Leon Berman is the host of “Shake
the Shack,” a Friday night rockabilly radio show on KEXP I listen to as I drive
to volleyball. Last night one of his
co-hosts pressed him to talk about his Seahawks pre-game rituals. (Sunday the
Seahawks play Green Bay for the NFC championship.) Leon’s family has held Seahawks season tickets
since 1975. He was genuinely reluctant
to discuss the rituals, but admitted they were pretty OCD, and included things
like not only wearing the same clothes, but putting them on in a precise order,
and not only cooking the same brand of sausages for breakfast but aligning them
in an exact pattern in the pan. These,
he admitted, were just the tip of an all-day iceberg.
Where does the belief that these rituals influence events come from?
You could say it’s an arrogant belief in one’s power: if I do certain things associated with my
team’s victories in the past I can help the team win by repeating them. Baseball players in particular seem to do this
regarding their individual performance: wearing the socks they wore the day they hit for the cycle. But
I think it’s not arrogance, it’s fear.
Our team wins an unexpected victory, and we think about all the
circumstances surrounding the game, including what we did that day. We begin to fear that if we don’t make our
small contribution to those circumstances, the team may lose. We recreate the details of the pregame period
as a ritual, motivated not by arrogance and optimism, but by a sense of
obligation and fear.
Do I have Seahawk
rituals? No. And yet, when I think about my behavior….
I tend not to watch games
from beginning to end. I have the game on
in the TV room and pop in from time to time to watch in small chunks, maybe
five minutes. Okay, here it is. I seem
to believe that whether I’m watching or not influences the game. But it can go either way. If the Hawks do something good while I’m
watching, I feel I need to stay at the set so more good things will
happen. If the other team marches down
the field for an easy TD, I feel my presence is a negative influence that day
and I leave the room hoping my absence will reverse the game’s direction. I’ll pop back twenty minutes later to see if
I’ve been successful….
Nothing rational about this
other than an insight into how primitive religions were formed.
