On Saturday morning I walked into the weekly men’s breakfast at my church wearing a t-shirt repping my daughter’s high school, whose mascot is the Eagles. I didn’t think anything about it honestly, until one of our pastors made the comment that I was awfully brave showing up there in an Eagles shirt. “What does he have against my daughter’s high school?” I wondered, thinking maybe there was some intense rivalry that I wasn’t aware of. The school just opened this year, so the thought of a rivalry already existing is pretty funny, but it was early and it took me a few minutes to realize he thought it was a Philadelphia Eagles shirt, and apparently wearing a Philadelphia shirt around a bunch of Dallas Cowboys fans would be asking for trouble.
I’ve been replaying that scene in my head ever since then, wondering if maybe there was something else I should’ve done or said, or if maybe I shouldn’t wear the shirt at all outside of school football games. But that’s silly. I’m a proud parent and want to celebrate her school as if it were my own alma mater. But it also got me thinking about all the other times I’ve attracted people’s snide comments about a particular school or team of choice simply by wearing that team’s shirt or hat. I’ve explained before why I’m a fan, but did I ever realize just how dangerous that is?
Admittedly, that danger is more in terms of misunderstanding than physical harm, but it can still make for some awkward social interactions. When I wear a TCU t-shirt, for example, people automatically assume I went there, which I did not. When I reply that no, I’m just a fan, they sheepishly reply, “Oh.” As if you’re not allowed to be the fan of a college team unless you went to that school. Sorry, I guess I missed that part of the contract when I bought the shirt. Of course, when I wear a Texas Longhorns shirt, nobody ever asks if I went there even though statistically I’m far more likely to be a UT grad than a TCU one. They just assume I’m a fan because there are billions of Texas fans out there.
So why is it OK to wear a UT shirt when I didn’t go there but not OK to wear a TCU shirt? And why don’t people assume I’m a professional baseball player when I wear a Texas Rangers shirt? (Don’t answer that one.)
Before the current high school opened, we were zoned for a different one whose red “N” logo is almost identical to the the logo of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. I have a hat with that high school’s logo on it and I used to wear it pretty often, sometimes with a TCU t-shirt. And let me tell you, that was an instant invitation for some biting remarks. “How can you be a fan of both TCU and Nebraska? Isn’t that kind of hypocritical?” I was asked that exact question by a complete stranger at another Christian event one time, and I was actually scared this guy was going to beat the crap out of me. But even if it had, in fact, been a Nebraska hat, why does that even matter? It’s not like Nebraska and TCU are rivals or that any native Texan even cares one bit about the Cornhuskers. Yet, somehow that combination of clothing was enough to incite a complete stranger to make a threat against me. Dude, calm the fuck down. It’s just a hat.
More often than not, though, people just jump to conclusions like the pastor at my church did. If I wear a shirt from my other daughter’s middle school — whose mascot is the Wildcats — people think I’m promoting Kansas State (which is somewhat understandable since both are purple) even though the logo is different and the shirt doesn’t say Kansas State anywhere on it. And admittedly sometimes I bring it on myself, like the time I wore a Michigan State hat (because I liked the hat, not because I’m a fan of the team) and people started asking me all these questions about their basketball team. All I could say in response was, “Uhhh…..”
Why do people react the way they do to a t-shirt, hat, or bumper sticker? What does it say about our society that we identify ourselves and others so strongly by the teams we choose to root for (either by choice or by association)? That we have these unwritten rules about when it’s acceptable to be fan and when it isn’t. That we enforce those rules so strictly that we would risk our relationships over them.
My dad died in August. For the vast majority of his life he was a die-hard Texas Tech fan. We used to go to Tech football and baseball games together when I was little, and my fanship of the Red Raiders was about him as much as it was about them. When I became more of a Longhorns fan and then a TCU fan, we would give each other a hard time about our respective teams. And then he, too, jumped on the Horned Frogs bandwagon, and we would go to TCU games together. And then my niece graduated high school and went to Texas A&M, and almost overnight my dad threw Tech and TCU to the curb in favor of the Aggies. It irritated me some, I’m not gonna lie. Not because he changed his allegiance but that it was to the most hated team in the state of Texas. At his funeral my niece got up to speak, and her eulogy was just a commercial for A&M football. They even played the Aggie fight song to close the ceremony, probably just to piss me off. After the ceremony I approached her and my sister and said bitterly, “You know dad hated A&M most of his life.” To me, his entire life and legacy had been edited down to just a couple of years, neglecting all the other ones that he wore black and red instead of maroon.
We are who we root for, I suppose, whether we intend to be or whether others say we are. Even if we wear the right name, they may be the wrong colors. Or they may be the right colors but around the wrong audience. It doesn’t change my opinion, however. At the end of the day, it’s still just a game. Even if my team is better than yours.