On Enmity, Tribalism, and Tom Brady

I hate the New England Patriots.

I don't mean that I find them distasteful, or that I'd rather they weren't successful, or that I root for other teams to beat them (although all those things are true). I mean that I hate them.

I hate their ability to seemingly pull the damnedest rabbit out of a hat you didn't even know they had at the worst possible moment. I hate Bill Belichick, who seems to work very, very hard at being a prickly, amoral, unsmiling, perpetually underdressed villain -- who cheats. I hate every player they've ever had who was cast off by some other team for having a bad case of suckitude but suddenly becomes an All-Pro the second he sets foot in Foxborough, Massachusetts. (Come to think of it, I hate that they play in a soulless monument to corporate greed, in a suburb in the middle of nowhere that's closer to the capital of Rhode Island than it is to the capital of Massachusetts.) I hate Julian Edelman, who once punched a friend of a friend in the face at a party. I hate their fanbase, who seem to expect that championships are their birthright, not just from the Patriots but from all of their teams (and, over the last ten years, that entitlement has been sickeningly well rewarded), who have a superiority complex about every other fanbase in the world, and who made going to Game 3 of the 2007 World Series one of the worst experiences of my life.

I hate Michigan Fucking Wolverine Tom Fucking Brady and his fucking shit-eating grin and his fucking hair and his fucking temper tantrums directed at his teammates and his fucking modeling deals and the fucking fact that he left his pregnant girlfriend so he could go out with a Victoria's Secret model and that he's one of the best fucking quarterbacks in the history of professional football.

But what I hate most of all about the Patriots is that I don't really have a good reason for hating them.

It's true. I really don't. And you'll notice that the title of this blog is Excessively Logical -- I pride myself on living my life according to rules of logic and reason. If sporting love is irrational, sporting hate is infinitely more so.

If I'm honest with myself, everything I just said above is an excuse. I would love to have my team coached by Bill Belichick, who cheats even though he doesn't have to because he's got a brilliant football mind; up until my team hired a guy named Peyton Manning, I'd have overlooked every last fucking foible of Tom Fucking Brady's if he'd suddenly decided he liked mile-high air. I wish I could be part of a fanbase that has seen its teams win eight championships in the last twelve years. (Denver championships in that span? Zero.)

I don't hate the Patriots because Bill Belichick's a douchebag or because Tom Brady's a cad or because their fans are awful. I hate the Patriots because they're a) successful and b) not the Denver Broncos, and all the rest is rationalization. It's not hate born of envy, either -- envy makes more sense than this.

And, truth be told, the only reason I love the Denver Broncos is that I just so happened to be born 65 miles south of Mile High Stadium, and raised by two native Coloradans. It's geography and family history, and nothing else. Any fan of a local team who puffs up and tries to defend himself or herself when he or she gets accused of rooting for the laundry doth protest too much. I root for the orange-and-blue laundry, and the only proof of that you need is that I once had a life-size cardboard cutout of Bill Romanowski -- one of the biggest assholes and dirtiest players in NFL history -- which I threw away the day he signed with the Oakland Raiders. (The life-size cardboard cutout of John Elway is still lurking in some corner of my parents' basement, I don't doubt.)

For whatever reason, it works for me. I feel a love for the Denver Broncos even though the reasons for that love suck. By the same token, I have a tribal enemy, and it is the New England Patriots, despite the facts that I hate tribes, I have no good reason for being a part of the tribe I'm in, and I don't like to think of myself as the type of person who has enemies.

And this is why, I think, I loathe -- or at least used to loathe -- bandwagon fans above any team or fanbase. I despise the kind of person who becomes a Lakers fan after whiling away 90 minutes in a sports bar during a layover at LAX, and that's because the one tenuous connection I have to my team -- the one thing that even comes anywhere close to making sense to me as being a good reason to root for a team -- is absent in the bandwagon fan. If I'm being irrational, they're being downright insane.

I have a very good friend whom I love dearly, and who is, in many ways, my muse for resuming blogging. She's a wonderful human being, full of vivacity and kindness and intelligence and good humor. She means the world to me.

And she's a Patriots fan. Arguably, a bandwagon Patriots fan.

Of course, I don't hate her. I could never hate her. She's carved out of my feelings for the Patriots tribe in my mind -- but why? It can only be because I knew her before her tribal affiliation. Which raises the question of what proportion of the tribe I am sworn against -- what proportion of people who grew up in the shadow of Faneuil Hall instead of Pikes Peak -- are perfectly good people who I would love if I set aside the blinders of tribalism.

I know the answer to that question, but it makes me uncomfortable. In sports, loving a team means hating that team's rivals, and I don't want to let go of my love of the Denver Broncos (or the Colorado Rockies, or the Northwestern Wildcats, or the Colorado Avalanche). Tribalism -- irrational, unjustifiable, Cro-Magnon tribalism -- both enriches and impoverishes my life. In very many ways, sports is my religion. I should hate that, but I don't.

Go Broncos. Fuck the Patriots.

(Have I mentioned that I'm a bandwagon Everton fan?)