6 April 2012 - Lexington as a sports town

I am writing this before the 2012 NCAA Championship basketball game between Kentucky and Kansas. This means that I am writing after the couch burning, car burning, and rumored assaults on the homeless that followed the basketball team’s victory over Louisville on Saturday. Similarly, I am writing in anticipation of an escalation of this sort of behavior (in particular the stories about students planning to burn down a house) regardless of whether or not Kentucky actually wins the game tonight.

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to live in Lexington. Because of that, it’s easy to understand why I have an unreasonable love for this city: I arguably dislike more things than I like about living in Lexington, but I love it nonetheless. At this point, I think I would be happy living in Lexington for the rest of my life.

I am also a tremendous fan of basketball, and I grew up loving the Kentucky Wildcats. I remember crying desperately when UK lost to Arizona in 1997, and screaming with delight when they beat Syracuse in 1996 and Utah in 1998. Some of my most vivid memories involve watching Kentucky basketball and, since I was an incredibly lucky child, spending time Kentucky basketball players.

With this in mind, it pains me to say what must be plainly obvious at this point: Lexington is not a good sports town. Quite frankly, I think Lexington is downright terrible when it comes to college sports fandom.

I don’t say this for the reasons you might think. It’s not because fandom in general operates alongside a resistance to actual knowledge or critical thought, a concept which is only amplified by the fact that UK is assumed as having the most rabid fans in the country. It is not because I dislike UK or think that basketball is stupid. It’s not even because of the violence and general lawlessness that pervaded the city Saturday night, even though it is obvious enough that such behavior reveals nothing positive about Lexington or its inhabitants. It is, however, about what such displays imply about Lexington.

After the game against Louisville on Saturday, a classmate of mine said that she loved wandering around after the game, high-fiving strangers and reveling in post-victory celebrations. She asked: why can’t it always be this way? My classmate voiced a position similar to my own, but not in the way she thinks.

Although I loathed the maniacal foot-traffic, seeing local businesses last weekend – particularly along Limestone – was fascinating to me: restaurants expanded their patios, people turned out in huge numbers, and the atmosphere was spirited and generally enjoyable. This sort of gameday attitude was also very familiar to me.

As much as it bothers my more irrational friends, I have been going to Ohio State football games since I was a little kid. Ohio State football is a lot like Kentucky basketball: both have massive local and student followings, both have significant legacies, both think they are “the best” (according to virtually any criteria), and so on.

The difference, however, is that Ohio State football is “this way” every time: on Saturdays in the fall, a huge portion of Columbus looks like the two or three blocks of South Limestone nearest to campus. It’s hard to find a restaurant where all of the staff members aren’t wearing football jerseys. Columbus is a different city even when Ohio State is playing an away game. I’m pretty confident you could walk into a business meeting and yell “O-H” and at least half the room would respond “I-O.” It is pretty wild stuff.

Similar things may have been true of Lexington Saturday, but only on Saturday (and presumably Monday). But as much as I would like to see more of this positive pre-game atmosphere, any discussion of Lexington fandom necessarily centers on the post-game events that revealed an ugly side of the city on a night when the governor said that the state was in the national spotlight.

I’ve never been witness to the kind of frightening mob-like activity that pervaded parts of Lexington on Saturday, let alone as a response to a sports game. I watched scenes on the news and felt scared and threatened even though I was nowhere near the actual events. At one point I remember remarking to a friend that these people were “trying to destroy my city” (perhaps my most Batman-like moment), and I meant it.

At most schools, silly behavior is in service of sports fandom and, as a result, somewhat directed and moderated. But at Kentucky it is the opposite: eventually there is a point where the sports team is completely in service of silly, deviant, criminal behavior. We have reached the point where these two things are difficult to separate: there is no great basketball victory without this sort of response, and there are no such genuinely violent mobs without the license of a sporting event. It can be a challenge to know whether this behavior is an aberration or a genuine representation of what Lexington and UK are really about.

As a result, the fanfare surrounding Kentucky basketball – even if they win their coveted eighth national title – is almost completely devoid of substance. Basketball fans here seem to care more about the opportunity to engage in violent behavior than anything related to the team or sport they are supposedly celebrating. Putting it nicely, this is unfortunate.

I’m sure UK fans will use this (as they do with all things) as evidence of their unmatched level of fanatical allegiance, but such boasts surely ring false to any socially or ethically serious person. They can try to blame young, inexperienced drinkers or a small, unrepresentative group for the events of Saturday, but it’s clear that this behavior is too institutional to be limited in that way.

One of my friends told me that he thought this sort of behavior was the only way for fans to make their connection to the sports team tangible. Of course he’s right, but as I’ve suggested, it seems that these responses have increasingly less to do with sports at all. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I don’t have a solution for this problem, but at the very least this pervading sentiment has to be labeled for the downright shitty culture it creates. There are a lot of things wrong with Lexington, and while its sports culture is far from the worst, it might be the most difficult to excuse.