Okay, say you’re at a sporting event. You’re probably going to be hearing two very different types of cheers: Supportive of your own team (“Yeah! Gooooo team! Woohoo!”) and destructive of the other (“Boo! You suck!”). Depending on how the game is going and who you’re playing, that cheering can go up and down in intensity. Now, do you think there’s a way we can make that intensity go all the way up? Make it exceed the maximum? Well, there is. All we have to do is introduce a rivalry.
Think to high school, or college. Did you have a rivalry with another school in sports? If you’re a student at UofL, I’m sure you’re imagining a beefy Cardinal bird in mortal combat with a Wildcat. When I researched some of the bigger sports rivalries, I split my information up into two sections.
1. How rivalries get started
How do they get started? Well, it turns out there are a few different ways, depending on the circumstances. Let’s start with the main cause: winning/losing records. Let’s take a look at the rivalry between the University of Alabama and Auburn, from the beginning:
+Their first game against each other in football was in Birmingham in the year
1894. It was considered a home game for Alabama, but Auburn won 32-22. That was it, there was no big controversy involving the nearly 2000 people attending.
+In their next game, Auburn beat Alabama again 40-16, with 5000 attending
+After the last big win, most of the fans supported Auburn at the third meeting as
the clear victors, but they ended up losing 18-0. That angered Auburn fans, and gave the Alabama fans something to gloat about.
+New Auburn coach fought back with a 48-0 win in his first year, making Alabama have a 0-4 season.
+Another new Auburn coach had first their undefeated season, 4-0. In all four games, only one team managed to score any points against Auburn, and that team was Alabama, when they lost 53-5. This was after 5 years without them facing one another, and that only angered Alabama fans all over again as suddenly the Auburn supports had bragging rights.
+Next year, Auburn managed to beat Alabama again despite not having won a single earlier game that season, which stung Alabama’s pride.
Alabama started to come back with two consecutive wins over Auburn and the year after, with both teams having only one loss in the season, they reached the first tie of the history of the rivalry in 1907.
After that, even with the huge rivalry between the two universities, there was a 41 year hiatus where Auburn did not play against Alabama for 41 years. That sounds like the setup for a movie, right? Right after two fiercely competitive teams reach their first tie in history, they suddenly stop playing each other… Well, the most interesting thing is that between being beaten on home turf and the shutout wins, a huge, seething rivalry had formed between Alabama and Auburn. It was so strong that it survived that 41 year hiatus and was still just as strong the next time they played each other in 1948.
There is another way for a rivalry to begin, though. My former high school chemistry teacher, Melissa Payne, who had both attending my school as a student and now teaches there, helped shed some light on the subject:
“When I went to J-town I our biggest rival was Fern Creek. Mostly due to proximity, but when I went to school it was based on where you lived so when we were in middle school at Carrithers, half of the 8th graders ended up at J-town and the other half at Fern Creek. So rivalries stemmed from an "in your face" attitude about the others who ended up at Fern Creek based on their residence. I think as the student assignment plan changed and students have choice as to where they can go to school that type of rivalry has gone by the wayside.
We now have rivalries more based on winning. J-town never really had very good sports teams when I went to school. We were OK but not great. Over the years, though, our boys basketball team's success has made them a target for much rivalry.
When I was teaching at Eastern and then at J-town, the rivalry mostly stemmed from us meeting each other so many times in the 90's and 00's in the district finals and regional finals in basketball. It seemed like every year it came down to one of us (or Ballard) would be making the trip to the 7th regional tournament and state tournament.”
This introduction leads me into my second point,
2. How rivalries affect fans
Payne continues to explain some of these affects with the J-Town/Eastern rivalry. She explains how, after one of their players transferred to J-Town, Eastern fans chanted and held up signs reading, “Recruit me, Morrow,” the name of the coach of the boys’ basketball team. But things got worse and the signs got “more hateful.” One of them attacked an overweight cheerleader, as they screamed “Free Shamoo” at her until she ran out of the gym in tears.
Unfortunately, even the faculty can be drawn into the rivalry. For example, when Payne went to Eastern’s Assistant Principal to demand he do something about the signs calling J-town girls dirty sluts, he had her banned from Eastern’s campus and threatened to have her arrested, in addition to ignoring the horrible things his students were doing. “I believe there have been some fights after games,” Payne continues, “But nothing too bad. There is always more security when we play each other, and the games have been moved to Bellarmine to accommodate more people trying to attend.”
Works Cited
Fravel, Jonathan. “Alabama and Auburn: Why the Rivalry Exists.” bleacher report. N.p., 08 Mar
2011. Web. 28 Sep 2011.
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Payne, Melissa. E-mail Interview. 29 Sep 2011.
