‘I’m a lawyer. Hit me, hit me, so I can sue you.’ I think America takes
all sports too seriously.”
So we want our affiliated sports teams to win to prove our own su-
periority. But to whom are we trying to prove it? Ourselves, certainly;
but to everyone else, too. According to the association principle, if we
can surround ourselves with success that we are connected with in even
a superficial way (for example, place of residence), our public prestige
will rise.
Are sports fans right to think that without ever throwing a block,
catching a ball, scoring a goal, or perhaps even attending a game, they
will receive some of the glory from a hometown championship? I believe
so. The evidence is in their favor. Recall that Persia’s messengers did
not have to cause the news, my weatherman did not have to cause the
weather, and Pavlov’s bell did not have to cause the food for powerful
effects to occur. The association was enough.
It is for this reason that, were the University of Southern California
to win the Rose Bowl, we could expect people with a Southern Cal
connection to try to increase the visibility of that connection in any of
a variety of ways. In one experiment showing how wearing apparel
can serve to proclaim such an association, researchers counted the
number of school sweatshirts worn on Monday mornings by students
on the campuses of seven prominent football universities: Arizona State,
Louisiana State, Notre Dame, Michigan, Ohio State, Pittsburgh, and
Southern California. The results showed that many more home-school
shirts were worn if the football team had won its game on the prior
Saturday. What’s more, the larger the margin of victory, the more such
shirts appeared. It wasn’t a close, hard-fought game that caused the
students to dress themselves, literally, in success; instead, it was a clear,
crushing conquest smacking of indisputable superiority.
This tendency to try to bask in reflected glory by publicly trumpeting
our connections to successful others has its mirror image in our attempt
to avoid being darkened by the shadow of others’ defeat. In an amazing
display during the luckless 1980 season, season-ticket-holding fans of
the New Orleans Saints football team began to appear at the stadium
wearing paper bags to conceal their faces. As their team suffered loss
after loss, more and more fans donned the bags until TV cameras were
regularly able to record the extraordinary image of gathered masses of
people shrouded in brown paper with nothing to identify them but the
tips of their noses. I find it instructive that during a late-season contest,
when it was clear that the Saints were at last going to win one, the fans
discarded their bags and went public once more.
All this tells me that we purposefully manipulate the visibility of our
connections with winners and losers in order to make ourselves look
150 / Influence