Tag Archives: football

Dirty Jersey and Trophy Helmet: Sport Customs

Nationality: Italian- American and "mix of other ethnicities"
Age: 58
Occupation: General Surgeon
Residence: San Diego, California
Performance Date: 3.23.12
Primary Language: English

A Rugby ritual and a Football tradition as told verbatim by informant:

“One of the team rituals we had playing rugby in college was that we wouldn’t wash our jerseys from the beginning of the season to the end of the season. Um, and so, um, I I don’t know what the why it started but that’s how it was told to me and and uh some people believed it made you look like a rougher tougher team um it certainly made us smell worse. And you know I stuck to that tradition um and you know rugby of course can be a very dirty game and particularly if you play in the rain you’d get incredibly muddy and so you know your shirt you could hang outside if it was really full of mud and then it would dry and cake and you could beat your shirt and get the mud off it but still you had to put it on for the next game, so. I tried to instill a similar tradition uh you know when I played rugby in medical school but the, the other guys weren’t as interested in keeping the tradition. (wife interjects, they both laugh, and he repeats) Some of them did it. It bonds you as a team but also again it was for some players a form of intimidation. If you went out there with a clean jersey you looked like a rookie. But if you went out there with a dirty jersey you looked like you really knew how to play the game.

There was a tradition in football too where in um in football you wear a helmet and in the beginning of the season usually the helmet’s nice and clean, it’s been freshly painted. Well, during the season your goal was to collect as many marks on your helmet as you could uh because we use our helmet to hit people and so you wanted to get scratches and scuff marks and you wanted to get at least a color from every team you played against. It was like a collection of trophies from the other team so you wanted to get a color of every single team you were playing against. And that showed you were always hitting people, that you were a tough guy. And you never wanted the coach to re-paint your helmet during the season. In college it’s a little tougher to do because they wanted to re-paint your your helmet all the time. So literally you had to sometimes take your helmet and keep it with you against team rules so that they wouldn’t paint it. I did it in high school for sure and then I tried to do it as much as I could in college.”

While both customs hold little symbolic or abstract meaning, as the informant suggests the factors of team bonding and intimidation signified by the dirty jerseys and marked up helmets play a big role in physically brutal sports like rugby and football. These traditions provide solidarity while still playing the mental game inherent in any competition. Rugby and football also are particularly dangerous, difficult, and “macho” sports, thus jerseys and helmets function like war-paint in battle, as players animalize themselves in the face of their opponents.

USC Football Superstition

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Poway, California
Performance Date: January 2007
Primary Language: English

“Before a USC football game, when walking from the campus to the Coliseum, it is good luck to kick the bases of the flagpoles at the intersection of Trousdale Parkway and Exposition Boulevard.”

 

My informant first heard of this superstition when walking to the first Trojans home game of the 2005 season. He had been to a Trojans football game before, but only with his parents, and they did not pass the intersection of Trousdale and Exposition.  On this particular day, he was walking with a few friends, and on their way to the Coliseum they noticed that everyone was kicking the flagpoles at the intersection.  So they joined in and gave the flagpoles a kick.  My informant didn’t need to ask, and easily figured out this was a traditional practice for good luck.

This tradition is shared by every fan wearing cardinal and gold that passes by that intersection.  My informant suggested that a long time ago, a Trojan fan gave a swift kick to the flagpole, and the football team preformed well and decimated their opponent.  From then on, they probably continued to kick the flagpole before every game and others began to join in.  While this may not be the official history of the superstition, it is likely that it was under these or similar circumstances that the superstition came about.

While many superstitions are believed to affect one’s own luck and fortune, this one is believed to influence the performance of a sports team.  So if a fan passed through the intersection without kicking a flagpole, and the Trojans lost, that fan could be considered liable for that day’s loss.  On the other hand, this is an instance where fans can unite and believe that they actually did something to help their team.

USC “Fight On” Gesture

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: April 2007
Primary Language: English

Sports fans at the University of Southern California take their traditions very seriously, even right down to the Homecoming Game tailgate on campus. There are certain things that the football fans of the Trojans, (USC’s team name), do before, during, and after the home games.

USC has become a very big partying school in the sense that the day of home games are the only time that you can have open containers of alcohol on campus. It has become such a tradition to party before the game that the school has recognized this and allows tailgating on campus.

My informant told me about the rituals involved in attending the games. First, everyone walks over to Exposition Park, which is near the Coliseum where the team plays. On the way there, everyone kicks one of the light posts that are on the very edge of campus before crossing Exposition Blvd. As a matter of fact, my informant told me that if someone does not do this, other fans to kick the light posts sometimes turn them back. This is just a superstition to ensure that the team wins. My informant did not know when this tradition was started, just that it has become so widespread that all students, fans, and alumni perform the ritual.

Another tradition is to make the fight on sign with your right hand. It looks like you’re giving a peace sign, but it is actually a symbol of the team’s slogan, “Fight On,” and is often shaken to the beat of the fight song that the band always plays at the games.

When the game is over, everyone walks back across Exposition Blvd. and once again kicks the light posts for good luck for the next game or the next season.

Traditional dress is the school colors, Cardinal and Gold, and sometimes traditional food is labeled as ‘death dogs,’ the hot dogs that local vendors sell right before and after the game all along Exposition Park.

Joke – American

Age: 53
Occupation: Real Estate Investor
Residence: Laguna Hills, CA
Performance Date: February 2007
Primary Language: English

An Oakland Raiders’ fan was watching a game in a sold out Coliseum, he could not see one empty seat in the whole stadium.  Then he saw an empty seat a couple rows in front of him so he walked down and asked the guy next to that seat if he knew the person whose seat that was.

The guy responded, “Yeah, you see that’s my wife’s seat and we haven’t missed a game since the sixties, but she’s dead now.”

The fan told the guy he was sorry and that it’s a shame he couldn’t find any family member or friend to come to the game with him.

The guy says, “well, they would except they’re all at her funeral.”

Barry says he learned this joke when he was a teenager of approximately fifteen years of age.  His father taught him this as both were fans of the Los Angeles/ Oakland Raiders.  Barry recalls his father supplying him with a new joke practically everyday, which he would then teach to his friends at school.

Barry believes that this story could be applied to any sports’ team and it would have the same impact, as is the case that is seen through the annotation (below.)  The punch line of this joke is that all the other family members are at his wife’s funeral, but he is not at the funeral because he is watching the ball game instead.  There is a whole genre of these jokes that revolve around men’s lack of sympathy for their significant others, many of which focus on the wife’s death and the husband missing her funeral to go to a game or out fishing.

Annotation: This joke was found at:

http://humorvault.tripod.com/sports.html

Superstition – University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California

Nationality: African-American
Occupation: Student
Residence: Saint Louis, MO
Performance Date: April 1, 2007
Primary Language: English

Don’t shave on Game-day. (with reference to USC football)

Notes:

The subject told me that its bad luck to shave (a guy’s face) on game day, saying that the team you were rooting for would lose. This is a huge superstition on USC campus, due to the obsession with USC’s football team. The subject is a member of the Trojan Marching Band and stated that this is a widely held belief for the band as well as most students on campus. When he told me this superstition a few other guys were around and he pointed at one and said you shaved when he played Oregon State (USC lost the football game this past season (06-07) to an unranked Oregon State). The guy quickly denied it, as if he wanted to deflect the blame of losing the game. It was obvious that they both believed and followed this tradition. The subject however was not sure how it started or why it only referred to shaving but swears it works.

I had never of this superstition before coming to USC, but that could be because all of the sports at my high school were not amazing. I think that this ritual definitely has a lot to do with the university and its tie to athletics, in particular to football. I do not think that the act of shaving itself has a lot to do with the custom, other than the fact that it is an everyday occurrence for men, and skipping it implies that they are doing something special. I think that if there were other things men did as often as shave, other than bathing, eating and sleeping, they would be equal contenders as to this ritual. I did find it interesting that both boys were so into the custom, and that the accused one was so quick to deny the comment. It really showed how fervently they followed the superstition.