Everywhere I’ve looked at recent MSU home games, I’ve seen all kinds of political stickers supporting various candidates for office. For whatever reason, it seems like the Republicans are more on top of it for this, with those “Bulldogs for McCain,” “Bulldogs for Wicker,” and “Bulldogs for Harper” stickers being everywhere, though I have noticed “Bulldogs for Musgrove” stickers as well.
At my College Democrats meeting, many people wanted to get “Bulldogs for Obama” stickers made to counteract this trend. I strongly opposed this, despite being 100 percent in favor of both Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and all Mississippi State Bulldog sports teams.
The reason is because sports should be a time when we put politics aside to cheer for our teams. It doesn’t matter to me whether the person next to me is voting for McCain, Obama or whoever when we’re cheering on the Bulldogs. Similarly, the fact that Ronnie Musgrove cheers for Ole Miss (so does Wicker) does not affect my opinion of how good of a senator he’ll make, nor does it bother me that Obama likes the White Sox and Bears, or that Hillary Clinton likes the Yankees (gasp!).
This is part of a larger problem of the mixing of politics and sports. A friend of mine told me he doesn’t like the San Francisco Giants because the city is full of hippies and liberals. This makes no sense, especially when the Giants have been in San Francisco a lot longer than hippie subculture, the Giants have no hippies on the team and the ownership, like most MLB teams, is pretty conservative. And no, that fact doesn’t prevent me from loving Major League Baseball either.
Another friend of mine refuses to root for the Italian soccer team that includes his favorite player, since it’s the “Socialist club.” Seriously. That kind of silliness just boggles my mind. If you like the player, cheer for his team.
Some people hate the Boston Red Sox because Curt Shilling was an outspoken George W. Bush supporter in 2004, or they might hate the Red Sox because they had the only MLB owners to donate to John Kerry. If I were an idiot, I might hate Mississippi State because the majority of fans are conservative.
What difference does it make? How does a player’s or another fan’s politics affect your enjoyment of the game? Why can’t we just keep politics and sports separate? Politics is something that’s important, something that will influence the fate of nations, while sports is something that keeps us entertained, but doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. And I don’t mean to belittle sports with that comment; politics and sports are probably the two topics I talk about the most. I just don’t want to see them mixed.
We should all be able to separate these aspects of our lives. When we’re cheering on our team, we don’t need to be worrying about whether the guy sitting next to us supports our candidate. We need to be one united fanbase that’s completely focused on our team. The election isn’t going anywhere, it can wait a few hours.
Our game Saturday with Kentucky is extremely important for us. If we win, we still have the chance to make it to six wins and a bowl game. If we lose, we aren’t mathematically eliminated, but it will be nearly impossible. Let’s leave the political stickers at home and go cheer on the Bulldogs as one united fanbase with only one thing on our minds: football.
Harry Nelson is a senior majoring in math and polital science. He can be reached at [email protected].