There’s a reason Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce adopted the rabble-rousing slogan/chant “No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care” during the 2018 Super Bowl victory parade after my beloved home team defeated the Patriots which we will continue to talk about forever because, one less ring for Tom Baby. Every time I see an image of Tom Brady and his Super Bowl rings, I say “It isn’t all the rings you have, it’s the one you don’t.”
The reason Kelce (and don’t even talk to me about his brother and the traitorous former Eagles fan singer he’s dating—she’s the problem) chose that chant is simply that no one likes us, and it’s also true that we don’t care. The underdog trope is strong, it’s why there’s a Rocky statue at the top of the Art Museum steps: in Philadelphia that movie is a documentary, far from fiction. In his speech, Kelce references something well-known to Philadelphians, sports analysts and rival teams. Right tackle Lane Johnson tweeted “they hate us cause they ain’t us” last week, and that’s part of it; there’s a level of unrestrained passion residing in the city of Philadelphia that you won’t find anywhere else.
When you grow up as a part of the cult-ure of Philadelphia sports, this passion is part of your identity like being a nationality or religion. When you see another person from the area, you recognize it in their eyes. You learned long ago not to walk through a room where one of your teams is playing on TV and speak (about something other than the play on the screen) for fear of getting yelled out of the room. You learn to hate rival teams: for the Eagles, you are born and bred to hate the Dallas Cowboys above all others, how dare they call themselves “America’s Team” while we play in the nation’s first capitol, beside the Liberty Bell, where the Declaration of Independence was signed? And you learn to despise the Pittsburgh Steelers as a distant second due to the audacity of the incorrect half of our Pennsyltucky state rooting in a traitorous manner for someone other than the Eagles.
We’re a superstitious people. I made the unfortunate choice to make cheesesteaks last Sunday before the Eagles game against the lowlife Cowboys, and now I can’t make cheesesteaks on a Sunday until next season.
How bad are we as sports fans? We may or may not be the only sports city in the land that had to install a jail and courthouse under our stadium, but it’s not like we executed anyone during games! One of the times we were voted the “Worst Sports Fans” by GQ, it was allegedly because:
"Over the years, Philadelphia fans have booed Santa Claus, their own star players and, most absurdly, the recipient of America's very first hand transplant, whose crime was dribbling in a ceremonial first pitch—thrown with his freshly transplanted hand. Boooo! Admittedly, there are some things fans have cheered. Like Michael Irvin's career-ending neck injury and a fan being tased on the outfield grass. Things reached their nadir, when Citizens Bank Park played host to arguably the most heinous incident in the history of sports: A drunken fan intentionally vomited on an 11-year-old girl."
Maybe if Santa Claus had brought an offensive coordinator who knew how to run the ball he wouldn’t have gotten booed, and to be fair, asking a hand transplant patient to throw a first pitch probably wasn’t so bright.
We’re definitely a fair-weather-fan people; in fact, a statistical study of MLB teams showed that Philadelphia is the fairest of them all when it comes to a bandwagon bunch. We only like our teams and players when they’re winning, what is the problem with that? You want to live in a place that builds the self-esteem of a bunch of losers and tells them they have a great personality after an L? Go to Seattle.
The only problem with being a fair-weather fan is that sometimes you might have to watch the end of a good game the next day because your blood pressure and heart have nearly tapped out from screaming at the screen and you walked away from a game thinking there’s no way your team could come back and it turns out they did. So as a fan you’ll live to see another day wearing your Philly gear and sharing the universal greeting every time you pass your brethren on the street or at a Philadelphia sports fan anonymous meeting: the slight nod and the “G’Birds.”
