I’m So Blue

Here are some facts about Ann Arbor, Michigan.

It’s a typical Midwestern town with a moderate population (124,000) in the southeastern part of the state. The average winter high is 34 degrees, it’s humid 84% of the year, 86% of the days are cloudy or partly cloudy, and 167.5 of them are rainy. Most residents live in medium-sized bungalow, prairie-style, or ranch homes, yet real estate prices are relatively high. It is the most educated town in America, the average age is 27.5, and 67.2% of the inhabitants claim no religious affiliation. 

Essentially, Ann Arbor is wet, cold, gloomy, expensive, and filled with godless, smart-ass kids.

The University of Michigan, of course, is in Ann Arbor. But in terms of mass popular appeal, nobody cares that U of M Professor Lois Weisman and her team discovered that lipid kinases VPS34 and PIKfyve coordinate a phosphoinositide cascade to regulate retriever-mediated recycling on endosomes. 

But what Ann Arbor also has, that millions of people care about very much, is an annual delirium that turns normal people into shrieking, brain-impaired lunatics. For 12 weeks every autumn, the University of Michigan football team provides a sports spectacle that wavers between glorious and gruesome. Since 1879, virile young Michigan men have run up and down a field as if the fate of the universe depended on them.

There is nothing unusual about this. Football fans howl on college campuses everywhere in America. “Roooooool Tide” rumbles far beyond Tuscaloosa. USC has won 11 national championships, had 13 undefeated seasons, produced 8 Heisman Trophy winners, and their fans gladly cheer a team named after condoms. Notre Dame fans believe that winning is their divine right because Jesus is the quarterback. 

Michigan fans, however, are in a slightly more psychotic category. For them, football isn’t exactly a sport. It’s an obsession of perverted magnitude, an affliction so desperate, demented, and delusional, it causes permanent emotional wreckage. Season after season, it clutches the heart and withers the brain, its origins vague, its duration long, and its cure unknown. 

Education is supposed to be the great equalizer. It isn’t. Michigan football is. Being a fan sinks every kind of person to the same low level of reckless frenzy and appalling self-torture. Rich CEOs, freshman math geeks, auto workers, poet laureates, middle school librarians, sorority princesses, second-graders, Uber drivers, policewomen, brain surgeons, Teamsters, sous chefs, financial analysts, and pickle ball coaches – all reduced by their passion and behavior to garish circus clowns. That includes some 94-year-old man who no longer recognizes his wife’s face, but still remembers the 1948 game against #3 Northwestern when Michigan scored 3 touchdowns in 7 plays to win.

There is no dignity, logic, or happiness in being a Michigan football fan. Tragically, I am one.

I’ve had 3 husbands, 4 children, 6 grandchildren, cancer, encephalitis, and Bell’s Palsy. I watched the Berlin Wall go up, the Twin Towers come down, school children murdered, a man walk on the moon, Mt. St. Helen’s erupt, Richard Nixon resign, polar ice caps melt, and thimble-witted thugs break into the Capitol.

I don’t need football scores to have drama and trauma in my life.

I was a freshman at Michigan in 1966. That means I’ve watched this team play football for 57 years. What I’ve learned in all that time is you never know. There is an improbable and immeasurable element in some games that twists the mists between victory and defeat.

I don’t know why Michigan lost to Appalachia Sate in 2007, or how UCLA overcame a 21-0 deficit in 1982 to beat Michigan 31-27, or what happened when Michigan led Michigan State 23-21 in the last 8 seconds of the 2015 game, but the kicker flubbed the snap, the ball flew into the hands of an MSU player, and he ran for a touchdown and a 27-23 win. 

Sometimes a scrambled misalignment of stars makes the heavens crooked.

I also don’t know how Michigan beat Ohio State in 1969, or why a Michigan pass with 2 seconds remaining in the 2011 Notre Dame game was caught in the end zone for a 35-31 Michigan win, or how Michigan crawled back from two 14-point deficits and one overtime to beat Alabama 35-34 in the Orange Bowl of 2000.

Sometimes the sky opens just enough to let magic fall through.   

My reactions to all the games I’ve watched is the same. When Michigan loses, I feel sledge hammers pounding my bones and I chew ashes for a week. When Michigan wins, I am certain that God himself wears tacky maize and blue sweatpants.

I know that my worldview is chronically shortsighted. 

It is true that a Michigan loss is not tragic like a nuclear war is tragic. But if winning was on the line, I might be willing to let a few small bombs drop.

When my first child was born, he was the center of my life. But if I happened to be watching Michigan at the one-yard line in a close game, he had to change his own diapers.

Bo Schembechler once said “In life, what matters is football. What doesn’t matter is everything else.” That’s sort of extreme, but not very much. 

I once had to choose between watching a Michigan game and going to my cousin’s wedding. I saw Michigan beat Penn State 21-13.

After almost 6 decades, it’s pathetic that I still care about exceptionally large 20-year-old boys running fast and crashing into each other. Especially since I’m not particularly knowledgeable about how football works. I don’t know the difference between a bomb and a blitz, although they both sound unpleasant. I can’t pronounce Olusegon Oluwatimi. When players get in a huddle, I always wonder what they talk about. I don’t know what hut means. Who talks into Jim Harbaugh’s headset? Which way is lateral?

And yet I persist, addicted to misery and in the company of equally deranged people. Michigan fans are the premiere football fools of all time. We are shameless, obnoxious, and myopic, prone to inflated self-assessment, interminable recitations of our hallowed athletic history, and bloated with hallucinatory expectations at the beginning of each season. People hate us. I hate us.

Where does this madness come from?

My belief is that it’s an unholy cocktail of arrogance, fantasy, and nostalgia that Michigan fans guzzle indiscriminately. 

Michigan students are casually arrogant, a harmless affectation until they graduate, and it becomes a serious personality disorder. It is based on the conviction that Michigan is an intellectually elevated institution, and that athletic superiority should match academic superiority. When faced with a losing season, fans retreat into the assumption that our players are smarter than their players. Somehow the permanent powerhouses – Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson – don’t deserve to win because there aren’t enough Rhodes Scholars on their teams. There is, of course, no proven connection between understanding linear Gaussian processes and sacking a quarterback, but the bias remains. Michigan fans are deeply ruffled if an Alabama wide receiver catches four touchdown passes but can’t identify heroic symbolism in Alexander Pope.

There are, however, certain indications that not everyone associated with Michigan is a genius.

The school mascot is a wolverine, an animal that doesn’t exist anywhere in the state of Michigan. A member of the weasel family, it is small and reclusive, and its scientific name means “glutton.” The most charming feature of a wolverine is a powerful anal scent gland.

The original name of the University was Catholepistemiad, but none of the students were smart enough to spell it.

In 1879, on their way to play the University of Chicago, the Michigan football team stopped in South Bend to teach Notre Dame how to play football. Very generous but also stupid.

The questionable Michigan sense of superiority, while irritating, is not a health hazard the way stubborn, neurotic delusion is. Michigan fans float through life in a luxurious fog of fantasy.

The ultimate phrase of hollow hope and warped imagination is “Wait until next year. Michigan has a great team coming up.” However dismal any season is, the pain of it recedes throughout December and burrows underneath the hard ground and cold snows of winter. It reappears in early summer, all traces of accurate memory pruned away so it can bloom by August into football fiction. In September the stadium fills with fans expecting the team fabricated in their minds and are stunned when it doesn’t appear. The cycle continues, lofty presumptions and harsh realities smashing into each other, year after year after year. However comforting these delusions are, they border on certifiable mental illness. An entire stadium of people like this is called an asylum. 

For most people, college is a four-year interlude between the mundane amusements of high school and the stern routines of adult employment. It’s an era removed from real time, a collection of rich indulgences that will never come together again — fresh freedoms, drug-bloated weekends, conspicuous irresponsibility, intellectual nourishment, slightly indiscriminate hook ups, and a thousand manic diversions. It provides a coddled independence – tethered to home but free to dismiss the people who live there. Bargain bliss.

Nostalgia and football collide in The Big House because every game is a celebration of accumulated memories, a socially acceptable way to be young and uncouth for a few hours. There is, of course, that sound – the greatest fight song in college football history. On the other hand, I’ve never liked halftime shows, a line of tubas and trombones scurrying into the formation of a hydroplane that looks like a myna bird. I don’t like hot dogs, either, but I adore fans who aren’t allowed to drink in the stadium but get so sloshed by the 2^nd quarter they can’t remember where the players are.

As committed as I am to the miserable pleasures of Michigan football, none of it really belongs to me. The whole chaotic crush of big donors, t-shirt vendors, sport writers, marching trumpets, the Jumbotron, box seats, NFL scouts, TV timeouts, betting odds, cruising drones, crowded bathrooms, rain, snow, boiling heat, and sentimental alums is just background clutter to one fact – college football is played by college students for their college friends.

This is their time, in their stadium, on their campus, in it together and doing their best. Trying to get through Inorganic Chemistry. Trying to get through defensive linemen. Working 2 jobs to fund an expensive education. Working 5-hour drills 6 days a week. Tackling Advanced Calculus. Tackling a wide receiver. Trying to get into law school. Trying to get into the NFL. Flunking. Fumbling. Incomplete in a class. An incomplete pass. Winning a scholarship. Winning a championship.

Football in The Big House is a whirlwind that descends onto the field and spins a thousand moving parts into choreographed turbulence, all of it ignited by 100 players and about 15,000 students who are their classmates, girlfriends, roommates, buddies, and best friends. After a win, the players strut over to the student section to gloat and roar because for a few years, the University of Michigan is their shared home, and everybody else just visitors. 

To watch a Michigan football game, all I do is sit down on an aluminum bench or turn on the TV. Except for the possibility of a shattering nervous breakdown, whatever happens on the field does not endanger me. But the players have bodies that can break and spirits that can be crushed. They are exposed to millions of people who feel qualified to assess their performances, curse their mistakes, rage about torn ligaments, and shout them off the field. 

Many of them come from towns like Solon, Ohio, or Sachse, Texas, or Ossineke, Michigan, places that watched them grow up and made them heroes. Friday night lights shined on them, but they weren’t blinded by the glare. Once they walk into The Big House, however, nothing is ever small again. 110,000 people can make a terrifying noise and TV footage sends their stardom and stumbles around the world. They are judged every Saturday by people who have never worn winged helmets, or any other kind of helmet.

They can learn new plays, improve their skills, and toughen their bodies. But there is no training for the sudden enormity, scrutiny, and stakes that begin when they flood out of the locker room and reach for the banner. They are 18-23 year old kids who have never bought home insurance, taken a toddler to the ER, or thought about a FICO score. They’re not adults but they have to overcome fears very few adults will ever face. They carry the hungers, elations, and furies of millions of people every time the ball is snapped.

I’ve never played football, I don’t like being outside, and the last time I was a student, a new show called Sesame Street went on the air. So I suppose it would be prudent to finally surrender such an unruly affection, even if it takes aggressive anti-psychotic drugs or a frontal lobotomy. On the other hand, I’ve never been an advocate of self-improvement, especially my own. And I wonder if it’s even possible to tame a compulsion that began the same way for every Michigan graduate – on an October day long ago, a certain crisp, cloudless autumn afternoon, walking south on State Street with 15,000 friends, hearing drums and horns in the distance, pushing through the gates to the cold crowded shadows beneath the upper bleachers, and then emerging into sudden sunlight and the stadium sprawl of 110,000 people and all the thunder and rapture they brought with them – a day that lasts forever because in that moment there is no better place on earth to be.