The Folklore of Football
Why *do* We Say Go Birds?
Dear Darling Dames Nationals,
Whether or not you care about tomorrow’s big game between the noble Eagles of Philadelphia or the Kansas City fellows led by Taylor Swift’s boyfriend, it’s kind of inescapable. As I was keeping an eye on Twitter during the game where the Eagles clinched another trip to the Super Bowl, sending meme after meme to my friend Sally, who is a professional folklorist, I realized we needed to bring her in. We needed her expertise, to explain why people make memes, why shibboleths like “Go, birds!” are so important, and why are we like this, as a species?
I’ve edited our conversation for clarity & brevity, and I hope you enjoy it!
Sally! Please tell the good people of Dames Nation who you are!
I’m Sally Van de Water, and I’m a card-carrying folklorist. I work in the realm of cultural heritage, and in my day job, I work for an Arts Council, where I help to ensure that the creative practices of culturally specific groups are acknowledged and uplifted. Groups can be culturally specific by ethnicity, and also by geography, religion, occupation – any kind of key commonality. For example, you and I are in the folk group of women’s college graduates of the mid-to-late 90s, and even more specifically, as Bryn Mawr alums. And of course, everyone is in multiple groups, too.
So, through the lens of your work at an Arts Council, how would you describe the Venn diagram of the arts and folklore?
So, if we think broadly about the arts, and about art as creative expression, we might start by thinking of a painting on a wall. But outside of that traditional, sort of fine arts orientation, there’s a lot of ways the arts can be seen as folklife. It can be the way that someone curates their home, the way someone is taught how to dress. We’re all constantly making everyday choices that convey characteristics including mindset, personality type, class, and so on. These are all aesthetic choices tied to our identity and our place in society – all of those things are part of folklife. They’re things that we make and do in everyday life that express who we are.
Then, activities or things we make that are creative expressions of our aesthetics and various elements of our identities are folk arts. Maybe your grandmother taught you the particular embroidery techniques that her mother brought over from the Old Country, and you incorporate elements of that in your own fiber arts hobby. People hear the word folklore and they often think, oh, it's something trapped in the past, or it's something that is like an old urban legend or a ghost story. And while, yes, that’s included within folklore, folklore is very much living cultural heritage. It's stuff that is happening now that very often has connections to both the past and the future.
It's not stuck in time or trapped in amber. It's not an accuracy-obsessed historical reenactment. Folklore is also about carrying forward elements from the past, and it encompasses things that adapt and change with access to new tools. It's an individually and collaboratively constructed culture, all happening right now.
Okay, so it’s drawing on techniques and aesthetics that we've canonized over time? And then we’re constantly grafting and weaving it into stuff that's happening contemporarily?
Yes! All of our folklife and folkways are also part of our cultural context, too, and each influences and is influenced by the other. For example, we’re here to talk about the folklore of sports and sports fandom. And we're having this conversation at the very end of January, as the Philadelphia Eagles are headed to the Super Bowl, which they’ll play in New Orleans, which is one of the most folklore-rich and folklorically self-aware cities in the country. The whole thing is one rich text after another!
Yes! I haven’t been seeing or seeking out much in the way of what New Orleans folks are posting on social media, but my various feeds are flooded with Eagles meme material and I texted a bunch of it to you over the weekend.
My God, the meme game is so strong right now! So first of all, memes are definitely folklore – this is how we’re expressing things we’re feeling, how we’re making sense of our lives. We’re interacting with and creating culture as we go along. I’m not especially a sportsball person, but there are some unique aspects of sports folklore and Eagles fandom folklore traditions and signifiers I can riff on. My husband and son are both rabid Eagles fans, and I grew up close enough to Philadelphia that the Eagles are my family’s team. The things I'm loving the most right now about folklife and Eagles culture right now is the expression of Philly's self-awareness merging with their understanding of how non-Philadelphians conceive of them.
You sent me the photos and video of a guy dressed as Ben Franklin, pushing a shopping cart barbecue stand in the parking lot, tailgating. There’s also footage of a different guy, presumably the proprietor of said shopping cart barbecue stand on the subway, and that whole thing is just brilliant.
Can you say a bit more about what struck you about Mobile BBQ Ben Franklin?
Oh, sure – it’s the weaving together of classic Philly history and contemporary Philly resourcefulness, that “fuck it, we do things our way here” ethos. It’s hospitable and funny, and also probably very dangerous to cook meat over an open flame in a supermarket shopping cart.
My other favorite thing is that you have to love a city that has industrial grease in its budget, because if there's a major sporting event, they have to grease the streetlight poles. It’s not optional. The phrase “grease the poles” might not mean anything outside of a Philadelphia sports context. But it’s not a gross euphemism! In a Philly context, it’s literal: win or lose, people like to shimmy up the streetlight poles on Broad Street. It’s a joke and it’s still enacted. People do this! I’m not sure how much of that we’ll be seeing after the actual Super Bowl, because a Temple University student fell from a pole and died last week, which is horrific.
Yeah, it’s hard to imagine a worse, more tragic reminder of why the city has to grease the poles.
Definitely. On the more benign side of things, there’s obvious folk traditions like wearing your team's colors to a game or to an event. People wear licensed team gear, but they also will wear shirts they bought off Etsy or throwback jerseys and hats, and some folks will just wear the team’s colors or paint their faces. People who create their own uniforms are getting into folk art territory, too. That’s not that far away from costume design or historical re-enactment.
When a team gets into the playoffs, and then makes it to the championship game, things get more intense, and it seems like folk practices surrounding that team steps up in intensity and frequency. So people who ordinarily would not be paying that much attention, like me, do start to pay attention, and find themselves getting invested. Have you witnessed this before? How would you describe it?
I had a front seat to this in 2003 and 2004, because I took a job as a city folklorist in Boston, and moved there while the Red Sox were in the 2003 playoffs. And my boss invited me to this fabulous pub in Jamaica Plain called Doyles, which had been there forever, the kind of place that all the politicians and deal makers would go, but it was also an Irish pub and sports bar. So we watched the game, and I'm not going to embarrass myself by recounting details that I don't remember very well, but I know that it was a heartbreaker of a loss to the Yankees, and it was just devastating. We were so close to going to the World Series, we were about to beat our arch rivals, and then we lost at the last minute in heartbreaking fashion. And at the end of the game, my boss stood up and said, “Well, Sally, Welcome to Boston. And, more importantly, welcome to life as a Red Sox fan.”
The pull of that bandwagon, and the heartbreak it may well contain, is so powerful! Are there other memories from that time that really stand out to you?
Yes! I was documenting a lot of that in my capacity as a city folklorist, taking photos of the impromptu shrines that people put up. This goes way beyond just hanging a flag out your front door. It's putting things on your lawn, it's wearing spirit-wear, it’s decorating your car in team colors and really extravagant fashion. Just bigger-than-usual expressions of who you are and your hometown that seep into everyday life, everywhere you look. It's really fun to watch and to see. And then to get to witness the Red Sox go on to win the World Series the following year, was an incredible thing. People get swept up in the excitement, they kind of can’t help it.
You know, people here who don't even follow football, will say almost reflexively, “Go Birds”. It becomes an easy icebreaker in social situations, too – it came up at a doctor’s office for me recently, because I saw that two of the schedulers had those super-fancy Princess Diana Eagles jackets draped over their workstation chairs. I said, “Good morning, and Go Birds”, and they laughed, and it was just nice. Not the most important moment in either of our days, just a fun little moment.
There's a reason that the jokes about how to break through an awkward conversation or how to change the subject quickly are either the weather or please pass the salt or, you know, “Go Birds”. They're easy things that we can grasp onto, that we can all kind of respond to. We’re living in wild times, and sports is a safe topic, even in disagreement.
Of course these inter-city or inter-regional rivalries are intense, too! During my time in Boston, the Patriots were on a tear, and I remember being on the T at a time when people were heading to a game, so the car filled up with people who were in Patriots gear pretty quickly. But then – and this is in the context of heading to a Patriots game – the chant pretty quickly came up, “Yankees suck! Yankees suck!” Because even though it's a completely different sport, that's how you express your love of Boston, by saying “Yankees suck!”
Philadelphia is a pretty legendary city for embracing hateration, of course – that anecdote is deeply relatable. What type of expressions of sports folk culture are you most looking forward to seeing as we approach the Super Bowl?
For sure, I’ll be watching Facebook or Instagram, to see how my friends are enacting their thing. I know folks who do really elaborate football parties and love seeing their menu and photos from their parties. I can only imagine what they're going to be doing for this, where there’s tons of homemade options, but people are also getting Eagles-branded cookies and cakes or getting their nails done in team colors. I know I’ve said it already, but I can’t wait for the memes.
Well, I’m still not a football person, but I am a my friends and family and city and region person. That’s who and what I’m saying “Go, Birds” for. Obviously anything can happen, and as soon as I finish writing this, I’m going to go outside, turn around three times and spit on the ground, so as not to tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing. And also! Last year, I was perfectly happy to root for Taylor Swift’s boyfriend’s team. This year, though, I hope the Eagles absolutely thrash Kansas City, because it’ll make my brother-in-law weep tears of joy. It’ll make my friends howl with delight and race down to Broad Street with their young son and his tambourine to celebrate with fellow fans in their neighborhood. It’ll make my neighbors come outside to bang pots & pans and sing “Fly, Eagles, Fly”. It’ll make it worth it for my darling Seb to have stayed up way way way too late, feverishly explaining plays I will never understand to the friends they’re indoctrinating into this fandom. And oh my god can you imagine the memes? In conclusion, Go Birds! Say it back.
It’s not the team. It’s the fans.