Does anybody support all the teams from one city? Or is it more typical for Iowans to be like me and kind of be all over the place?
My family wasn’t particularly into sports.
For the NFL, I picked the Packers because I lived in northeast Iowa and it was the Brett Favre Super Bowl years when I started paying attention. I suppose I could have just as easily picked the Vikings or Bears. A lot of classmates were Cowboys fans too, especially with it being the mid to late 90s. The Chiefs were kind of far away.
For college, we moved to central Iowa during Eustachy’s Big 12 championship runs. I didn’t really pay attention to college sports before that other than seeing if my pop bottle cap matched the NCAA tournament winner. I had some family that supported the Hawkeyes and I even had a couple pieces of Iowa clothing as a kid but never thought much of it. A friend in northeast Iowa liked “the other one” and that was about all I really knew of Iowa State before moving to central Iowa. I started with Iowa State basketball and then picked up on football. Thankfully Mac was starting to take us to bowl games.
For MLB, I picked the Yankees first because an older cousin liked them and always wore a Yankees hat. Then I picked the Cubs as my local/National League team.
For the NBA, I picked the Bulls because of Michael Jordan but didn’t really follow them. Then I liked the Lakers because they were good. Finally, I kind of picked the Pacers after they picked Tinsley. I quit caring for several years and starting paying attention again when they got Haliburton.
For the NHL, I picked the Avalanche, but I never really watched much. I moved to Washington state as an adult and the closest team was the Canucks, so I kind of followed their scores. Then we got the Kraken and they became my team.
Living in Washington state as an adult added the Seatte pro teams and local colleges to my fandom.
Yes, I’m shooting the crap with a long post including personal details you probably don’t care about. Go easy on me.
Does anyone ever pick their allegiances? I think they are picked for you. It's all a matter of circumstance, environment and location, in my experience.
My dad was always a St. Louis Cardinals fan, but I grew up a Twins fan, because where we lived, the Twins were the easiest to follow, both by radio and TV. I have a feeling if I grew up in Illinois, I would have followed the Cubs or the White Sox.
Same thing with the Vikings. It was just easier to watch them on TV and read about them in the paper.
As a teenager, I began following Iowa State because that was where I decided I wanted to go to college. No idea why I decided to go there. I just liked the idea. I followed Iowa State basketball and football on the radio mostly in those days, even though it was difficult to find a radio station that carried them and if I did, it was a very faint signal most of the time. They didn't make it easy to listen, but I rarely missed a game. Iowa State is maybe the only allegiance that I consciously picked, but only because I decided I wanted to go there.
Back in those days, before I learned to detest them, I even followed Iowa to some extent. They made it easier, because you could get WHO radio in just about any part of Iowa. However, when I did follow them, I found myself rooting for them, but I was never sad if they lost and was secretly giddy about it, even though seconds earlier I had been cheering them on.
It was just a very strange relationship I had with Iowa. I even went to an Iowa football game in 1973 in Kinnick Stadium when they hosted Michigan, who was ranked No. 1 in the country at the time. Dennis Franklin was Michigan's QB, I remember and Iowa lost 31-7, the first of 11 straight losses for them that year.
The only reason I went to the game was because Michigan was ranked No. 1 and I thought, how many chances do you get to see the No. 1 team in the country? I knew Iowa was going to be crap and I secretly wanted to see them pummeled, too, though I never told that to my Hawkeye-loving friend who went with me to the game.
but around the age of 10 I switched to ISU.
