We chose this.
Maybe it was the pomp and circumstance of the occasion. Maybe it was the flash of brass as a marching band paraded up the street. Maybe it was the brilliant green shining out of the TV with seventy thousand people roaring in the background. Maybe it was the fact that everybody else was talking about it. Maybe it was a father, or a sister, or a friend, or somebody else who first handed you the T-shirt, or the miniature jersey, or that oblate brown spheroid with the white laces on one edge.
And it took over our lives. Voices on the radio that were familiar as our own family. Names of young men who passed through our lives for a few years and remain legends to us decades on. Songs that we sing at our own wedding receptions – or will have sung for us at our funerals. Chants and cheers and gestures and bumper stickers. And traditions and superstitions. As Nick Hornby said of another kind of football, “what else can we do when we’re so weak?” Incantations at every snap, ballcaps tilted just so and filthy from twenty years’ use, chants held back until over the 50. Statues rubbed, alcohol-soaked cherries consumed, hours spent crouched just so for fear of breaking the spell if you move even an inch.
And it stuck. Even when the rest of the fan base seemed indifferent. Even when you couldn’t pull off one lousy bowl win in four decades. Even though you never actually went to the school and only set foot on campus for those few blessed gamedays when you get to see your guys live and in person. Even thought you have a spouse, and kids, and a job, and a mortgage, and a million things in your life that you know should be more important that what a few dozen college boys do on a Saturday afternoon.
Maybe it was because it was the only time all week when a seven-year-old could scowl “aw, bullshit” at an interception and know that Dad wouldn’t care because he was scowling it too. Maybe it was because after four years at a school without football, you wanted part of the experience you could really call your own. Maybe it was because you married somebody who carried the team and the band and the school in her heart for 20 years. Maybe we didn’t choose it at all.
But it chose us, and we went along without a fight.
Cheer for old Vandy, cheer for the black and gold…