22. Colson Whitehead

“He liked the punch-drunk ones, half walking at mile twenty-three, tongues flapping like Labradors.” – Colson Whitehead

There’s something in it, this whole rooting for the underdog thing. I get it, I do it, too. I don’t follow the New York Marathon, but I’m sure if I did, I’d have the exact same attitude as Elwood Curtis (or the man purporting to be Elwood Curtis) in Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys. As the novel’s narrator puts it, “It [is] easy to root for winners.” Indeed, too easy. Anyone can simply align themselves with the champion and bask in their reflected glory. But there is no real triumph in this. If we hope to reap the moral rewards when our guy finally wins it all, it helps if we’ve thrown in our lot with the underdog, whether that’s a runner in a one-off event like the Marathon or a sports team that we follow over the course of a season. The reward increases in indirect proportion to the perceived quality of the champion. Were one of the Marathon’s unlikely punch-drunk runners to somehow win it all, then how justly would Elwood Curtis celebrate, having been in, as it were, on the ground floor?

In addition to the sense of moral vindication that comes from rooting for an underdog-made-good, such an attitude can also serve a more constructive purpose: it is a ward against aligning with power. After all, it’s not such a large step to go from identifying with a favorite in the sports world to siding with corporations as they attempt to crush their labor forces or to rooting on the United States to make a show of military force against some hapless nation we’ve deemed an enemy. We don’t generally have one attitude towards life in one area and a completely different attitude in the rest. Other qualities we can develop from siding with the underdog: humility, a healthy distrust of winning at all costs, an enjoyment of the process over the final results.

Of course, this is not the way most people follow sports. We generally pick a team when we’re young and then root for that team throughout the course of our lives, whatever the organization’s changing fortunes. But it’s certainly true that those who have picked teams deemed “underdogs”—the Chicago Cubs before 2016, the New York Mets most years, any team with a tiny payroll—take a certain pleasure in playing up this status. As a Mets fan, I’ve certainly been known to do this. (My favorite football team, the Buffalo Bills, is too dismal even to qualify as an underdog.) But this seems ultimately a little foolish. The Mets had a 2019 payroll of $162 million, eighth highest in baseball, are owned by a family of real estate developers who profited off of Bernie Madoff’s ponzi schemes, and play in a huge media market. They may be underachievers compared to the Yankees, but they are not underdogs.

And, neither, really is any team in American professional sports. It may feel good to root for the Tampa Bay Rays (I do sometimes), who despite having one of the lowest payrolls in baseball, are always competitive. And it is impressive the way that they continually make smart moves to overcome this disadvantage. But they are still a major corporate entity worth almost a billion dollars. In the end, it is fun and instructive to root for a team like Tampa. It shows a fine attitude towards life that hopefully translates to the larger world. But it is not a morally superior act, both because fandom in itself is too arbitrary, and most importantly, because there is no such thing as uncompromised allegiance in any multi-billion dollar industry. Rooting for a hapless, tongue-flapping marathoner, though, is quite another matter.