Thursday, July 31, 2003
Mob Mentality
I chose my college in large part because I wanted minimal distraction. Not “no distraction” - I’d have gone irrepairably eccentric. But I liked the idea of a school in the kind of big city where big things didn’t happen very often, where I didn’t have friends or relatives to serve me as a foil for perpetuation of my habitual personality, and where academics took precedence over sports.
So I chose a school that had famous, historic and beautiful sports facilities that had rarely seen recent home victories, much less winning seasons. Yes, the basketball arena had hosted more games and NCAA tourneys than any other in the country, and was home of the first NCAA championship, but the team hadn’t done better than one trip to the final four in half a century and even then that one trip had been pretty much a fluke.
And the football stadium - seating 60,000 on two tiers of brick arcades, a tudor castle in the endzone, featured in such films as Unbreakable and 12 Monkeys, site of the first televised football game, once a home to national gridiron heroes - by the time I was packing my freshman trunk, Penthouse Magazine was citing the team that played there as 3rd worst in the nation: “a thoroughbred with four broken legs.” They’d won three games in the prior three seasons. I was ready to study all year long.
But I also chose my school in part because of its apparently rich historical tradition. I wanted to immerse my self in the ivy-drenched campus environment. So, I attended the home opener - just to see how it all came together. The feeling before the team ran onto the field was strangely electric. It was a glorious day and I had a lot of fun.
Plus, we won. Big. And we’d already won one or two games on the road. It was the beginning of a very surprising season. Against patrician league rivals whom we thought viewed our sturdy little school with disdain, as well as against regional squads who saw us as unworthy opponents, we racked up win after win. I became invested in the team’s success and went to every game, shouting myself hoarse, gesticulating to the school songs, marvelling at the hail of toast hurled from the upper bleachers at the end of the third quarter of every game.
By the end of the season we were one game out of first place in the league. Two other teams were tied for first. On that final saturday, one of those two teams lost early and we were scheduled to play the other. By the fourth quarter of this game our rival was therefore in sole possession of first place and we were in third.
The game was brutal, with the lead changing hands several times. We were up by a point. With three minutes to go, the hated bluebloods drove for a field goal, giving them a two-point lead with 65 seconds or so to play.
I was screaming. So were the 40,000 others in the stands with me. The monumental brick structure was shuddering with sound and excitement. Over the course of the next 60 football seconds we drove to the 30 yard line and set up for a field goal of our own. We were pointed toward the heart of campus, kicking into the crennelations of the brick castle that closed the horseshoe of the stadium.
The snap was good. The kick was not. Two seconds had elapsed and the clock read zero - time had expired. Game over. Season over. A season that had started as a lost cause and had evolved into an article of hope, reverted to being a second-best’s third best. Bronze would have to do. Forty thousand voices howled.
And then a yellow flag soared skyward, and with it, our hearts - a penalty: roughing the kicker. One more try, with no time on the clock. The ball moved ten feet closer to the goal line. The snap was clean. The kick was good.
At this point I’d been shouting and cheering so hard and for so long that I had no more voice at all, but the din of the crowd reverberated to the center of the universe. I was aware of my body moving, though I was not willing it to do so. Rather, I and my 40,000 compadres were surging forward automatically, partisans of one of three co-champions in a season pre-destined for, and then rescued from, ignominy. We were one-third of number one, and ecstatic about it out of all proportion. We poured onto the field, rushing the goal post over which the final kick had triumphed. We began to press it, push it to the turf. As it fell, dangerously heavy and cumbersome amidst our drunken revels, I realized that I was in a mob.
The awareness was a dim glimmer buried in my primal scream of a mind. I quashed that vestige of thought and got a hand on the yellow steel tubes. We hoisted our trophy and carried it east, out of the stadium, to the river that bordered campus; we commandeered the South Street Bridge and sent the goal posts over the patinaed balustrade to sink and drown.
My four years at that school were all championship years, but I never again became quite so divorced from my own rationality because of it as to re-submerge myself in the mob mentality. It had been cathartic, but frightening. I had become a non-person, a mere organ in a voracious amoral celebratory organism.
And in the end, though victory was and remains sweet these 21 years hence, that’s what I remember: losing myself, the crude ancient emotion which first came from us but then became our master. It was life-affirming and olympian and heedless. It was spontaneous, victorious, terrible. I’ve never felt the need to go quite so far in that direction again. I’ve had occasion to celebrate, even in mobs (Kirk Gibson’s HR against the A’s in 1987’s world series opener was one standout example), but I have kept myself under a modicum of control. Once over the edge was enough.
