Banding Together

The NFL’s corporate veneer might not require live musical interludes, but it’s hard to imagine a high school or college football game without the sonic lift of a band. Even if the band doesn’t march at halftime, they are there in the stands, providing the soundtrack to your Friday or Saturday entertainment.

Interesting, then, that while you can’t really have a high school football game without a band, you can have a marching band without a football game. I learned as much when my oldest daughter started drumming in her high school band two years ago. Until then, I was hardly aware of marching band competitions, or that preseason band camp would be such an intense experience, with 12-hour days that would put two-a-day football practices to shame. That year the marching band essentially went undefeated by taking first place in all competitions when pitted against bands within the same classification. Sometimes, they even outperformed larger bands. In truth, the band had a better year than the football team.

My youngest daughter joined the squad this year on mellophone, which is a cross between a French horn and a trumpet. Like her sister, she has found a community that might not have otherwise been afforded her. Most of the kids in the band get good grades and are high achievers. Many are transformed from hesitant freshman to confident seniors. Many become leaders in school and in life.

The same might be said about other activities, too. Certainly, football and other sports provide opportunities for leadership, teamwork, and communal bonding. But there’s something about marching band that’s truly remarkable. Unlike, say, art club or the Tech Student Association or the cross-country team, marching band is a large operation, bigger in some respects than the football team. Unlike most football teams, however, the marching band is co-ed. In fact, all three drum majors on our high school band—the quarterbacks of the team—are girls. It’s an egalitarian club that you don’t see operating on such a scale anywhere else in the school system.

What’s more, band competitions are less about conquering a foe (though first-place awards are nice) than conquering your self-doubts among the elements. Scores are not based on taking down an opponent but rather on perfecting your field show. Football players have the advantage of turning adrenaline into a viable force. Twenty-two players on a field can slip and slide and collide in the mud, be blown about by the wind or deluged by rain, but their plays—no matter how well designed—do not attempt the level of choreography that an 80-person marching band requires. Within seconds, a football play becomes improvisational, and then the whistle blows and there’s an opportunity to regroup. Marching band, on the other hand, seeks precision and concentration throughout the duration of a performance. Adrenaline must be checked and channeled into crisply synchronized movements, all while maintaining proper breath control. And the rain can’t be easily wiped from your nose when you’re sliding a trombone.

I say this as someone who has played football and been a football fan most of his life. But I’m also a musician, if on a minor scale, and I’m very pleased that my daughters have become musicians. For music provides food to both the heart and the brain. As neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitan notes in his book This is Your Brain on Music, music activates “an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving both the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes.”

I’d argue that music in a social setting—as an act of teamwork, as an act of community—can be even more invigorating to these organs. The neurons fire, and the social skill set expands in concert. Plus, while marching band (or choir, jazz, and symphonic band) might not be cool to some kids, it’s often the breeding ground for some of the coolest people on the planet—the rock and pop stars who took piano lessons and voice lessons as kids, who spent thousands of hours practicing their paradiddles or scales.

Sure, there are the few raw, untutored talents who come along once in a generation and capture the popular imagination, but for the most part it’s the band kids who write the soundtracks to our lives. And music, unlike most team sports, doesn’t have a shelf life. Tackling someone after the age of 30 is a questionable proposition. Tackling a new song or instrument, on the other hand, has no age barrier.

Fandom and the Self

Ask a Bororo tribesman: Who are you? He may reply: I am parakeet. 
(Ask an L.S.U. fan at a football game: Who are you? He may reply: I am a tiger.)

— Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

The ticket stub was worth $1.00 off one family-size pizza at all participating Shakey’s Pizza Parlors, but it’s a good thing I didn’t redeem it, or I’d be up one long-forgotten pizza and down a significant memory prompt. Flip the ticket over and you’ll see a graphic of the original Seahawks logo. They played the Los Angeles Rams on August 17, 1978, and this stub from that game represents one of the best birthday presents I’ve ever received. I must have lost the accompanying note my dad wrote decades ago, but I kept the stub, despite the fact that it provided admission to a mere preseason game and we sat in the 300 level of the Kingdome, just a few rows from the top.

Didn’t matter—for I, a native of the Pacific Northwest, was thrilled to not only be attending my first NFL game but to catch my favorite team: the visiting Rams. Why a team from L.A.? The formative years in my sports-fan psyche occurred before the NFL existed in Seattle. The same can be said for Major League Baseball, which found me following the Yankees in the early ’70s until the Mariners came along.

I had pledged my allegiance to the Rams in 1973 because they were good (12-2 that year) and because I liked their uniforms. I memorized the players by position, was a fan of their coach, Chuck Knox. I begged to be allowed to stay up until halftime of Monday Night Football to catch the highlights of that Sunday’s Ram game, to hear the halting diction of Howard Cosell as he described how a team’s comeback was “too little, too late.” If the Rams lost, I cried, which happened only twice that year until the playoffs. (Damn you, Dallas Cowboys and the horse you rode in on!)

After the Seahawks hatched in 1976, I certainly became a fan, but a fan with conditions. It took a while before I could recognize myself in that peering raptor’s eye. It took a few years before I stopped pretending to be Lawrence McCutcheon or Harold Jackson on the playground and identified with burgeoning local heroes such as Jim Zorn and Steve Largent.

I can recall the day my allegiance shifted for good. By 1979, my dad had purchased season tickets, and the Rams were back for a game on November 4 of that year. The teams had similar records, hovering around .500. We were now sitting in the corner of the end zone on the 200 level of the Kingdome, and the Rams proceeded to pummel the Seahawks 24-0. The most depressing stat? The Seahawks had -7 total yards, the worst offensive performance in NFL history.

The fact that I was so depressed belied my changing heart. How dare the Rams do that to us! To us! I could’ve stuck with the Rams, who went on to play in the Super Bowl that season, but I didn’t. (Yes, I still rooted for them when they lost to the Steelers in Super Bowl XIV, but the air had been leaking from my L.A. balloon for quite a while by the time Cheryl Ladd sang the national anthem and Up with People presented the halftime show, “A Salute to the Big Band Era.”)

And so I became a Seahawk through and through. At a certain point, I even started hating the Rams, who had become like a bad ex-girlfriend to me. They found new fans in St. Louis (until they abandoned those fans and returned to L.A.). And, more recently, they’ve been messing with my Seahawk heart like a faulty defibrillator: Think fake field goals and duplicitous punts and devious the-ball’s-over-here-no-it’s-over-there returns.

__________

When Chuck Knox became coach of the Seahawks in 1983 and delivered them to the playoff promised land, it only seemed fitting to me. Coach Knox, “Ground Chuck,” had made the transformation from Ram to Seahawk (by way of the Bills) just like me. We were shape-shifters of a sort, shedding old hide for new feathers. We had taken on new totems, joined new tribes. Such are the rights of passage in the American education system that most of us join new tribes as we matriculate from one school to another. I, for instance, have been a Cougar, a Wolverine, an Indian, a Fighting Missionary, and a Cavalier (or Wahoo). (Two of these mascots have either been changed since my graduation or come under scrutiny; I’ll let you guess which.) Add in Little League teams and miscellaneous intramural teams, and I’ve also been a Jet, a Cardinal, a Smasher, an Eagle, a Red, and a Mercenary, among others. It’s enough to give you an identity crisis.

Of course, sports tribalism doesn’t require you to be an actual attendee of a school or a player on a team or a resident of a team’s city. But it’s only natural to fall for your home squad, to nurture it, to wish it the best, to roar from the depths of your diaphragm when things go well and to weep like your nine-year-old self when things go poorly. The Greeks and Romans figured out long ago that the collective viewing of sports could displace some of the bloodlust of combat. (And often those events included just about as much blood and lust as actual fighting.) Sports can operate as a kind of civic release valve that allows for the tribal inclination toward warfare to be satisfied and settled under mostly safer, more controlled conditions.

What’s more, tribal identity in the sports world is a curious act of self-assimilation. The self becomes part of the collective—and sometimes at an elite level. In Seattle, where the “12th Man” has transmogrified into “12s,” (a somewhat irksome happenstance involving a Texas A&M trademark), fans are not just Seahawks but über-Seahawks. The field of play is not just restricted to the green gridiron. In the stands, Seahawks fans take pride in affecting the outcome of the game by creating so much noise that the opponent jumps offside and Guinness World Records are achieved. (Louder than a jackhammer! Louder than a turbine jet engine!—are the usual decibel-related ejaculations.) That’s not just a Seattle thing, of course, but the 12s seem to be especially good at it.

Still, tribal affiliation can be challenged as quickly as saying, “You’ve been cut.” That’s the business of sports, and sometimes it’s hard for fans to keep up. What, wait, Griffey’s been traded for Mike Cameron and a can of magic Hormel beans? It can be a shock to the system when your favorite player leaves. It can create a temporary displacement of your tribal identity if you really, really identify with the player as much as you do the team.

One solution is to have multiple affiliations, creating a kind of Venn diagram of who you are and whom you’ll root for: I hate the Oklahoma Thunder because they stole our Sonics, but damn if I’m not gonna cheer for Kevin Durant. Another solution is to excommunicate the player: You are nothing to me now. So long, A-Rod.

Selfhood, self-identity, within a collective enterprise is an odd phenomenon to think about (this self, this independent being that I am, is somehow defined by its associations?), but people do it all the time. We are Spartans or Trojans or Yankees or Southerners or Republicans or Democrats or Christians or Muslims or lawyers, journalists, developers, pipe fitters, baristas, magicians, musicians, monks. And usually we are many of these selves at once. Not only are we who we cheer for, but we are where we come from, what we believe, and what we do. It’s kind of like a stew—or maybe a can of mixed nuts.

Which raises a phenomenological question: Is the self an onion or a nut? A Shrek (“Ogres have layers. Onions have layers.”) or an Austin Powers (“This is me in a nutshell.”)? Is my “self” just a series of layers that can be peeled away until there’s nothing, or is there some me-kernel within an outer shell?

Is a 12 an onion or a nut?

I am not just a Seahawks fan, of course. (Nobody is.) I hesitate to even call myself a “12” because I don’t have the dedication that other fans possess. I don’t particularly care to join clubs, churches, or political parties. And yet I love that feeling of being part of a team, especially in an improvisational way. I like the loosely collaborative nature of pick-up games and jam sessions. I like working toward a common goal.

Perhaps I learned when I was a child that too much devotion to your team could lead to too much pain during a loss. So I adjusted my thinking, matured (perhaps), and developed a stoic approach to fandom. If I missed a game on TV and heard that my team lost, I told myself I didn’t want to see the game anyway and had more important things to do. If my team won (unless it was a championship finale), I told myself there’d be another game to watch. I learned to temper my seasonal frustrations by looking to the future. A lot of sports fans resort to this kind of emotional template when the season seems gone: No playoffs? Well, at least we got a high draft pick! “Suck for Luck!”

But there are dangers in cloaking yourself in a carapace of nonchalance. Focus too much on controlling your emotions and soon you realize how much they are controlling you. The self becomes its own battlefield, its own gridiron. The nut becomes mush. The onion diced and confused.

I can never be the childhood fan I was because I can’t truly be a child again. There have been too many seasons for me to feel the newness of it all, the puppy love of being a fan. But I do have the memory of that feeling. I do remember crushing on my team, and every now and then that sense of exhilaration returns (the Seahawks win the Super Bowl in a dominating performance!) as well as that sense of utter despair (the Seahawks return to the Super Bowl and lose on a heartbreaking interception at the goal line!). 

And thinking back on it, I take an odd pride in the Seahawks’ ineptitude during that 1979 game against the Rams. Negative seven yards? Really? Nobody can top that! It’s the self that experiences ineptitude which better understands greatness when greatness arrives. Just ask Cubs fans.

Maybe a fuller version of the self is accessed via an artifact like my ticket stub, stowed away for nearly 40 years, that’s no longer redeemable for its original purpose but capable of being redeemed in another way. Half that torn ticket left my possession on the very day of its use, but the other half is what I keep with me in the field of memory, providing admission to an earlier version of who I am.