Brother Ali — Champion EP

Vinyl, 12", EP, 2004

In sports, the champions I’ve rooted for have always been sure bets. I’ve never been part of an underdog story.

Let’s be clear, here. I’ve been a part of very few championships to begin with. I’ve rooted for the Dolphins because my father followed the Dolphins. He bet money on the 1972 Dolphins and that ended up being enough for him to become a fan. When I was old enough to pay attention to baseball, I rooted for the Cardinals. I saw the Twins beat them, and after a few years living in Minnesota I switched allegiances just in time to watch the Cardinals become a perennial contender.

My sport is basketball, though, and I’ve been on the winning end of three different championship eras. I was a child in the 90s, so I was a Bulls fan during the Jordan era. After a brief allegiance with the Pacers, I took my father’s advice (finally — again, he bet on the Celtics in the 70s and that became his team) and became a Boston Celtics guy in time for Kevin Garnett to show up and make waves.

I was also a season ticket holder for the Sioux Falls Skyforce during one of their championship seasons, when they led the entire time, they killed their opponents, and they made it look easy.

Just once, I’d love to be part of a Cinderella story. To be a part of something like Villanova. To be a part of worst to first. To be a part of a strike against superteams. Just once, I’d like to be the guy who rooted for a team that wasn’t supposed to do great things … and then they did.

But that’s not sports. Sports isn’t a hollywood movie. It’s a careful and pointed drive toward perfection. You can see when your team is going to be great years before they make it — in fact, the reverse Cinderella is more common, where a team squanders their potential, where the perfect pieces don’t mesh, where what was obvious is broken by another team who is just as qualified.

Underdogs don’t win in sports, at least not in the way we think they do. The teams that do come out of nowhere are still great teams — great teams who have things go their way. An Olympic upset is still an upset by a person who is the best at what they do in their country.

Same with non-sports life, too, to be honest. Those who succeed — even when they’re saddled with the mantle of underdog — succeed because they worked hard to achieve it. They are able. They did what they did because they were good at it. The pure underdogs we see in bad 80s movies and sitcom television aren’t real — if people succeed by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, it’s not because they’re underdogs.

It’s because they cared. They worked hard. They did what they did well.

I guess, technically, the concept of an underdog is not about the person or team making things happen. It’s on us. We’re the ones that dismiss anything other than perfection, and we’re the ones that assume that underdogs don’t have a chance.

I would love to be a part of an underdog story. But by doing so, I’m really just admitting that I wish I could sell someone short.