A History of Rooting for the Underdogs

A spectre haunted Columbia—the spectre of Bambinoism. All
the powers entered into an alliance of academia to exorcise this
spectre: RA’s and Alice!, midterms and papers, veteran
seniors and naïve freshmen. But to no avail, because it was
here to stay.

Yes, the World Series came like a tidal wave through this
Morningside campus. But was it those last four games or the seven
preceding them that really shook us?

It was a Tuesday night and Carman 13 was glued to the TV set, as
was probably most of the campus, watching the Red Sox pull off yet
another victory in their match-up against the Yankees.
“How?” one asks. “How did they do it?” I am
from San Francisco, a Giants fan, and I am not going to lie. I have
no affiliation whatsoever with either the Red Sox or the Yankees,
no East Coast pride requiring that I watch the contest between
these two neighboring teams. Hell, it wasn’t even the Series
yet.

This college is filled with people from all 50 states, U.S.
territories, and over 150 different countries, some coming in with
strong affiliations and others with none at all. Yet we joined
together that night, aligning ourselves with one side or the other,
or perhaps with neither, and enjoyed the tense game (a welcome
short nine innings after the 14-inning game of the night
before).

Let’s take a minute, shall we, and think about just why
this underdog success story so captured our campus of stress-ridden
college co-eds. It was more than a battle between cities, more than
a rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox; it was
history—history being made, and history finally playing
itself out.

We’ll start with the Curse of the Bambino. In 1918, the
Sox won the World Series—a moment of glory—with the
Great Bambino himself, Babe Ruth, on their side. They traded him,
however, to the Yankees, and later sportswriters claimed that he
had cursed the Sox to a hundred years without a series. Until that
Wednesday night, this curse had been lived out.

But, just as Reagan broke the curse of Tecumseh when he was
reelected in a zero-year election, could the Sox in turn break the
curse of the Bambino? That’s what we were all wondering: can
they somehow defeat the same “powers that be” that let
a crucial ground ball bounce past Red Sox first-baseman Bill
Buckner in ’86 against the Mets and facilitated Aaron
Boone’s out-of-nowhere home run last year in Game Seven of
the American League Championship Series against the Sox?

So that’s part of it. But I think this goes beyond that,
far beyond; I think this really dates back to the beginnings of our
country. We are a nation of underdogs, historically, and it is
because of this that a little bit of each of us wanted to see if
the Sox could actually pull this one off.

We were comparing our scrappy army of the Revolutionary War to
this team in its struggle to stand up against the monster power of
the 26-time winners of the World Series, who have dominated
baseball for the last century much like the imperial Great Britain
dominated the seas. This was a battle between the Patriots and the
Loyalists, the Rebels and the Tories. The Red Sox were David, the
Yankees mighty Goliath.

And why did we, poor college students caught in the middle of
midterms, follow this baseball match-up when there were far better
ways to be spending those four hours (or six, in the case of two of
the games)? It was procrastination, yes. But here, also, I believe
it goes beyond that.

If David can beat the odds and win over Goliath, if the
Americans can defeat the British superpower for independence, if
the Red Sox can miraculously come back after trailing 0-3 to win
the set and make it to the Series—if all this can
happen—then school, or anything, for that matter, becomes a
relative piece of cake. We are the underdogs in the world of
academia, we undergrads, and especially we freshmen; it’s
just nice to know that we can win sometimes.

Students of all ages and residence halls, unite!

Kristin Francoz is a Columbia College first-year.