Last week I had planned to write about a very light-hearted sports topic since it felt like all I had been writing about were life lessons and trying to teach you something.
Then, real life handed us a matter we couldn’t look away from.
But this week I want to take a few minutes of your time to write about rivalries.
There are two kinds of stress: real life stress and sports stress.
Real life stress is just that – real. It’s death, illness, job loss, making ends meet, natural disasters and … you get the point.
Sports stress is not any of those things.
Sports stress is the last three innings of last year’s World Series. Sports stress is Kyle Mangas at the free throw line with three seconds left in the second overtime of a regional semifinal game. It’s 4th and goal with six ticks on the clock and your team is down by three.
Rivalries in any sport are fun because of the sports stress they bring about. You know you have a rivalry on your hands when the two opposing entities take shots at each other all year long.
For example: some friends of mine from Michigan vacationed in Wisconsin this summer and stopped at Lambeau Field in Green Bay on the way home for a tour. They posted a picture of themselves and their children inside the legendary venue on Facebook, which prompted the following response (not from me): “It is the height of either stupidity or arrogance to post a picture of yourself submitting your children to child abuse.”
Rivalry.
It always helps a rivalry to have an object to play for. If you have a trophy, an axe, a stick, a wooden bucket or anything like that on the line, then the game becomes a quest to either get that thing back or keep the other side from getting it.
In Argos, our major soccer rival was Culver Military Academy. The boundary line there was socio-economic. Here was a bunch of kids from a farming community of about 1,500 people taking on an organization whose hand-selected roster included kids from Germany, South Korea, Columbia and all around the U.S. Even now, more than 30 years later, I see their faces in my mind and remember their names: Juergen, “Whitey”, Sam Pak. We were 1:58 away from taking Argos back to the Final Four of high school soccer. They denied us.
I don’t watch soccer or attend a match that I don’t think about that 80-degree, wind-swept afternoon in mid-October.
It haunts me.
Rivalry.
We have two special rivalries that will play out in our area Friday night. They have all of the ingredients needed to obtain rivalry status: geographical proximity, daily/regular interaction of the fan bases, an object to play for.
Warsaw hosts Wawasee Friday on the high school gridiron. Tippecanoe Valley heads to Rochester.
Yes, there is stress involved in the week leading up to these games. Yes, there will be sleepless nights. Yes, the computers will stay logged into video services a little longer searching for a trend, a tip – anything that might help give their team an edge for one play or one moment in this biggest of games.
But it is the best possible kind of stress. It is not likely that anyone will lose their jobs if they don’t bring home the Bell or the “W” Trophy. As a matter of fact, about the only tangible proof of the result of either of these games (outside of who has the W or the Bell, of course) will be the absence of Ws on the side of the Tiger helmets if they lose on Friday until they win them back.
But games like these are games that you sit around and talk about 40 and 50 years from now. They are the moments that are captured in immortality in restaurants, barber shops and in scrap books at class reunions and during calling hours.
They lead to great mysteries, like “did Rochester kids really steal the ‘Welcome to Death Valley’ sign from the press box at what is now Smith-Bibler Memorial Field … or was it an inside job to motivate Valley?”
Rivalry.
As you get older and your life changes, your rivalries are much different and not nearly as much fun. Maybe your rival becomes a physical condition or sickness. It could be a competing company, or maybe even someone in your own workplace. It could be your own children squabbling about this and that.
But there are only so many of these sports-related rivalries and they come around regularly but infrequently, then they are gone.
Enjoy them. Bask in them. Cheer and scream on every play in them. They are special.
