Stanley O'Shea

My Memories of American Football and the Super Bowl

Why was it so hard to fit in?

This is the 3rd extension article for my hybrid memoir The Snowy Battlefield of Ohio. The audiobook is currently in production and hopefully will be available by the end of this year.

In my book, I briefly mentioned my experience watching Ohio State football, just like many international students and scholars trying to get a taste of “the authentic American culture” and to fit in. (Immigrants who oppose assimilation may see me as a sycophant instead.) I enjoyed the halftime shows, the marching band, and the free shirt I got. I didn’t enjoy watching the game during the blizzard or the racism coming from a (presumably) white supremacist inside the Stadium.

Generally speaking, I wasn’t able to make American football part of my life. Nor did I try very hard.

In a parallel universe, if I had gone to a private school that doesn’t emphasize the college football culture (there are plenty of them throughout America), maybe I wouldn’t have cared about football at all, let alone professional football. Then I wouldn’t have felt abandoned every Monday after the Super Bowl weekend, when folks talked about the Super Bowl commercials. The truth is, I never knew when it would happen.

In the 1st year (Feb 2013), I lived with a roommate from China, who couldn’t care less about American stuff except for the NBA perhaps. He only socialized with Chinese students in his engineering department. We had no access to television.

It was my first year in grad school, so I was still in Mr. McCarthy’s lab. During the lab meeting on Monday, I watched him talking happily with the American lab mates as if the 2 foreigners (one Asian and one European) didn’t exist. That’s how I picked up the term “Super Bowl.” Then I googled it on my HTC smartphone and realized I missed some huge event that could make me more Americanized. D*mned. I was ignored throughout their discussion. I was ignored by Americans who assumed I didn’t deserve a spot in this “national” conversation. This, in a way, reflects why some international students couldn’t fit in despite their intent and desire. I’m not saying Mr. McCarthy as a professor did anything wrong in his job. It wasn’t in his duty to provide hospitality or help foreign students appreciate American culture.

However, by sheer coincidence, Mr. McCarthy was not a reputable person in real life, as we later found out. For that reason, I didn’t treat him as a significant character in my book so that he wouldn’t overshadow the antagonists in the main story.

In the 2nd year (Feb 2014), I ended up living alone after moving out of the “Shining” house, and working alone after being stripped of the original TA duties. I was pretty much isolated from the outside world, lonely and depressed, struggling with abandonment from multiple sources. I had no reminder about the Super Bowl that year, though I had access to television. No colleague of mine in that year cared about Super Bowl. In that lab run by Mr. Osman, there wasn’t any American left. In the musicians’ lab, nobody cared about competitive or violent sports, not to mention half of them were Canadians. By the way, my female next-door neighbors also confirmed they didn’t care about sports in general, not even the Winter Olympics.

a football sitting on top of a lush green field

In the 3rd year (Feb 2015), I was painstakingly restarting a life in Davis town, ready to “shoulder” my temporary employment with the boss Mr. Osman, and living with a college student from Shanghai who didn’t want assimilation after years of disappointment. I still had no access to television. I was disappointed at Davis from the very beginning, and the winter weather was depressing. Due to the lack of effective transportation, I hadn’t developed serious friendships in Davis by February. Super Bowl, you just slipped away again.

In the 4th year (Feb 2016), I was too busy preparing for the Cognitive Neuroscience Conference to be held in NYC later that year, and writing application materials for other RA positions on the East Coast. At that time, I was aware that I didn’t want to get a Ph.D. at UC Davis, let alone work with Mr. Osman for years. I was certain I didn’t like California except San Diego, not even SF or LA, consistent with my attitude even before I came to America. No television still.

I had one American colleague Mr. Shapiro, who talked about Super Bowl commercials that following Monday, just NOT before the Super Bowl weekend. This time when I realized I missed this national event, just like when I missed the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics later that year, I didn’t feel too isolated. I wasn’t close with my coworker outside work. Neither was I among a group of roommates who would watch that event spontaneously. Consistent with my understanding gained in Ohio, as long as I continued to live with Chinese students, I would never be able to be immersed in American culture— American culture doesn’t just embody itself in the workplace, but also at home. However, reality has shown me that living with Americans didn’t help, as mature mainstream Americans would only want to live with mainstream Americans. The rejection was more subtle in California than in Ohio.

In the 5th year (Feb 2017), I was almost living alone again, with the landlord who turned out to be working the night shift — I didn’t know that when he replied to my post on Craigslist. He was a good guy, but not the same generation. That year was special, as I saw the Super Bowl ads on YouTube before the event happened. After 4 years in America, I finally caught the Super Bowl on time, even though I didn’t watch any football throughout the previous year! I should thank Mr. Shapiro for talking about Fantasy Football beside me now and then, even though that was the only football he cared about.

Sadly, I still had nobody to watch it with, after many White friends moved to Sacramento. My model minority friends at UC Davis didn’t belong to the American football culture, as I had noticed. Baseball was way bigger than football in SF Bay Area. Therefore, I decided that American football was never going to be part of my life. Destiny, and no need to try too hard to fit in.


Up to this point, I intentionally wrote it as if I was excluded from American culture— “Poor guy, he couldn’t fit in despite his attempts”. For mainstream Americans, it’s not something that needs a reminder; they are reminded by the atmosphere around them. But as some smart readers might have noticed, I didn’t take the initiative to put the event into my Google calendar to remind myself either. In retrospect, my heart wasn’t taking it too seriously. The regrets were always post hoc. Seriously, it was never on my agenda until someone’s Facebook status reminded me. I don’t care about the NFL, just like I don’t care about Mother’s Day or Father’s Day.

I know, it’s symbolic, but it’s not part of my upbringing or interest. I tried, but it’s almost impossible to succeed without guidance on those issues. Yes, some folks in Ohio State did help me understand Ohio State football, I mean the general rules, but they didn’t tell me anything about the Super Bowl, either. Why? They mostly cared about BIG 10 college football, not the NFL. Why? Because Ohio State was in it.

One thing to acknowledge, however, was that I was almost forced to live outside the mainstream American circle when I wasn’t at work or in grad school. It was very hard to be included unless it was a religious group. Life didn’t allow people like me easy access to those circles, especially considering the cities I lived in were not international metropolises.

At first sight, whether or not I know Tom Brady doesn’t make a difference to my current life. But objectively speaking, to survive in America as an immigrant, it’s important to be literate about these famous names. Nobody told us these things. They just wanted us to read academic papers and get published. Woo… That’s what grad school was for, isn’t it? They assumed we only cared about the degrees, not immigration, let alone assimilation. Well, as I mentioned in my book, the people who will succeed in immigration are the minority among international students anyway.


OK, finally, let’s get into psychology. Because that’s what truly matters.

Since I entered adulthood, I have stopped watching any sports that I know I would never participate in. Watching those tall basketball players only makes me feel worse about my short legs; watching those soccer players running and kicking only gives me sympathetic pain in my problematic joints; watching F1 races only reminds me that I grew up in a small town with nothing interesting; swimming, diving, acrobatics, skating…these “aesthetic” Olympics games are totally out of my world. I hate clashes that will cause fractures and concussions. So when Mr. Shapiro asked me if I watched any sports at all, I simply answered NO with no more hesitation, especially after I learned that he cared about Fantasy Football more than football itself. Well, when you watch a sport that you don’t even participate in, you are merely consuming other people’s training efforts. They entertain you with their performance. No, they don’t inspire you with their athletic skills, unless you’re going to train in that specific activity. There are exceptions, but those usually have little to do with the sport itself. For example, someone’s disability may show their strength and resilience. That’s also independent of the profession.

Why did I say “no more hesitation”? As I grew up, my XCP Mandy always tried to put me to shame because I didn’t spend a lot of time on competitive sports like other male peers claim to. Fortunately, I became immune to her judgment, after realizing that the excessive amount of art courses she forced me to learn in elementary school had shaped my brain development permanently, and after knowing that a lot of dudes with my music taste never watch games as a hobby, after knowing that watching other people play has very little to do with my personal fitness, after realizing that an auditory person like me naturally feels exhausted when watching the tiny ball (ping-pong ball for example) moving around on the television, and fatally, after realizing that I never grew up in a family with the tradition of watching any sports except during the Olympic Games (as a national orchestrated behavior in the summer) and the World Cup finals. I can say a lot about human behavior or the psychology of watching games and idolizing the players, but I choose not to, because I see no essential difference between liking the athletes who can win medals and liking the singers who can get all four judges to turn around. You will cease to idolize them if you reach their level in their profession. Yes, I just implied that you idolize them because you are not in their profession. Those top figures in your own profession are generally not considered “idols.” That would be too silly.

People blame America for disrupting my psyche, but I thank America for letting me see myself as simply a data point in the multi-dimensional space. On this matter of American football and the Super Bowl, I understand that not all Americans care about them more than I do. Therefore, I no longer feel I missed a lot. It wasn’t my value to begin with. It was a popular value somehow imposed on me because I went to Ohio State in the Midwest. My friend Julian explicitly told me I didn’t have to watch American football just to belong with these Ohio State students and faculty. In retrospect, it’s not even a matter of fitting in. I was never going to fit in with a circle of real football fans. As soon as I found another group I could hang out with, I would say goodbye to American football. In reality, I was able to make friends with many American singer-songwriters in the Midwest, off-campus, as detailed in my book. That’s the most important to me.

Also in reality, I sold my gray-colored Buckeye hoodie to an African-American OSU student before I moved to California. Unlike many rich international students who could afford OSU for college (as opposed to grad school programs), I didn’t want to be recognized as a Buckeye after what happened to me in my memoir The Snowy Battlefield of Ohio. To me, the word “alumni” is mostly used for utilitarian purposes. Well, if I did go to any Ivy League institution, I would use the affiliation to advertise myself till I die. You would do the same.

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