Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh once said he wants to build ‘real’ men in the NFL. So… who are ‘fake’ men?
The drums pound in my ears as I clap my hands in the stands. I sing the fight song at the top of my lungs. I’ve missed this feeling; it’s the first game I’ve been able to make all year.
Hockey at Miami University (Ohio) is a huge deal. It’s our football. Students stand in line for two hours prior to games to get one of the limited free student tickets. In some ways, I never feel more like a part of my school than when I am at hockey games.
Then the cheers start.
Like many fan sections, we have set cheers. Most of them just involve a lot of clapping while yelling “sieve” at the goalie, or singing “Sweet Caroline” (BAH! BAH! BAH!). After reading the cheers at the University of Alabama Huntsville and the University of Michigan, they are pretty standard across universities, down to the offensive ones.
The chants from the student sections are only one small part of the dynamics that have dominated sports for decades.
Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh column from a decade ago about building “real” men takes the cake.
Sport grants license to be rude, crass and downright mean.
From the now-banned “See-Ya chant” at the University of Michigan to the hardwood of the court belonging to my old crosstown rival, fans taunt, yell, jeer, and cheer.
In middle school one of my friends would stand in the middle of the crowd at my home games and pretend to answer his phone during the opposing team’s freethrows.
He’d yell: “Mom! Yeah, I’m at the game! She’s shooting freethrows.
“No, she just airballed again.
“It’s third one in a row. I know, Go Cavs!”
I could barely contain myself when he did it, because it was hilarious. I’m still shocked he never got thrown out.
Cheers are all about mental disruption. So much of sport requires mental strength. At their core that’s what these cheers test. They can also forward oppression blatantly, and in such a way that it can be hard to recognize. When I attend hockey games at Miami, I make the conscious choice to not participate in the “War Whoop” – that “Indian” chant nearly every child in my town learned while playing “Cowboys and Indians”. Students make that noise whenever an opposing player is sent to the penalty box.
I also choose to not participate in some of the more vulgar cheers like the crowd favorites: “Get off your knees, Ref! You’re blowing the game” and “Delta! Delta! Delta! Score! Score! Score!” Delta Delta Delta refers to a sorority on campus by the same name.
There are a number of others that are less tame – so many of them are rife with sexism and homophobia. That we don’t realize the real origins of so many of these chants is the very definition of normalizing.
It wasn’t until I re-watched “The U” and “The U Part 2” that I realized I had been doing a “Tomahawk Chop” for two years. The Tomahawk Chop is mostly associated with Florida State football and the Atlanta Braves, but it has also infiltrated Goggin’s culture without the larger racial context to the point. Even I had no idea the motion I performed at hockey games was anything other than the way we pointed at people until I saw the image recontextualized.
When we talk about oppression in sports, often the overt use of slurs or violence is brought up as an example. And while those things certainly happen – see Kobe and Joakim Noah and the story of Dalton Maldonado – the reality is that sexism, homophobia, and racism are woven through the very fabric of sporting culture, affecting all of us, and often within our subconscious.
Sports create an important pillar of any town, state, university and national culture. When a team wins the sectional championship in my hometown, the fire department does a lap of the entire town while the locals stand outside and cheer. After a university or professional team wins a championship, there is a parade. The way we have constructed sports as a society centers masculinity as essential for their perceived goodness. This particular kind of masculinity means big men, big muscles, big hits, and big dunks. The emphasis on what I will name as hypermasculinity, determines the definition of athletes and the norms and behaviors to which they must ascribe. These values become the status quo, reinforced with every cheer, image, and discussion about sports.
