Perhaps the sight of Tom Brady’s chin dimple doesn’t blind you with seething rage. I guess you don’t have eyeballs.
Or maybe you’re not from Philadelphia. Eagles fans have recently been prevented from realizing a beloved postseason pastime—the city’s so-called “Crisco Cops” greased up downtown lamp posts to stop rowdy Philadelphians from scaling them. Perhaps now they can instead relish another classic activity: the great tradition of loathing the New England Patriots, everyone who holds them dear, and everything they represent.
The Patriots. Ugh. Even their team name is a lie. First of all, a bald eagle—so sleek! so majestic! so fierce!—is infinitely cooler than some dude wearing a tricorne hat. And can someone tell Robert Kraft that giving muskets to a bunch of LARPers in the endzone isn’t actually patriotic? Last time I checked, the cradle of liberty wasn’t in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Ben Franklin may have believed the nation’s premier bird was the turkey, but he still picked Philadelphia over Boston for a reason. (The reason: Philly’s better.)
Tom Brady. Ughhhhhh.
It isn’t the unrepentant cheating that makes him detestable—or even his thing with avocado “ice cream,”or that he’s from California, or that he wrote a bookcalled The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance, or that he tried to sell people $99 science-pajamas, or that he has a controversial bromance with Donald Trump, or that he’s so wishy-washy about that bromance, or that he married a mega-successful knockout supermodel, or that he has a $44 million salary, or his 66,159 passing yards, or his five Super Bowl rings, or the fact that he is some kind of football-savant Benjamin Button who ages in reverse and physically cannot stop winning.
Actually, wait, it is the winning thing. It’s totally all the winning.
Tom Brady is eminently hate-able because he’s so damned good. But there must be more to it than that. Philadelphians can’t be that petty, right? (Don’t answer that.)
People love an underdog, in part, because spectators are hedonists; they want an emotionally pleasurable experience. And, putting aside team loyalties, it turns out that rooting for a favorite like Brady to win is especially ho-hum if that favorite ends up losing. “Because it is unexpected, an underdog’s victory is more satisfying than a favorite’s and an underdog’s loss is much less traumatic,” wrote Jimmy Frazier and Eldon Snyder, the authors of a 1991 paper published in the Sociology of Sport Journal about the appeal of teams that are expected to lose. A utilitarian model would, they said, clearly predict the underdog effect. (...)
Their findings have implications that extend beyond the sporting world. Underdogs show up throughout the history, literature, and mythology of the Western world. Going back to ancient times, one of the most compelling kinds of stories people tell is fundamentally concerned with underdog status.
The novelist Kurt Vonnegut, for example, once observed that the arc of one classic story type—characterized by a protagonist’s steady climb in good fortune, sudden fall, and eventual ascension back to happily ever after—can be found in anything from creation stories across major religions to Cinderella. A couple years ago, I wrote about a group of computer scientists who studied the emotional path of this story pattern, compared with several others, and found that it’s among the top narrative arcs favored by readers.
This same story arc arguably mirrors the trajectory of Tom Brady’s career. It wasn’t always easy for him, back before he was the king of the Super Bowl and the husband of a supermodel. This is the same Tom Brady who got so little playing time at the University of Michigan that he nearly transferred. And the same Tom Brady who began his career as a starting player with a humiliating loss to Notre Dame. “No one expects that this guy was going to be the best football player of all time. Even him!” said Mark Snyder, who was one of the beat writers who covered Brady’s redshirt junior season for the University of Michigan’s college paper in 1998. “No one really knew who he was. He was definitely an underdog.”
by Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic | Read more:
Or maybe you’re not from Philadelphia. Eagles fans have recently been prevented from realizing a beloved postseason pastime—the city’s so-called “Crisco Cops” greased up downtown lamp posts to stop rowdy Philadelphians from scaling them. Perhaps now they can instead relish another classic activity: the great tradition of loathing the New England Patriots, everyone who holds them dear, and everything they represent.
The Patriots. Ugh. Even their team name is a lie. First of all, a bald eagle—so sleek! so majestic! so fierce!—is infinitely cooler than some dude wearing a tricorne hat. And can someone tell Robert Kraft that giving muskets to a bunch of LARPers in the endzone isn’t actually patriotic? Last time I checked, the cradle of liberty wasn’t in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Ben Franklin may have believed the nation’s premier bird was the turkey, but he still picked Philadelphia over Boston for a reason. (The reason: Philly’s better.)Tom Brady. Ughhhhhh.
It isn’t the unrepentant cheating that makes him detestable—or even his thing with avocado “ice cream,”or that he’s from California, or that he wrote a bookcalled The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance, or that he tried to sell people $99 science-pajamas, or that he has a controversial bromance with Donald Trump, or that he’s so wishy-washy about that bromance, or that he married a mega-successful knockout supermodel, or that he has a $44 million salary, or his 66,159 passing yards, or his five Super Bowl rings, or the fact that he is some kind of football-savant Benjamin Button who ages in reverse and physically cannot stop winning.
Actually, wait, it is the winning thing. It’s totally all the winning.
Tom Brady is eminently hate-able because he’s so damned good. But there must be more to it than that. Philadelphians can’t be that petty, right? (Don’t answer that.)
People love an underdog, in part, because spectators are hedonists; they want an emotionally pleasurable experience. And, putting aside team loyalties, it turns out that rooting for a favorite like Brady to win is especially ho-hum if that favorite ends up losing. “Because it is unexpected, an underdog’s victory is more satisfying than a favorite’s and an underdog’s loss is much less traumatic,” wrote Jimmy Frazier and Eldon Snyder, the authors of a 1991 paper published in the Sociology of Sport Journal about the appeal of teams that are expected to lose. A utilitarian model would, they said, clearly predict the underdog effect. (...)
Their findings have implications that extend beyond the sporting world. Underdogs show up throughout the history, literature, and mythology of the Western world. Going back to ancient times, one of the most compelling kinds of stories people tell is fundamentally concerned with underdog status.
The novelist Kurt Vonnegut, for example, once observed that the arc of one classic story type—characterized by a protagonist’s steady climb in good fortune, sudden fall, and eventual ascension back to happily ever after—can be found in anything from creation stories across major religions to Cinderella. A couple years ago, I wrote about a group of computer scientists who studied the emotional path of this story pattern, compared with several others, and found that it’s among the top narrative arcs favored by readers.
This same story arc arguably mirrors the trajectory of Tom Brady’s career. It wasn’t always easy for him, back before he was the king of the Super Bowl and the husband of a supermodel. This is the same Tom Brady who got so little playing time at the University of Michigan that he nearly transferred. And the same Tom Brady who began his career as a starting player with a humiliating loss to Notre Dame. “No one expects that this guy was going to be the best football player of all time. Even him!” said Mark Snyder, who was one of the beat writers who covered Brady’s redshirt junior season for the University of Michigan’s college paper in 1998. “No one really knew who he was. He was definitely an underdog.”
by Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic | Read more:
