playing to win

Pittsburgh’s going to the Superbowl, crushing the Bronco’s 34-17! If someone asked me a year ago if I cared I would have said “hardly.” After all, I’ve never paid too much attention to sports. Growing up I played a bit of soccer or touch football on the elementary school playground, but with artistic parents was encouraged more in the direction of music and the arts, and whatever playing I did was left up to the imagination and video games. The further the playing fields and blacktops of my youth receded the more I suspected organized sports a sham much like the ancient Roman hand outs of bread and circuses, vicarious entertainment set up to remove agency from the passive spectators and distract them from any real events that might be occurring, like wars or natural disasters. Or their own creative abilities.

Of course, if I’d grown up in a city that’d actually cared about its sports team, D.C. barely bares the Redskins, if I’d gone out to games as a kid and had that as part of my own enculturation I might have formed a different opinion sooner, especially considering the historical impact of sports and gameplaying on society and culture.

Last year, or should I say, last season, as the Steelers were approaching the Superbowl, I began to notice the effect the games have on the population of Pittsburgh. After a win the streets felt lighter, smiles and greetings graced people’s lips, and once they lost for good it was a black Monday, the city crying and drinking itself down as if the President had died, or their beloved coach Bill Cowher, who I imagine the citizens of Pittsburgh respect more than any two-timing politician.

It isn’t so surprising that the outcome of a football game could affect people this strongly, in a town where the major industry died thirty some years ago and many feel they no longer have anything to live for, rooting on the team has become one of the few collective passions left to bring people together and give hope and meaning to their home and their lives. It is not uncommon, even through the off-season, to see yinzers dressed up constantly in black and gold. And as the big day approaches they break out the silly hats and fight songs, car pennants and terrible towels and you’re hard pressed to find someone who’s not intimately hinged on the results of the next game.

To an outsider this bizarre social ritual might seem generally annoying if not down right absurd, but to the fans they know it’s precisely their camaraderie and excitement that will drive the team on to victory, the players’ abilities a reflection of the city’s self-pride. Intrigued by this phenomenon, at the beginning of the season I decided to get in on the game myself and root on the Steelers, immersing myself in the local customs and measuring the effects of a small subset of the population on the game, and the game’s effect on them. Throughout the season I found the turns triumphs of each game often followed the focus and excitement the fans in our small living room group put into watching the game unfold. The way the wind from several twirling towels could cause the opponents’ kicks to mysteriously go astray. I can only assume that interaction between crowd and players is even more dynamic at the game itself. Perhaps next year I’ll have a chance to find out. After every loss or win the moods of my friends and the city changed accordingly, especially in the last few games when the Steelers started to play to their peak. I found myself becoming emotionally involved, and acquiring a Terrible Towel and Steelers hoody to bring whatever luck I could to the outcome of the game.

After last week’s tense and necessary win we went to Max and Erma’s in Shadyside for Black and Gold Burgers and people were out cheering each other on in a victory flush and almost breaking into spontaneous singing of the fight song.

Yesterday we did. Walking down Liberty waving our towels, passersby cheering, all the cars honking and waving. Even a cop car booped his sirens for the Steelers before a more intimidating squad of paddy wagons rolled by. Apparently they blocked off the Southside for all the reveling when some of the Steelers showed up. More singing in the bar, non-stop toasts to the team, and last call around ten when all the bear ran out. Could imagine this scene playing in all the dives across Pittsburgh, all the Steelers’ bars across the country. Four in Denver alone, how many Bronco’s bars here? None.

I suppose Pittsburgh takes victory seriously. We do have a lot of bad rep as a burnt out steel town. I mean, you’re not going to get any recognition if you don’t set out to win. I don’t think I’ve ever taken this seriously enough, raised to choose collaboration over competition, but in the age of rampant cutthroat advertising you’ve got to have an edge if you’re gonna get up. Being involved in the music industry has taught me that. There’s thousands of bad second-rate punk bands out there for every one that comes up with an innovative new riff or rhythm. I used to book shows and never got anywhere with it, not wanting to deal with the headache of hooking and booking the latest bands before someone else does. I’ve always preferred just performing myself, but at the time no one else was really booking certain acts in venues like Project 1877, except maybe Marry Mack or Manny Theiner, and I felt I was doing what I had to to keep the scene going. Now seeing what my compatriots at TBA Records are doing to promote shows in this town makes we proud. They know how to play that game; solid variety of acts and venues, persistent flyering, the My Space account. Their shows so far show they want to win, and are looking for everyone else to win too. Great for starring underground artists like myself to get noticed, get published or recorded, make a name for ourselves.

At one point in time I’d have laughed at this, but the act of getting up seems an integral part of the human spirit. From arts and literature to science, sports, politics, religion. Getting known, getting ahead, whether desperate urban youth spray painting the back alleys to whole nations waging war for pride, protection, and natural resources. Even the personal interactions we have with each other play out a game of learned scripts and cultural desires that affect who with and how we choose to relate. And for what purpose: Sex, money, attention, respect, whatever we can get away with. Anyone whose fucked with the fickle dramas of dating knows what James Joyce meant when he said “All’s fair on all fours.” Like a nasty shove in a game of Twister.

Humans have always been playing games, both innocent and vicious. Before Sunday’s game, a friend told me about this movie “Rise” which documents a new phenomenon in CA called “churling” which is a sort of fast paced competitive dance used to replace gang fights, reminiscent of 80’s breakdancing and the more ancient dance-combat tradition of Capoeira. I recall from brief college studies that ancient cultures such as the Mayans would use their sports as a replacement for all out warfare, teams representing armies and letting the game decide the battle’s victor. Sure people still got killed for breaking the rules, and the looser’s players got sacrificed to the vanquishing gods, but their was much less wholesale slaughter and cultural destruction that marks traditional warfare. When I was a kid there was this meme going around that instead of fighting wars the opposing generals would have a boxing match, or at the very least a virtual simulation of the war so no one would have to die. If they have the capability of rendering and tracking he moves of thousands of individual agents necessary for the fight scenes of some computer animated movie like Lord of the Rings they should at least be able turn that technology to the good of mankind (assuming mass death isn’t a necessary move in the global game of survival. Overpopulation could be just as fatal).

Of course, all this doesn’t address the need for personal agency in one’s own life, perhaps responsible for the desire to get up, behind all the game playing, the tools and the techne. The visceral satisfaction of having done it with one’s own hands, in actual contests of real wills not merely reduced to a spectacle of passive entertainment. Certainly I’d rather be amused than dead, but creating my own forms of excitement is always the preferred alternative.

Walking down the street exciting the city into wild howling with a towel-twirl of the wrist, I remark to S. it would be that easy to incite the people to riot, enticing their mutual love of the football game into an uncontrollable frenzy. In the height of last season a bunch of anarchists dressed in black and gold and with a brass band playing modified fight songs went down to the stadium tailgate parking lots to drum up support against the war. With the state of the city now they wouldn’t even need the message. “Don’t worry,” S. says, “whatever the outcome of the Superbowl, the Southside will burn. Just direct everyone away from the bars and local stores towards the Southside Works, and light up a couple dumpsters.” Of course, chaos may not be called for, and Revolution’s just another game too, with its own rules of engagement and prerequisites for victory. Another game we play to win.