Roll On You Bears?
Today presents a challenge to my core identity. I’ve been attending Cal games since I was a wee cub of six. That’s thirty-three years (cough) of futility. Not totally futility, mind you — there have been a few bowl games and good years — but thirty-three years without playing in the Rose Bowl or BCS game, winning the conference, or generally having a reason to look forward to New Years Day.
This is not a matter of simple alma mater loyalty; this is something I’ve done my whole life. Everything I learned about humility I learned from Cal football.
It wasn’t just me; it was the whole fan base. The oft-proferred line about Cal — at least when things were going poorly — was that its alumni would rather be proud (and beat Stanford) than become a so-called major program.
But this year looks different. Very different. Not only is Cal ranked in the Top Ten to start the season and opening its season at a bona fide "football school" (Tennessee), but ESPN analyst Lee Corso predicted Cal to win the national championship! This, dear readers, is crazy stuff. Cal hasn’t even got to the Rose Bowl since 1959, many years before my parents were thinking that sex was something they could do.
A national championship simply does not compute. It does not map to my self-image, to root for a team that can and will win. It used to be that I went to Memorial Stadium each week wondering how we’d find a way to lose. Now I have the neurosis of the winner — "Which game is the one where we slip and fall?" Instead of worrying about whether we’ll beat Stanford, my attention turns instead to "How much do we need to beat Portland State by to keep the East Coast writers from doubting the Bears? If we don’t win by 35 points, will it hurt our standing in the computer rankings?" I’m not certain that this is an improvement, fandom-wise.
There are cultural issues to think of, too. I’ve been very happy with the ramshackle stadium and the relatively low-key games. (Note the picture above; that’s the highly successful 1975 team upsetting USC at home. The stands in the background are pretty much empty.) I don’t want to be Texas with the world’s largest HDTV or the Florida teams with their absurd fan rivalries. Or, god forbid, USC with its traveling squad of weirdly mindless fans led by 5,000 band members playing one song over and over. (Cal fans have found ways to get back at idiot Trojans over the years.)
But unfortunately this is what it takes to be a top program in today’s major collegiate athletics. Today we stare into the abyss, sing our fight songs and hope we don’t lose our selfhood along the way.
UPDATE: So much for that. Jake Curtis at SFGate still thinks Cal has room for hope. One friend said that we had to break our "culture of losing" and then in the same breath said that we didn’t really want the national championship, just the Rose Bowl. Sounds like a contradiction to me, but I guess that’s we’ll have to do to break up this culture one step at a time.
