What is it about the underdog that makes everybody come out and root for him? There are many famous examples of underdogs, but with the sports frenzy going on with the World Cup Soccer games happening in Japan, I will stick to sports underdogs that I know of.
Two wonderful examples are the Chicago Cubs baseball team and the Seleccion Nacional, Mexico's futbol (soccer) team.
Now, both these teams have a reputation of losing. Those of us who watch these teams know without fail that "we" will lose. That is one of the curious things about an underdog. We always identify with them, making their occasional victory "ours" and their inevitable loss, also "ours". We are seriously overjoyed when "we" win, but we are not overly upset when "we" lose. It will always be the ref's fault because he obviously should have given them a break on one thing or another, and the other team was always "playing dirty" when this happens.
Point in case, I was watching the second game Mexico played against Ecuador. When Ecuador scored the first goal, many of the 20 or so gathered to watch loyally at 1am, said, "Ok, so we lost, big deal." Most of us truly expected to lose. When Mexico scored their goal, we said, "Ok, we at least tied; that's better then nothing." Nobody at any moment expected to win, but did we stop watching the game? Of course not! That would be blasphemous!
When Mexico scored another goal and successfully somehow managed to keep Ecuador from scoring again, the partying went on well into the next morning. I live right on the carretera, and at 4 and 5 am there were still cars going back and forth honking "Toot, toot, too-too-toot" which is a sports battle cry meaning we won.
Some of you may have heard this when the Chivas (the local Guadalajara underdog) won, and also when the America team (another Guadalajara outfit, which has not traditionally been an underdog, but has only recently entered their honored ranks) won the national league championship.
The last game that Mexico played against the US, we lost badly: 2-0 against one of the (please pardon me US expatriates) worst teams in soccer. We might be bad, but they are, honestly, worse. It was a very bitter pill to swallow indeed. What is the concensus on the street? We played badly because it must be very stressful, and surely some kind of psychological thing happens when you play such a big and powerful country, and so on, and so on.
"Not logical," some of you are thinking, but this is the way it is for the underdog fan. We know we will lose, yet none of us misses a game and if we do, we wake up at dawn to find someone who did watch the game and interrogate them about the details and sigh bitterly, agreeing (though we did not see the game) with whatever the concensus is: Bad weather, one of the guys had a cold, biased ref, whatever works best to absolve our heroes of blame for losing.
I would like to point out that, as I said before, this phenomenon happens also with the Chicago Cubs. The stadium is always full, rain or shine, for the Cubbies, and everyone there knows they are probably going to be there just to show support when they lose.
But, the fans wouldn't miss it for the world because the whole point of being an underdog fan is to show support. The biggest thing an underdog fan has is hope. We always hope to win, but never expect it. We show our support through hope of winning, not to celebrate the win or to lord it over our friends whose team lost, but just to say, "Gotta love ‘em. They try so hard. They never win. You'd think they'd just give up. How can I abandon ‘em? All they have is us!"
I for one root for the Cubbies and Mexico whenever they play...You never know when they just might win one!
