Outsider on the Inside

 

Photo © 2009 Stan Brewer

 

 

This Saturday marks the much-anticipated football matchup between the beloved Iowa Hawkeyes and the beloved Iowa State Cyclones.

 

Now, not being a football fan, I don’t really care who wins. But, if I had to choose a side, I would have to side with the Cal Bears. To be perfectly honest, the Cal Poly Mustangs hold my loyalty only slightly less so than do the San Diego Chargers. But does it all really matter?

 

Apparently it does.

 

Since moving to Des Moines from California three years ago, I have been blown away every mid-September by the energy football fans put in to this annual Big Game. I understand the rivalry, and I understand the excitement. But rather then get all worked up about it, I sit back and watch.

 

I just finished my master’s in journalism from Iowa State, so it seems that would make me a Cyclone fan. But I really am not (does that make me blasphemous?). However, this year, unlike other years, I plan to go to a bar and experience first hand the reality of the passions that drive the people of Iowa during these few precious hours of game time. It’s a Cyclone bar, true. And, I am half expecting a few Hawkeye fans to show up. That would be interesting.

 

Once I went to a Oakland Raiders game when they played their rival, the Chargers, and watched a fist fight break out in the section next to ours between Chargers fans (who just couldn’t keep their big mouths shut) and Raiders fans (who are out for blood anyway). As I said, I am most attached to the Chargers of any football team, and so I took that as a sign to play my cards close to my chest.

 

I stopped going to football games, and I pretty much stopped paying any attention to football altogether, NFL or NCAA—or even Pee Wee (not that I did much of the latter two to begin with).

 

My point for this column, I will say, is to admit that I find it quite interesting and entertaining to experience the way people get worked up about college football here in Iowa. In California, we have one big game: Cal vs. Stanford. The outcome doesn’t really matter, and most of the state is oblivious to its occurrence anyway. Iowans treat their college football teams as Californians would treat a rivalry between favorite sushi restaurants. 

 

I may be called a heretic for writing all of this, and certainly, my husband—a loyal sports fan on every level except golf and NASCAR—will scoff at my opinions and observations. Of course this is important, he and others might say. Of course this is something to get worked up about. It’s about loyalty. It’s about history. It’s about pride.

 

I understand all that. And I applaud the passion. It’s a good distraction—and I’m really going to take some flack for this bit of effrontery—from the real problems we face as a society, such as the health care conundrum, climate change, two wars in the Middle East and a slumped economy. 

 

Nevertheless, wherever your loyalty lies, and whether or not you care about the outcome of Saturday’s game, any anthropologist would be wise to take some study on this piece of cultural phenomena. This Saturday in Iowa, football will rule.

 

Go Cyclones?

 

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