Updated: Monday, February 14th, 10:10am.
As you probably know by now, I’ve been a Los Angeles Lakers fan for as long as I can remember. My dad grew fond of basketball and chose Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—for obvious (religious) reasons. We, his kids, inherited his loyalty to the purple-and-gold. Of my own accord, I got into football years later, but chose my geographic, demographic roots: A child of New England, I rooted for the Patriots.
As I sit up late at night absorbing the Bengals’ heartbreaking loss, 23-20, in Super Bowl 56, two things occur to me. The first is: Being a Lakers and a Patriots fan has, generally speaking, been more than easy. More than fair. In my actual memory, I can remember 8 Lakers’ championships—and 6 New England wins. That’s one for practically every three years I’ve been alive, which made that fandom pretty great.
I kind of literally embody the stereotype of the spoiled, privileged, blue-state-bubble. There’s no LA against the World t-shirts, for example, and no New England vs the Planet t-shirts, because, well, when you’re in LA or represent New England, you often think you are the world. The narrative of the latter is: We started the world’s most powerful country. The former projects it into the world.
The other thing? Being a Lakers fan in the Northeast is lonely; likewise, I only got into football when I had moved to New York and, for a lot of reasons, and some of them pretty understandable, the Patriots were just not that popular outside the six-state conglomerate. (That’s New England, if you didn’t know.) What does this second lesson mean? That, yes, it was easy being their fan. But also socially distancing.
I never got caught up and swept away in the moment.
Not like that, at least, because cheering either team was generally a solitary affair, or a relatively exclusive one.
You didn’t walk into a store and see a stream of jerseys like yours.
You didn’t walk into a bakery, looking for themed cookies, and find they’re all but sold out. There never were cookies. Nobody in New York cared about the Pats.
Nobody in the Northeast really gave a damn about LA. Even in LA, for the one time I went to a Lakers game in LA, lots of people didn’t seem to care about LA.
When I moved here, I have to confess I only really got into the Bengals because everyone else around me was passionately, intensely loyal to this franchise, to its tumultuous and often terribly painful history, and the saga of Joe Burrow and this year was simply too much to not be consumed by and drawn into. I haven’t cheered for a team like this in a long, long, long time.
Also, how can you not love Joe Burrow?
And I’ve never—ever—experienced anything like southwest Ohio in the grips of Super Bowl fever, for the simple reason that I’ve never lived anywhere where I’ve identified with the local team, which was by every metric the underdog, which then made (almost) perfect. I’ve just never had any kind of experience comparable to this.
When Burrow was pulled down with about a minute left, and it was clear the game was over, a wave of sorrow unlike any other I’ve experienced in team sports passed over us. All of us, including our youngest, who was devastated. I mean, we all were, but he really was, and I suddenly understood why.
We talked as he nodded off to sleep. I had to tell him that life’s actually not fair. Well, scratch that. This life isn’t fair. (Fairness shows up in the next round.) Because we don’t get what we deserve. Things don’t always work out perfectly. But how often is it you get to live in a place, and root for a team, and see that team make it all the way to the top? Nobody really even expected Cincy to be here in the first place.
To make it this far was a gift. To watch it was a gift. To be a part of it was a gift. Because you don’t actually know if, or when, it’ll come again. Playoff droughts and all that. So, scratch that. Maybe life doesn’t seem fair. But it’s actually not. We truly get far more than we deserve. We just have to know where to look. And remember to look. Just because you didn’t get all the things didn’t mean you got none.
Next year in Glendale? Maybe. Maybe not. But at least we had this year in Los Angeles. And thank Allah for that.
Incidentally, if you are Joe Burrow, and want to get us tickets to, you know, help me really deepen, extend, and corroborate this brilliant teaching moment, I’d be pretty down for that, too.
Insofar as life is a gift, and I appreciate gifts, you can count on me to never turn down a gift. And if this Substack isn’t reason enough, this adorable picture of our two cats, Kylo—known colloquially as “Lolo”—and Rey—known affectionately as “Lili”—showing their love for their feline cousins should warm your heart.
Three Lessons
Since this is a Substack ostensibly started in and out of a halaqa, I can’t end without sharing three lessons.
Maybe they’re worth talking about with your little Bengals or, sigh, junior Rams.
The first is that, yes, life isn’t fair. Life is a kind of test. We are judged not on what we ultimately accomplish, but on the effort we put in before, and the character we show after. We are judged on our heart and our grace, our struggle and our resilience. Because, of course, if everybody got what they wanted, every team would win the Super Bowl (so to speak).
And why is life a test? One reason, I think, is because human nature—the way God chose to make us—is revealed only through endurance. It’s not a test like some kind of punishment, or arbitrary imposition, but a process through which we can either become the best versions of ourselves. Or not. In that, the process is a full-fledged blessing. God wants us not to be simple automatons.
But flourishing individual humans.
With some caveats.
The second is a corrective. It’s not actually that life isn’t fair. It’s that this life isn’t fair. The compensation or, God forbid, comeuppance we deserve comes in the next life, when the Merciful Judge of all scrutinizes each of our lives and finds us wanting (may it not be so!) or wanted (may it be so!) This is why those of us who have a hard time here have reason to look forward in hope.
And for those to whom much is given? Well, on that specific Day, we may regret every blessing we had, for fear of how we handled it—let alone whether we thanked God for it properly, lived gratefully, and paid it forward appropriately.
The third: Solidarity.
Joe Burrow made much of his disdain for the Bengals’ mantra—“Why not us?” No, he said. It is us. We have to have a winning attitude. There’s no question mark there. Or at least there shouldn’t be. Stop doubting yourselves. While I think there’s much to what he’s saying, I’ll focus on another word. Us. That’s the key. The way we get through life, the way we handle the ups and downs, is through strong relationships, strong families, strong friendships, and strong communities.
Those are required for a strong country, incidentally, and not the other way around. The world is built from the ground up and never the top down. My wife and I were talking yesterday about how COVID seems to be receding from people’s behaviors—and what that meant. We reflected on how brutally isolated American life, society, and culture has become, which in turn might explain why COVID was so singularly devastating in American and other, atomized, materialistic Western societies.
When you already don’t have strong relationships, and live closed off from one another, something like a pandemic is doubly distressing; it’s why, I think, the Super Bowl meant so much more this time around, especially for me, rooting for a playing team—because all of us, we are just desperate for solidarity, and hungry for something that doesn’t sort us into political tribes, oppositional identities, or structural hierarchies. We want to feel joyfully human and truly connected again.
That’s a good reminder for me: It’s been a hard two years. It was hard even before then. We truly, badly, really need help, hope, and happiness.
We need it for ourselves. We should want it, and work for it, for others.
Well said Haroon! Life is not fair in this life.