Unnatural Rival

Another more personal essay, about rivalries in sports. Or it was supposed to be before I got carried away. The pictures are partisan; everything else is fair. I'll do my Week 3 stuff over the weekend, but I get a better reaction from this kind of entry anyway.

Until 2007, this was the highlight of my Giants fan-dom.

When I was 16, in my Junior year of High School, there was probably nothing I hated more in the world than Arlington High School. I hated their preppy attitude and clothes, hated the attention they got, and hated the way our football team always came up just short against them. I hated that my cousin went there- and he always seemed to be my grandparents’ favorite. I’d get into arguments with people in the mall or at bowling alleys just because I saw them wearing a maroon and gold (and seriously, could there be a more pretentious color scheme?) sweatshirt. So when it came time to get a summer job, I got one in Lagrange, working with 25 kids who all went to Arlington. I spent my whole summer arguing 1 on 25 with people about high school sports, or whatever other insignificant bullshit a 16 year old kid cares about. I don’t know why I felt like I should surround myself with nothing but kids representing something I hated to much, but I just felt comfortable with it being me against everyone else.

Fast forward 16 months.

Now here I am an 18 year old kid. And I’ve once again decided to surround myself with people who love something I hate. I’m in north Philadelphia, at La Salle University, moving into freshman dorms with 800 or so kids from Philly, suburban Philly, and South Jersey. La Salle was not a school with a huge amount of kids from all over the country, it was mostly regional. New York may as well have been Winnipeg to a lot of those kids. I heard some new phrases I wasn’t familiar with (a notebook is a “copy book?”), caught some shit for an accent I never knew I had (there’s a “w” in chocolate somewhere) and tried to figure out why soft pretzels were served cold.

I also saw a lot of green.

This was September, 2004. The Philadelphia Eagles were coming off 3 straight title game appearances and were easily the class of the NFC. They’d just acquired Terrell Owens, who I hated even before he was an Eagle, and seemed destined for a Super Bowl. My Giants on the other hand, were coming off a 4-12 season. They had a new head coach, a rookie quarterback, and seemed destined for 11 or 12 losses again. They unfortunately played the Eagles in Week 1 and got soundly hammered. My roommate first half of freshman year was an Eagles fan, but not the kind I could respect. He didn’t know shit, and was clearly into it because they were good and all his friends were fans (something tells me he’s got a Chase Utley jersey on as we speak). I remember watching him sleep through 3 quarters of a game like 2 weeks later only to see him wake up and start bragging because the Eagles were winning. As that season unfolded it kept getting worse. The Eagles went 13-3 spanked the Giants again, and won the NFC Championship game. You couldn’t go to a party without hearing the E-A-G-L-E-S Eagles! chant and the T-O song 10 times each. When they finally lost the Super Bowl I felt nothing but relief, but I had 3 years of this left to deal with.




Winston Justice only let Osi get 6 sacks in this game



Only it didn’t quite pan out like I was expecting. The Giants got good, and stayed good. They swept the Eagles in 2005, but the Eagles took 2 out of 3 (including a playoff win) in 2006. The Giants won the first game in 2007 to knot the series at 4-4 since I’d been in college. I remember how hard I rooted for the Giants in that last game my senior year. I just wanted to be able to say the Giants had a winning record against the Eagles in my 4 years at school. When Akers missed a potential game-tying Field Goal as time expired, that relief came back again. Despite how rocky it started, the Giants had gone 5-4 while I was living in a sea of green.

But my hatred for the Philadelphia Eagles was not born out of my matriculation (fancy word to describe the beer drinking and Nintendo playing I actually did at college) at La Salle. It started way before that. My father’s family is after all, originally from Philadelphia, and despite living in New York for 40 years, I constantly had to hear all about Philly. My cousins (the same ones who went to Arlington) were raised rooting for Philadelphia teams, and my grandparents never missed a chance to jab at New York- or our teams. My brother and I- the dyed in the wool New Yorkers, rebelled hard against that, and it was the subject of many an argument at family gatherings. When the Giants played the Eagles in Week 17 of 2002, it was during a Christmas gathering. Both teams needed the game, and were split into separate rooms, lest the family be torn asunder. When David Akers missed a 29 yard field goal that would have iced the game, my cry of “He hooked it! He fuckin’ hooked it!”  reverberated throughout the house. When the Giants finally won in overtime, the dejected looks on my family members’ faces were the greatest gift of all.



The only thing out of date about this photo is the QB.

 I tell this long and overly elaborate personal story to reflect on rivalries in modern sports, particularly the NFL. Long gone are the days where players stay on a team for 15 years and legitimate rivalries develop. The Giants and Eagles specifically have had a ton of player movement between teams in the last 20 years. So the players don’t care. It’s really about the fans, and what each fan wants to make of it. In the NFC East specifically, every team is a rival. Each team has their own rivalry with the Cowboys that they think is primary. The Giants and Redskins goes back 90 years. The Eagles and Redskins is probably the weakest, but last year’s McNabb thing proves there can be heat there. But for me, for entirely personal reasons, it’s always been the Eagles. To put it bluntly, I hate the Philadelphia Eagles so fucking much my teeth hurt sometimes. I love watching them lose. I used to go to a bar in Center City to watch the Giants when they weren’t on local TV in Philly. Every now and then I’d time it just right coming home and get on the same train as Eagles fans leaving the stadium. If it was after a loss, seeing them sad made me so happy it’s illogical. Most of them are good people I’m sure and good fans. But you get more from sports in the hating than you do the loving. Think about it, the average die-hard sports fan hates 5 times as much as he loves. There’s legitimately 4 teams in the NFL I hate right now, and 1 that I love. Outside of Giants players, I hate a lot more guys than I like. It’s how you become I die-hard in the first place. And I know it’s completely irrational, but you hate a team so much you love them. As much as I hate the Eagles and their fans, I would never want to see them move or suck for 20 years. Great rivalries develop in the punch/counter-punch. We win 9 in a row; they take 7 out of 8. For every Sehorn interception, there’s a DeSean Jackson punt return.

I’m sure all of you have rivalries like this if you’re as into your teams as I am. I set out trying to write about rivalries in general, and ended up writing a personal essay about the Giants and Eagles. Only natural I guess. Because I relate to it in such personal terms. If the Eagles win Sunday, I’ll be mad. If the Giants pull the upset, I’ll be happy. I still have to get up and go to work in the morning either way, but knowing that someone in Philly will be upset about the outcome would just make me happier. And yes, I know that’s messed up.