Go Birds? Go Birds!
I fell in love with my favorite football team while I was in college in Philadelphia. I’ve told the story before, but one part of the origin story that I didn’t include in my Paste piece six years ago.
When the Sunderland fans celebrated Kevin Phillips’ extra-time winner in the League Cup round of 16, one of them ordered a Boddingtons.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything approach Arlo Guthrie’s description of the Group W bench quite like that moment, a stunned quiet falling over the Dickens Inn until the line that brought it back, “for Manchester City!” That was also the day I learned Boddingtons was a Manchester beer.
Was.
Boddingtons was bought by Anheuser-Busch that year, and no longer exists. It hasn’t for 10 years.
City no longer exists in its 2000 form, either. I could’ve just as easily become a fan of theirs if my goal was not to be a frontrunner with United. And the beer was pretty good. I could have been treated to six Premier League titles, two FA Cups, five League Cups, and a goddamn Champions League final. Whatever. We all make choices. I loved Sunderland then and now, and don’t see that changing.
But I don’t know for sure. I don’t know anything about sports fandom or much of anything else for sure anymore. Because here I am, looking at Super Bowl LVII, and I am, with the greatest of ease, rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles.
Call me The Dude, because I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man, but here we are. How?
It was only a couple of months after that first Sunderland game that I really started to turn on the Eagles. Until I’d gotten to college, they were largely harmless as an NFC East rival for my Giants, whose real battles were with Washington and Dallas.
When I watched the Giants lose Super Bowl XXXV in a house full of joyous Eagles fans, things changed. My Joker moment was leaving in the third quarter, going to the bar, blasting Sinatra on the jukebox and getting absolutely hammered. Then the Eagles went to the next three NFC title games, and a Super Bowl, and Matt Dodge punted to DeSean Jackson.
As much as that sucked, and as mad as it made me, that game turned me around, the canary coming out of a sports emotions mine and coughing up radioactive bile.
The Giants still won a Super Bowl after that, but being a parent of two early 2010s babies and a general feeling of ick toward the NFL made it easy to let my old Sunday viewing habits go. I’ve emerged as what I generally call a RedZone fan, and who wouldn’t be? It’s the best television product out there.
I’ve changed, and so have the Eagles. Most notably, they won that Super Bowl with Nick Foles, putting him alongside Eli Manning in having denied Tom Brady a win. Even as many of my Giants fans bit their lips and rooted against Brady in that one, I didn’t — I hated the Eagles and I have Patriots season ticket-holding family.
It’s not that I missed all the fun of the Eagles winning it all that has me backing them this time. It’s that getting the Super Bowl win changed everything. It’s now Dallas and Washington each with multi-decade droughts that everyone outside of those fanbases hopes will continue until at least after those franchises are sold. So much of my loathing of the Eagles was tied to hoping they’d never win — I know that Eagles fans can appreciate a spite-based fandom — and then that was no more.
You never do know how it will break when there’s such an existential change. The Red Sox remained insufferable to this New Yorker after they won in 2004, but their subsequent titles obviously haven’t stirred the same emotions of when they won it all. But the Cubs lost 100% of their charm after winning in 2016. The Cavaliers, winning their first title that same year, remained a charming underdog to root for in the NBA.
Circumstances have a lot to do with it. The Red Sox remained generally the same in the way they operated under John Henry, while the Cubs got to the top of the mountain and set their oxygen tanks on fire. Manchester City is a whole other story over the last two-plus decades.
And then there’s the Eagles. They’re super fun to watch, I love Philadelphia, and I’m hopelessly attracted to teams and athletes (hello, Patrick Beverley) who go at 800% at all times and give 0% fucks. I think that’s why even though it was a fluke that I fell in love with Sunderland and not some other team, and why I’ll never describe myself as an Eagles fan1 but dang do I want to see them pull it off in the Super Bowl.