USC, Ohio State, Michigan and the Hundred-Yard Stare

This morning over at his eponymous sports blog, Dan Shanoff made an astonishing confession:

This fall, every Saturday I will wake up with rabid anticipation, choose between a dozen different possible "lucky" outfits, then set up (or stand up) on the couch next to my wife to root on my Florida Gators football team.

Or should I say: HER Florida Gators football team.

[...]

That was the initial attraction to this woman across the table from me on our first date. I have heard stories of people on dates with successful professionals and fantasizing themselves as spouses of a doctor or hedge-fund manager; I sat across from my date and imagined how happy I would be married to a fan of a great sports team.

Now, in my younger days, I might have taken this opportunity to bust on dear old Dan. I'm sure you'd be familiar with all of the old standbys by now, so there's no need to go over them again. Safe to say, if you're a guy and you grew up in North America -- I usually write about the NHL so excuse me for including our Canadian cousins -- you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Fortunately for me, time and tide have made me all the wiser, and led me to conclude that Dan's decision was the right one on more levels than he could possibly know. Why do I say that? Because, unlike Dan, when I had the chance to glam onto the loyalties of a woman who was a fan of one of college football's most storied teams, I blanched.

Did I mention that I did it twice?

Growing up on Long Island outside of New York City, I wasn't so much of a college football fan as I was a fan of college football on New Year's Day. Back in those days, the only Division I team of any consequence in New York was Army, and I didn't have any ties to them. Rutgers was a bad joke, and neither of my parents graduated from a four-year college so I didn't have any family ties to fall back on.

But what I did rely on, until the advent of the BCS anyway, was hoping the dominoes would fall just right on New Year's Day so every game you watched -- from the Cotton Bowl in the early afternoon all the way to the Orange Bowl under the lights in Miami -- mattered when it came to determining what was then the mythical national title.

Over the years, ones where my family would spend the holiday at my grandparents' brownstone in Brooklyn, the game that I came to love the most was the Rose Bowl. I always seem to remember it coming on NBC right after we finished with dinner, and it was hard for a kid from Long Island not to dream about what it might be like to lose yourself far from where you grew up at a massive campus like Ohio State or USC.

Years later, as an adult, I finally got a taste of what college football was all about when I stopped off in Columbus in the Fall of 2000 for Ohio State's homecoming game against Minnesota. To say I was awed by the experience would be an understatement: There was the teeming mass of people; a massive stadium that was almost too huge to comprehend, complete with the sort of stained glass windows you usually only find in the world's finest cathedrals.

To this day I don't believe the experience of any American sports fan can really be complete without watching watching big time college football in person -- otherwise how could you possibly hope to understand why Jim Tressel is more important to the state of Ohio than the Governor?

To make sure I remembered it all, I stopped at a stand outside the stadium and plunked down some cash for an OSU jersey and baseball cap. It would come in handy later.

Fast-forward a couple of years, and I find myself dating a Washington lawyer. But not just any kind of Washington lawyer. Instead, we're talking about a Michigan alum, a girl was was born and raised in Ann Arbor and didn't really love anything more than the maize and blue than her two dogs. Sure enough, the week of the 2003 Ohio State-Michigan game comes around, and she asks me if I'd like to come over and watch the game.

I say sure, which was around the time I remembered that I had that cap and jersey stashed away somewhere. Come game day, I dug them out of a closet and threw them on, thinking that I'd get a big laugh once I showed up at her front door.

It didn't quite work out that way. There was no laugh, and no perfunctory hug and kiss inside the door. Instead, me and my dopey grin were met with a glare with the intensity of the kind of gale force wind off Lake Superior that probably doomed the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Though we did manage to get through watching the game, I don't remember that we talked all the much, even after I sheepishly removed the cap and jersey. It was the sort of experience that you don't soon forget, and to tell you the truth it was still fresh in my mind come New Year's Day 2004, as the two of us sat down to watch USC and Michigan in the Rose Bowl.

Even though months had passed since the OSU game, I had to admit I was still a little frosted. I wasn't really an OSU fan, I was just a wise guy from Long Island who was playing for laughs. After that experience, it was hard not to feel that rooting for Michigan was some sort of unconditional surrender in the relationship, as if she owned college football. As long as we were together it was Michigan or nothing.

So as she switched on the television in the midst of the first half, I was determined to simply watch the game and say nothing at all. All was well for a few minutes, at least until I seem to remember that the Wolverines were forced to punt.

Which was right when my significant other looked me straight in the eye and said, "You're rooting for USC. I can't believe you're rooting for USC."

I stuttered. I stammered. But I couldn't get anything out of my mouth. How could I? After all, she had looked deep into my soul and found a Trojan sympathizer. And she was right.

A few weeks later, the relationship came apart for a thousand other reasons, or so it seemed. Perhaps I should have been grateful. After all, if a couple can't agree on something simultaneously as vital and meaningless as the allegiance to a college football team, how could they possibly expect to get along about anything else?