The huge outpouring of support for the New York Giants in Stuyvesant on January 30, the Friday before they were to play the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII, was overwhelming. Going up the fifth floor escalator, my eyes were flooded with Eli Manning jerseys. Giants fever had infected the student body.
Such unity is not the norm for our school; we are constantly reminded of this by many facets of our daily lives. There is a widening rift between the Student Union (SU) and the administration over student rights. An unwritten code limits students of specific grades to specific hangouts.
However, this disunity isn’t mended by all sports. For every Yankees fan in Stuyvesant, you have a Mets fan. For every Knicks fan, you have a Nets fan. We hardly agree on anything. That Friday, however, was different.
Jets and Giants fans are usually bitter rivals, but hatred for the Patriots brought the two groups together. Anyone who wasn’t a Patriots fan was supporting Big Blue in the Super Bowl. The school had finally found a reason to come together, and it wasn’t due to the Stuyspace campaign or the SU-College Office switch.
Everyone had his or her own reason for supporting the Giants, and similar reasons for disliking the Patriots. The Patriots are known for running up the score against previously defeated opponents, an obnoxious display of showboating. They have also been criticized for spying on their opponents. Despite the bad reputation, they are a team with great talent, and a coach, Bill Belichick, who knows how to use it. This massive talent mixed with intense gamesmanship is the reason why Giants fans despise them.
Other than hatred of the Patriots, the one thing that all of us at Stuyvesant share is our home. We are all New Yorkers, and there is nothing New York sports fans hate more than the Patriots’ hometown of Boston. The rivalry between the two cities first manifested itself with the Yankees and Red Sox, but seems to have carried over to football, too.
Our school’s ability to rally around the Giants shows the importance of sports in our culture. We may not always agree on which team to root for, but we are unified by the special place sports hold in our hearts. Congressional Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on what to do about the war in Iraq or the slipping economy, but they can form a bipartisan committee to investigate steroid use in baseball. More than anything else, it is this sense of unity that makes sports so important to us.
