Column: What ignites a sports rivalry?

The circumstances are everything. Whether individual or group, rivalries are the result of a special confluence of circumstances: proximity, talent, history and — by far the most important — character. Difference in character, more accurately. Larry Bird and Magic Johnson are the owners of perhaps the most remarked upon personal rivalry in modern sports history, but it’s worth noting that despite the number and magnitude of their contests — their teams played against one another for championships at both the collegiate and professional levels — the majority of the perfection of ‘Bird and Magic’ is about everything but the games. It’s about their upbringings, their races, the cities they came to represent, their personalities and their playing styles. Basketball was a backdrop for something else, and although it arguably distracts from the purity and physicality and grace under pressure that sports are meant to represent, the times when something else is present are arguably when sports are at their best.

Point being: The rules and outcomes of a sport are often arbitrary on a level so deep that we forget it even exists; rivalries change that, transform it somehow. Two people or teams that deserve one another as rivals should always find each other; they make watching sports richer and cooler and more desperate. If Tom Brady weren’t more handsome, more talented, more revered and more married to a supermodel than his doofy, twanging, little-brother counterpart (who is married to his high school sweetheart), it wouldn’t be as meaningful than the latter has, three times now — twice in the most-watched football game of the year — been the better, more self-assured man on the field when it counted. If David Tyree had ever (ever!) caught another pass in the NFL after February 2008, his last reception might, in retrospect, seem a little less unbelievable. Would the loss on Sunday have been as hard to swallow for certain Patriots players and personnel and front office members if they hadn’t been playing in a small, significant way for the MHK patches stitched on the breasts of their jerseys? What if Boston (and New England, to a lesser extent) didn’t have a massive inferiority complex when it comes to all things New York City? Hell, the idea of Bill Belichick is a rivalry in and of itself. The games were close and full of unforgettable moments, but it’s these littler, more personal things that give the Giants-Patriots matchup a real shot to develop into something worthwhile.

College sports might be even more dependent on rivalries to create intensity than the pros. Which makes sense: Educational institutions are very old institutions, but the faces change every four years by necessity. Look no further than the Border War, a rivalry between the Universities of Kansas and Missouri that is more than a century old. This is real, deep-rooted mutual disgust going back to antebellum America. Wikipedia has the all-time series football record as “disputed”: There was apparently one contest in which the two couldn’t even agree on a winner. This coming year, however, Missouri will move from the Big 12 to the SEC; the football matchup, even if it continues in non-conference play, will never quite be what it was. These two schools competed, disliked and needed each other for forever, and now it’s gone. It might be only now that they appreciate just how valuable that kind of relationship is.

Which brings us, to close things out, to our humble neck of the woods. Genuine differences and hatred sustain and enhance sports. The Ivy League, it seems, is too genteel for it. Harvard-Yale is about communal arrogance more than anything else. Here we trot out Penn once or twice a year as a Big Game, lightly and persistently condescend to Rutgers — and I’m sure every team on campus has a team it feels just a little bit better than usual to beat — but no fire. I know there’s a school out there that we play regularly, that is for the most part evenly matched, that is our distorted and ugly reflection in a mirror, that represents for us just as wholly as we represent for them an example of everything that is wrong and indecent: I’m sure of it. Who? I don’t know; I’m accepting nominations. I do know, though, that a small dose of hatred would make this campus a more fun place to be a sports fan. Finding an anti-soulmate isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.