Behind The Thrill Of Victory

Of all the euphoric sports celebrations that have marked the advance of Western civilization since Ben-Hur won that chariot race in Rome nearly 2,000 years ago, nothing in memory quite matched the unbridled exuberance and joy that swept through the entire Red Sox Nation on Oct. 27, the night Boston won its first World Series in 86 years and threw off the Curse of the Bambino forever.

The most memorable dénouement to this tortuous tale was not the spectacle of 3.2 million New Englanders descending on the Boston victory parade route three days later. No, the most touching twist of all in this serpentine narrative involved the hundreds of people who repaired to New England cemeteries after the last out to kneel at the graves of deceased friends and relatives–supine Red Sox fans who had spent their lives waiting in vain for that final victory–to share with them the glorious news and leave tokens of the triumph at their tombstones. “We all had relatives who did not live long enough to see the Red Sox win,” says Cheri Griffin, president of the Bosox’ fan club. “A lot of people went to cemeteries to plant Red Sox pennants at the graves. People were kneeling down by graves and telling the stories.

‘Thank you, Red Sox, from my grandfather.’ People were deliriously happy.”

Indeed, it would be difficult to conjure up a more graphic example than the Red Sox experience to illustrate why so many Americans–old and young, rich and poor, even dead, for that matter–derive so much happiness from rooting for teams. According to Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist from Arizona State University who has studied fan behavior, the cemetery excursions to mutter over the departed are not bizarre at all. They make perfect sense, he says, when you understand that the joy and passion felt in rooting for a team is an atavistic response, from when the family of man moved in small, closely related clans and each clan had members who foraged for food and fought to protect the group. “If your warriors defeated your neighbor’s warriors, it meant that you were better,” says Cialdini. “They came from the same genetic stock as you. So if they won, you won. That hasn’t really changed. Today our teams are our warriors.”

That the national pastime is played with large wooden clubs that are wielded like weapons and that the nation’s most popular sport, football, is viewed logically as a metaphor for war–a territorial struggle with shifting front lines, blitzing linebackers and bomb-throwing quarterbacks–work well as subliminal references to that warrior past.

The powerful currents of spectator passion–the heady highs after a victory, the lugubrious lows after a defeat–run especially swift and deep in places where there are no professional teams to uphold the local honor. The fervor with which college football is followed at the universities of Nebraska and Oklahoma, two states without a major league pro team, is rivaled only by the ardency with which the basketball team is worshipped at the University of Kentucky, where college hoops is the state’s secular religion and parishioners make pilgrimages to Rupp Arena in Lexington, Ky., to watch their soldiers do battle against all enemies of the tribe. To attend a game at Rupp and watch grownups choke with pride at the close of a hard-fought victory is to begin to understand how fiercely they identify with their warrior children, how deep those ancient taproots really go.

Cialdini sees fans’ happiness trace to what he calls “a perceived superiority and competence” that they feel in the full flush of victory. He first discerned this when, as a visiting professor at Ohio State University, he was walking across campus one autumn day and noticed that many students were decked out in red-and-silver nylon windbreakers–the school colors–with the O.S.U. logo on the back. Reading the campus newspaper, he learned why: “The O.S.U. football team had been ranked the No. 1 team in the country that week,” he says. “Everyone was literally dressing themselves in the success of that team.”

His discovery launched him on a study that took him to six other football-frenzied universities. The results were the same everywhere, with one unexpected twist: the tendency of students to dress themselves in school colors was tied not just to victory but also to the size of the victory. “It wasn’t the more closely fought contests that produced this powerful phenomenon,” Cialdini says. “It was the clear crushing of an opponent that most elicited this tendency to wear clothing that announced your association with the team. It’s about power and superiority.”

Power and atavism aside, the pleasure and happiness experienced in the act of watching games is doubtless related to what Michael Mandelbaum, in his book The Meaning of Sports, sees as the three most attractive qualities inherent in athletic competitions: suspense, authenticity and coherence until closure. Indeed, he says, in an often desperately muddled, complex and confusing world, “a world in which we are increasingly beset with spin and hype,” authenticity has a powerful, visceral appeal. “While John Wayne was not a war hero and Arnold Schwarzenegger did not do the things we saw the Terminator do on the screen,” Mandelbaum says, “Michael Jordan really did make all those shots.”

No less compelling is that all major pro sports–baseball, football and basketball–have clearly defined seasons, the culmination of which brings closure with the crowning of a champion. One of the reasons that college football’s Bowl Championship Series is under such withering fire is that it fails to offer a definitive title game. In a modern society informed by its tribal past in which wars and scores were originally settled with bows and clubs, the very idea of determining the superior tribe through polls and computers constitutes an evisceration of ancient rules, a form of cultural sacrilege that cuts off the narrative before the end, leaving the outcome voiceless and untold.

And, to be sure, it is that often surprising narrative thread of sports–the suspenseful unfolding of the story line–that is at the bottom of their enormous appeal. It’s the kind of rich and delicious tension that gripped everyone who witnessed Secretariat’s 31-length Triple Crown victory in the Belmont Stakes in 1973, with grown men climbing on dining room tabletops at Belmont Park and later having no memory of how they got there. Or the U.S. hockey team’s beating the favored Soviets in the 1980 Winter Olympics. Or the U.S. women’s soccer team’s winning the World Cup in 1999. Nearly every sports fan can recount such a moment of pure, victorious delirium.

That tension, the intoxicating scent of suspense, certainly drove the Red Sox saga and helped turn it into one of the greatest stories ever told in sport. Red Sox Nation had it all–the vanquished enemy, the lifted curse, the World Series trophy and, yes, at last a happy ending to one of sports’ longest and most poignant narratives. In an ancient ritual, as though around a campfire, the faithful have been sharing it with both the living and the dead.