I Hate the Chiefs

In real life, I’m a gentle soul—easygoing, tolerant, deferential, emotionally steady with a tilt toward whimsical joviality. There are exceptions. Behind the wheel of a car, I turn into an ogre who regards every other vehicle as a rival in the race toward our separate destinations. Put me at a keyboard with a writing deadline, and the world melts in the heat of my frenzy to finish. And: Set me in front of a screen or plop me into the bleachers to watch a sporting event, and I boil up with competitive spiritedness. It’s worse if I’m rooting for one of the teams, but prior fandom isn’t of the essence. A few minutes in, I’ve decided who should win, and I’m offended, even crushed, if they don’t. Watching sports, I understand why the ancients thought of passion as a species of possession by a superhuman power.

I’d like to excuse it with a wink and a nudge, knowing in my soul that the passion is put-on. I can’t. It’s not pretend. I can juice myself into a small froth reading one of Lear’s angry speeches, but sports passion isn’t like that. It’s too immediate, too intense to dismiss as make-believe. And, for me, too long-standing: Some of the worst spiritual crises of my boyhood in Ohio occurred in close proximity to The Game (Ohio State–Michigan). “Can God be just,” I found myself asking, “if the Wolverines beat the Buckeyes . . . again? How long, O Lord?”

It’s a perplexing experience. I can make sense of my earlier self ferociously ripping a rebound away from an opponent. But what’s happening to me when the same rage rises up while I’m sitting comfortably in my recliner? Sports passion, for both players and spectators, is rage, rage usually controlled, rage mixed with hatred. Where is it coming from?

Sometimes I can pinpoint the source. When “my team” is playing, the other team isn’t merely an opponent, but a mortal enemy to be vanquished, blotted from the face of the field. Some teams I dislike because of particular coaches and players. Notre Dame has long been a bête noire, largely, I think, because I find its former coach, Brian Kelly, an insufferable whiner who scapegoats his players for his failures. (Marcus Freeman, Notre Dame’s charismatic new coach, is softening my hostility to the Irish.)

Down here in Alabama, we don’t have any natural link to an NFL franchise, so I spread my interest, mainly following teams with former Tide stars. I want to see Tua Tagovailoa’s Miami Dolphins take off. Jahmyr Gibbs and Jameson Williams helped make the Detroit Lions this year’s funnest NFL team, and I’m always curious to see whom Derrick Henry has stiff-armed into the third row this week. By this measure, I’m pulling for the Eagles in Sunday’s Super Bowl. They’ve got a half dozen former Alabama players, most prominently their quarterback, Jalen Hurts, an Alabama legend who is classiness made flesh, and wide receiver DeVonta Smith, who earned the Heisman Trophy back in 2020. 

If I’m honest, though, my attitude toward Sunday’s game is more about hatred than love. I’m more interested in seeing the Chiefs lose than I am in watching the Eagles win, for reasons that are hard to discern. Patrick Mahomes’s prancing style strikes me as too precious for pro football, but, I have to admit, he’s a magician. Like most football fans, I’d find Travis Kelce tolerable if he could touch the ball without a cutaway to Taylor Swift cheerleading from an upper booth. But the Chiefs have a couple of Alabama grads (Isaiah Buggs, Irv Smith Jr.). And who could hate Kansas City’s avuncular old coach Andy Reid, a genius and as gruffly American as a coach can be?  

Sports hatred, in the end, is a clue to the moral complexity of hatred. Competition depends on enmity, and the enmity has to be passionate to produce high-level performance. Just so, as Julia Yost has recently pointed out, we’re morally good only when we learn to be good haters. Some things are hateful and must be hated. Hatred of folly and thoughtless cruelties is wholly justifiable. We cannot do moral or political good without taking sides and counting our opponents as enemies.

To be sure, sports hatred is a “play” enmity. Few players want to do permanent harm to their opponents. When the clock ticks off the final seconds, enemies embrace, as if heaven’s harmony has descended to envelop the Superdome. But the feeling of play hatred is real. Hatred is inherent in sport because it’s an unrehearsed morality play, an imitation of the action of life. Which is why sports hatred is among the pleasures of sports. It’s the pleasure of taking sides, the compulsion to see the right prevail, the ecstasy of victory. Will Blythe, author of a book about Duke and North Carolina, is right: To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever. If I ever ease up, can someone please check my pulse?

Image by Accedie. Image cropped.