Melany Perez
There’s just something about football in the South. August nights when an entire community braves hundred-degree twilights to rally around their team. Scorched air exaggerating the pink of the setting sun like a magnifying glass setting a field on fire. Suspense and humidity mingling in the air while an entire stadium holds its breath, eyes on a Hail Mary pass.
That intoxicating feeling of exploding out of silence once the receiver throws the ball down in the end zone is one that I practically have bottled and saved on a shelf. I was a cheerleader in high school, in Texas no less, and as such a part of me will always belong to those Friday nights spent jumping and screaming on the red rubber track.
So it came as a surprise when I went almost the entirety of the fall season without attending a Yale football game. It is, if no one else, the stereotypical Texas cheerleader that one would expect to see at the Yale Bowl every autumn Saturday decked out in blue and white. Yet, for whatever reason, I just can’t bring myself to show up for the Bulldogs in the same way that I used to for my high school team.
A characteristically introspective Yale kid, I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out why this is the case. And it occurred to me that maybe before I identify some kind of deficiency in Yale football, I owe it to this school to be a little more honest with myself about my own history with football and cheer. I wasn’t placed on the Southern conveyor belt that turns little girls into uniformed gymnasts with teased hair and red lipstick — actually, I wasn’t even raised watching football at all. The reason I tried out for the cheer team in ninth grade was that I liked to dance, and it seemed like a good way to meet people at my new school. In fact, it wasn’t until my junior year that I began to pay attention to the football aspect of Friday Night Lights. I had virtually no understanding of how the game worked, and even now I only cautiously throw around seemingly knowledgeable terms like touchback, two-point conversion and running offense. (Okay, maybe those aren’t actually knowledgeable terms, but let me have my small victories.)
Coming to college, it’s easy to caricaturize elements of your past to the extent that they can ground you in your present. This is a particularly easy thing to do being from a state like Texas — I’d imagine that for non-natives the name itself conjures images of cowboys and mutton-busting and the faint smell of barbecue sauce. So perhaps when I express shock at my lack of attendance at the Yale Bowl stadium, what I’m really feeling is a tad unsettled at the fact that my pre-Yale background can’t account for 100 percent of my current self. After all, it’s a quick fix for homesickness to align your own identity with that of the place that you come from.
That’s particularly applicable when you consider that football in the South is an entity centered around youth and grit in a way that it never could be in the North. At the point when northern cities were founding professional teams, the South was behind in industrialization and economically crippled by Reconstruction. So, in the absence of expensive professional franchises, Southern fanatics put all they had into college football. As such, the narrative of football in the South is one that follows a plucky freshman who has been giving the game their all for 18 years in order to have a shot to play for UT or Alabama — not a millionaire quarterback who sells his soul to the team with the highest offer.
These characteristics — hard work, passion, loyalty — are some that anyone would want to stake their claim to, and so I’ve jumped on my status as a Texan in Yankee territory, using football as an attribute of my past. As opposed to Northern professional franchises, Southern obsession with college football borders on worship. It’s religious. It’s a rite of passage that filters down from adults who recount the story of how they beat their rival in high school 40 years ago and now teach their kindergarteners how to tackle. That kind of ridiculous allegiance is a stark contrast to the quiet professionalism and respectability that I’ve seen at most Yale sporting events.
So maybe what I’m tapping into isn’t so much nostalgia for Texas or Friday Night Lights. Maybe there’s just something about being 16 and cheering for your high school team, existing as a cliché and being more than okay with it.