team is just barely good enough to squeak into the playoffs and then has the good fortune to hit a hot streak at just the right time? (That question is only semi-rhetorical. I'm sure I could easily find the answer online, but I haven't actually looked yet, so feel free to enlighten me in the comments if you are so inspired.)

For what it's worth, I think wild card flukes — and similar situations where the championship is won by a team that disinterested observers agree really wasn't the best team — are a good thing. Or at least they are a necessary consequence of that which is good. Inevitably it raises complaint. "Everyone knows that the XYZs were the better team, but the ABCs just got lucky," someone will grumble. Then follows the opinion that there must be something wrong with the system if the inferior team is allowed to win.

This is not just impractical to fix; it is conceptually impossible. Suppose we have a perfect system in which the better team always wins. Where's the fun in that? If you know the system is perfect then you already know who will win and you don't even need to play the games. That would defeat the entire purpose of spectator sports. There has to be enough randomness or quasi-randomness that the inferior team still has a chance.

Is it a stretch to apply the same reasoning to the real world? The sort of sports fans who grouse whenever the "wrong" team wins a series are the same sort of young men who long for a meritocratic libertarian utopia where the best candidate always wins the prize and everyone gets exactly what he deserves. No more idiots who lucked into promotion by influence or nepotism; no more hard luck cases where genuine talent and effort goes unrewarded.

Meritocracy is the sort of thing everyone is supposed to be in favor of. It's hard to come out and say that people should get what they don't deserve, in the same way as it's a little hard to say that the inferior team should win the championship. But even setting aside the fact that some outspoken advocates of meritocracy are deluded about their own true talent level or debt to nepotism, pure meritocracy is a problematic ideal. For one thing, if we accept it as axiomatic that the world is truly meritocratic (whether or not it actually is) those who enjoy a privileged life are logically justified in considering themselves to be superior to those who don't. For another, some people really are less bright and less talented. The meritocratic ideal requires saying to them, "You're supposed to lose all the time. That sure sucks for you, but fair's fair." Is this really a good thing?

If I do watch the Super Bowl tomorrow, I will of course root for the Cardinals. (It helps that their opponents are one of the teams I used to dislike.) I assume the Cardinals are the underdog, though come to think of it, I don't actually know that.

5:46:11 PM  [permalink]  comment []