The Minnesota Twins are not very good this year. After a couple of good seasons under manager Rocco Baldelli, the team is riddled with injuries and underachievers. Barring a massive comeback, they will be out of the playoff picture by mid-August.
And I’ll keep watching them and paying attention to their games.
The Minnesota Vikings have teased fans for years. They’ll be a really good football team and tantalize Minnesotans with the possibility of finally winning that elusive Super Bowl. But the team will collapse in new and tragic ways every time. Recently, I saw a question on Twitter that asked which player or coach from the past, in their prime, you’d put on the current team. I suggested Ryan Longwell, since he might finally break the kicker curse we seem to have.
And I sit down and watch every game, every season, even when they’re doing poorly.
The Minnesota Timberwolves… eh, why bother? I’m sure some of you are fans, but I gave up on that franchise a long time ago. And I’m not a hockey fan, so the Minnesota Wild are on the periphery of my sports vision.
Jerry Seinfeld once did a bit on how sports fans essentially cheer for laundry. There are different players who come and go, and diehard fans keep cheering for their team. The only common denominator from year to year is the clothes the players wear on the field or the court. Rare is the player who plays for one franchise their entire career. The Green Bay Packers are a classic example of this. Who would have ever thought Brett Favre would at some point NOT be a Packer? And now there’s a chance that Aaron Rodgers could follow the same path as his predecessor.
Sure, the uniforms change in style, but Minnesota fans root for the red and blue of the Twins, the purple of the Vikings, and the green and red of the Wild. (The Timberwolves seem to have more different uniforms than there are costumes at a Weird Al concert.)
We root for the maroon and gold of the Gophers, no matter which sport they are playing. And there’s probably the best example of rooting for laundry: college teams. You won’t see a player for more than four years in that uniform, and even fewer if that player is really good. So why do we do that?
I thought about that a lot this spring as I watched baseball and softball games for our local NRHEG Panther teams. And it clicked that this cheering for laundry bit starts in high school. The black and red of the Panthers doesn’t change, even though the players rotate through all the time. For me, there’s also still something about seeing the maroon and white of players from my alma mater, New Ulm Cathedral.
And the same goes for opponents’ colors. One of our rivals in high school was Sleepy Eye Saint Mary’s. I saw the green and yellow as their softball team competed at sections, and I instantly wanted to root against them, even though I don’t know any of their players. There must be something about green: the Packers, the WEM Buccaneers, the Maple River Eagles…
We root for the uniforms. Quite often, we know a lot about the players themselves, but when they are gone, we will root for the new players to fill those uniforms. This is what struck me as I sat watching our softball team finish 3rd at sections as I sat next to my daughter, a year out of high school. She is an alum of NRHEG but was still cheering wildly for those uniforms. I can imagine that ten or twenty years from now, she might still ask how the local kids are doing, even if she doesn’t know any of them.
So is that where it starts? Sure, many of us watched professional sports when we were very young, but when you reach an age where you truly choose who you will watch and support, you are seeing your local teams compete too. Not everyone chooses to cheer for the home state pro or college teams, but it’s rare NOT to cheer for your high school team. And even if you decide to follow the Chicago Cubs or the Dallas Cowboys or the New York Rangers or the Miami Heat, you will always enjoy hearing about the successes of your old high school’s teams.
There will come a day when I retire and stop knowing all the kids who compete for NRHEG. But I will keep cheering for the black and red; I’ve grown pretty attached to those particular colors on clothing!
Word of the Week: This week’s word is umbriferous, which means shady, as in, “The fans looked for any umbriferous ground while watching their team during the heatwave.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!