Tag Archives: Sports

Boston’s Marathon Monday

Nationality: Italian-American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/14/2014
Primary Language: English

INFO:
On the day of the Boston Marathon, the entire city of Boston basically has a drinking holiday. From your freshman year to your senior year, you’re trained to know that when the marathon is happening, you have a day off and that everybody is going to get “totally shitfaced.” You start drinking in the morning, and keep drinking, and keep drinking… The goal is to be drunk and run outside to watch the marathon runners go through, as the marathon route goes through their campus.

People plan their drinking out the night before, and smuggle booze by the finish line. People don’t cheer the marathon runners for more than about an hour after the first people pass through, but the entire city is essentially in celebration.

BACKGROUND:
The informant lives in Los Angeles now, but had previously been a student at Boston University for 3.5 years. Though he chose not to recount the events that happened during the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, he still engages with Marathon Monday in a positive way, though he missed the 2014 marathon because he was in Los Angeles.

CONTEXT:
The informant shared this with me in conversation.

ANALYSIS:
There are actually a lot of exceptions when it comes to American public “drinking holidays” — sports games and Independence Day between two of them. With the Boston Marathon, which is a sport event tied into a city celebration, the emotional connection residents feel with the race is extremely strong. I really love the fact that Boston residents can still celebrate the event even in the face of tragedy, and have rallied around both the marathon organization and the city itself.

Rally Cap

Nationality: Turkish
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/22/14
Primary Language: English

This informant is my roommate, who grew up in Laguna Hills.  He played baseball up until high school, when he quit to play lacrosse.

Baseball has a ton of superstitions and lots of players do weird shit, like never wash their socks if they are on a winning streak or something, but the “Rally Cap” is known by all players.  It doesn’t matter if you are in Little League or the Majors but if your team is losing and you need a good inning everyone wears their hats upside-down, which is suppose to make your team play better or hit homeruns or something.

I know from my few years in Little League that the rally cap is a very prominent folk belief in baseball regardless of how effective it really is.  While neither my informant nor myself know how it originated, I can guess that it stuck into the baseball culture because of the “hat’s” importance to the sport.  Many people refer to hats as “baseball caps,” regardless of the embroidering on them and hats really aren’t worn in any other sport, making them unique to baseball.  From this perspective it sort of makes sense that a folk belief like this stuck for good.  Altering an item of clothing that embodies baseball seems natural, especially when a hats appearance is so easy to change by flipping it.

Lacrosse Flow

Nationality: Turkish
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/22/14
Primary Language: English

This informant is my roommate who plays on USC’s lacrosse team.  I asked him if there was any folk superstitions or traditions widely accepted amongst the sport or team and this is what he told me.

There’s totally two huge beliefs in lax [the “x” looks like a cross, making it la-“cross,” but it is still pronounced like “lax” in “relax”].  Players always try to have the longest “flow” and the most eye-black on their face.  Flow refers to the length of someone’s hair and it gained its popularity when a player made a Youtube video about his “flow” making him a better player.  I’m not really sure where the eye-black trend started, but lax was first played by the Native Americans against rival tribes, so maybe players think the eye black makes them look more like warriors.  Obviously these are just superstitions but they everyone acknowledges their importance so it has become a part of the game.

Obviously these are two folk superstitions that have become popular belief in the sport of lacrosse, even though players know they aren’t true.  I’m not entirely true what these beliefs say about the sport itself or the players who participate but I think my informant touched on an important topic regarding the sport’s origin.  He said lacrosse was played as a game amongst rival tribes, almost like battle.  In some cultures, such as the Norse, hair length was tied to manliness, so maybe the eye-black and flow became popular because it symbolizes masculinity.

Football Games at UC Davis

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: 3/28/14
Primary Language: English

The informant is a 19 year old computer engineering student at UC Davis. He is currently a freshman there after graduating high school the previous year. He grew up in Rancho Cucamonga, CA and has no strong religious ties. His family has been living in Southern California for many generations.

I asked him about the customs and activities associated with the football games at UC Davis. UC Davis is located in Davis, CA. This is northern California, which is slightly different culturally than the informant’s hometown. Though UC Davis has had an almost continuous football program since 1918, the team was only established as a NCAA Division I team less than a decade ago. This contrasts greatly with other universities who have structured themselves around their football team, like USC.

The football games are free for students to attend, but the informant says that the main draw for students to attend the game is the free giveaways of UC Davis apparel from various sponsors before and during the game. He said that he knew of giveaways of clothing such as scarves, beanies and t-shirts. There does not seem to be much hype for the games themselves. In other words, the students do not seem to be going because they are interested in football or supporting their university’s team, but just as something to do on the weekends. There does not seem to be as much pressure on students to actively support sports teams as there is at other universities that are more famous for their teams. When asked how he decided to go the game and who he went with, he replied that the decision was pretty spontaneous. A couple of his friends asked if he wanted to go and he said sure. He did not look forward to the game in advance.

Tailgating is found at UC Davis, but the informant said it was relatively minimal compared to other universities and takes place mainly in an empty field outside of Aggie Stadium. Aggie Stadium seats roughly 10,000 people and opened in 2007. The informant does not personally take part in the tailgating.

During the game, the student section is called the Aggie Pack. There is no assigned seating and people come and go as they please. There is a student leader in charge of leading cheers, but the mascot (a horse named Gunrock) plays a relatively small role in the games and is merely a person dressed up in a typical horse mascot costume. The informant said that the most exciting part of the games is the UC Davis tube sock giveaways, in which pairs of tube socks are thrown into the student section randomly.

When asked about half-time, the first thing he mentioned was that people like to leave then. This reinforces the idea that the students attend the games merely as something to do and not to actively watch the games.

All in all, there does not seem to be much hooplah surrounding the football games at UC Davis. Football is not the defining feature of UC Davis and this is evident in the blasé attitude towards the games. This is also evident in the attendance of other sports, including basketball. Even when ESPN was going to be filming one of the games, the students had to be lured in with free items to fill in the usually pretty empty stands.

Burgers for Soccer Goals

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/28/2012
Primary Language: English

Informant Bio: Informant is my friend from high school who also goes to the University of Southern California.  We currently live together and he is a third year electrical engineering major.  His dad is from Concord,  Massachusetts and represents a large blend of different cultures.  His mom is from upstate New York and is mostly of Hungarian, Italian and American ancestry.

 

Context: I was interviewing the informant about childhood traditions and rituals that he remembered well.

 

Item: “For our family and sports, if you played soccer or something, for us it was soccer and hockey, but we almost never ate fast food because our parents were healthy and against it.  But as kids, we still wanted fast food since it tasted good.  The way we would get fast food is that for every goal we scored we’d get a burger.  It worked surprisingly well (laughs)”.

 

Analysis: The informant shows some of the views very apparent in Massachusetts that fast food represents some of the most unhealthy food you could eat.  Although the health food craze is not as fully developed as in California, many families prefer home-cooked foods using natural, organic and locally procured goods.  There are still many farms located in our area (there are three alone within a one mile radius of my home in Massachusetts).  The rewarding with food also follows along with the informant’s recounting of his family’s graduation party tradition that heavily surrounded food and positive reinforcement as well.