I Hate Those Guys By: Joshua Chamberlain Posted: January 28, 2012
Does everyone remember when the Patriots were actually a team that people rooted for?
Judging by much of the ongoing discussion of this year’s Super Bowl, many people do not. How quickly we forget! Don’t you remember how inspiring it was watching them run out of the tunnel as a team before Super Bowl XXXVI? The St. Louis Rams’ offensive starters had just been introduced individually, and everyone expected the Patriots to do the same with their defensive starters. Instead, the Patriots chose to come out as a team, eschewing the individual attention in favor of portraying a unified front in the first Super Bowl after the 9/11 attacks.
Just admit it: you were moved, at least a little bit, by the gesture. Part of you immediately started rooting for the Patriots to win.
People forget that the Patriots were huge underdogs in that game. They were not expected to win, and the image of Tom Brady standing on the podium, holding his hands on his head in disbelief is now etched in the minds of many as being indicative of the rags-to-riches story that Brady and the Patriots team embodied.
Many people flat-out hate the Patriots now. Sure, they bring up the “Spygate” incident as a reason to do so, but the Patriot disdain goes much deeper than one scandal. In simple terms, everyone hates a winner.
There is a great deal of jealousy in the sports world, especially among fans. This jealousy goes beyond simple rivalries, where the hatred would exist regardless of the individual teams’ records. For example, I would be as excited by a University of Wisconsin loss if they were 1-11 as I was by the Wisconsin loss in the Rose Bowl. Hell, I’m excited when the Badgers lose a soccer game. Similarly, Wisconsin fans loved seeing every Gopher loss this season in a way nobody else could.
The Patriot hate, however, is something different. Other than their rivals, few people cheered when the Vikings lost a lot of games this year. If anything, people felt sorry for them. Nobody wants to see a team get continuously steamrolled. That is not the case for the Patriots, who have won three Super Bowls in the last ten years and have not had a record worse than 9-7 over that span.
American sports culture is built on knocking people down a peg.
American sports fans thrive not just on building up the underdog but on tearing the underdog back down when he gets a little too big for his britches. In that sense, the Boise State football fans should be happy that they do not have the easy, yearly access to the BCS bowl games that many are clamoring for. If that changed, Boise State would immediately become less likeable. As a sports culture, we will give underdogs their moment in the sun as long as they agree to suck again in the very near future. Experience continued success, and you will immediately suffer the wrath of the fickle American sports fan.
The examples of this are countless. People loved seeing USC and Ohio State get hit with NCAA sanctions in recent years. It was more than just Yankee fans celebrating the Red Sox collapse last year. In the ‘90s, people loved seeing the heartbreaking Florida State football losses. Why? Americans hate a perpetual winner because every American wants to be a perpetual winner. We want, and hate, what we can’t have.
This phenomenon extends beyond the sports realm, of course. There is an entire industry dedicated to documenting the slip-ups of celebrities. Politicians must watch their every move lest they fall victim to the vindictive hoards. In reality, anyone who experiences a modicum of success in nearly any field will probably be subject to increased scrutiny by a public eye looking to tear down society’s winners.
I suppose this is just the price of success, however. As a Patriots fan, I don’t really worry about it too much and can brush off the obvious jealousy.
As a Gopher fan, I can only dream of receiving that type of undue hatred. I want people to be jealous of me and would revel in it. While it seems strange, in one sense, to want to be hated, being the object of scorn in America usually means you are doing something well.