"We go every Sunday, pray, come back home and then do it again next week."
Would it surprise you if I said this was my film teacher talking to our class in Spain last term?
"This is the most important thing in all of Barcelona."
Would it also surprise you that my professor showed us not a bible, but a plastic ID card?
My professor was flashing an FC Barcelona season ticket holder's card, and it was his most valuable possession. Be convinced by the religious overtones of his words in Spain, soccer is sacred. His obsession with the team was to the point where I would honestly spend the first 10 minutes of the class asking him questions about the team in order not to do work. I would stay very clear of this tactic if Barca ever lost, but fortunately for me it is probably the best team in the world.
I bring this up because the most recent match between Real Madrid and Barcelona highlights the difference in sports passion between the United States and Europe. That difference is almost incomprehensible until you have actually seen it.
To make a simple analogy, Madrid vs. Barcelona games are as if two NFL teams played in the United States in the late 1860s with one squad representing the North and one representing the South. It is literally that intense, escalating to civil-war status in Spain.
Boston vs. New York rivalries are great, the Duke vs. UNC matchup is always good and the national hatred of Lebron James has caused many like myself to root for the Celtics. Being from New York, that was one of the harder things I have ever had to admit, but that's how much I hate the man who has tattooed "Chosen 1" on his back. Still, these cases of animosity are exceptions, and none of them can compete with the intensity seen in European sports.
I thought Dartmouth was more or less lacking a particular athletic passion. At first, I think of football games, where the stands are painfully empty. Hockey is also awkwardly empty until a few minutes into the game. We are not the diehard fans one would find at large state schools.
At best, we are probably fair-weather fans by American standards. We go to the Princeton hockey game. We went the women's lacrosse Ivy League Championship match.
The title "fair weather" is generally negative, but take into account an important part of what we are fans at Dartmouth.
Let's think a little more about that to understand it better we are fans at a D-I school that offers no scholarships, whose students have tons of other stuff to do and that is in a place where it gets so cold that it is literally painful to walk to the games so I guess the phrase is ironic in that we rarely actually have fair weather.
If we accept the facts about Dartmouth and look at the sports here, we really don't do so badly. We came out in large numbers to support the women's lax team in a crucial game. I had never heard of a squash team getting any fans, but our home matches are always packed. Students get so into lacrosse games that they are not allowed to go into the same section as parents (seriously, they had two different places to buy food just to accommodate this, and you could not get into the parents section if you wanted to).
Yeah, the football stadium might need to be downsized so it looks like it's full and at times our teams can be painful to watch thanks Ivy League for not letting us have scholarships but we do the best we can given what we have to deal with.
Also, unlike the Barcelona-Madrid death march, no Dartmouth sport has ever fought anything comparable to a civil war. Although I really do hate Harvard.
