Do Americans Love Underdogs?

The saying goes, “everybody loves an underdog” and it is easy to see examples of this through decades of film and TV shows depicting the small or disadvantaged teams or people going up against the prohibitive favorites and pulling off great upsets.   Every March Madness you can see the country come together to root for the little schools to pull of remarkable upsets against the Duke’s of the world.  It seems that everywhere you go people are always rooting for the upset.  But I have found that there are certain times when people put aside their quest to witness an upset and instead want the favorite to win, and it comes down to greatness.

I realized this watching the Preakness this past weekend.  While Americans love to root for the underdog, they also love absolute greatness.  They revel people or teams who transcend a competition and completely dominate their competition to the point where there is no doubt who is the greatest.

This is why on Saturday with a packed field, everybody I was watching the Preakness with (including those without any money on the race) was pulling for Big Brown to pull away from the field.  They wanted to witness a great horse, not just a good one.  In most situations where there is a favorite, the masses will root against him, hoping that an underdog will emerge from the pack to claim victory, but in rare cases there is a favorite so dominating that people will want to see them dominate their competition.  Secretariat was a horse that many people cried while watching him blow away the field in a record breaking Belmont Stakes – they cried because they were watching something that was so much better at its craft than any other horse.

Here are some other examples of players or teams in my lifetime that I have noticed transcended their sport to the point where people neglected to root against them:

Mike Tyson – as crazy as Iron Mike was, people loved seeing him pummel his opponents.  They expected him to come out in the first round and hit whoever he was fighting so hard that they fell through the canvas.  People loved the idea of a one man wrecking crew that was unbeatable in a fight.  Once he lost to Buster Douglas he lost that allure and was never the same fighter.

Tiger Woods – while you would think that everybody would be rooting against Tiger since he is a huge favorite in every tournament he plays in, people love to watch him win.  They love the idea that he is the greatest golfer of all time and they are getting to witness him do his craft at its highest level.  Why would people collectively root for Tiger to win and the Duke’s of the world to lose?  Because those Duke teams are merely good, not transcendent of the game.

Micheal Jordan – unless he was playing against your favorite team, everybody wanted him to dominate a game.  There is comfort when an athlete is so consistent that they always come through when you think that they will.  As you can read in the last post, Jordan was one of these figures.

 The great Patriots team of this past year was close to falling into this category but the “Spygate” incident put such a negative connotation on them.  There were still pockets of people that wanted to see an undefeated season, to witness an unbeatable football machine, but because of their dicey history they never could truly fall into the category of having the everyman pulling for them.

I am probably missing one or two players or teams that were giants that everybody pulled for, but I cannot think of them now.  Roger Federer is dominant, but he does not command this type of respect from the public.  Maybe it is because he is not American, but I think it is because there is no single facet of his game that is unbelievable.  He is just really good at every part of tennis.  If he had a monster serve than I think people would tune in to watch him play and marvel at his abilities.

There were definitely players that fell into this category (Koufax, Ruth, Secretariat…) in the past, but I was not around to witness it so it is hard for me to quantify.  If you know of any other players/teams that were so good at their craft that people unified behind them rather than rooted for them as an underdog or against an underdog please let me know.