My college football team, the Oklahoma Sooners, lost on Saturday and it made me sad. As I told my good friend Jay Nordlinger (he e-mailed to offer his condolences), when your team is ranked No. 3 in the country and you have waited nine long months for the season to start and then they lose in Week 1 . . . it feels like someone canceled Christmas.
I should like to say a word about sports, and about college football, in particular: In a world in which our enemies are on the move, our Republic is forced to choose between two less-than-ideal candidates for president, and Syria bleeds without end, it strikes many as the height of triviality to elevate sports to any level of importance. But I think that, within reason of course, the love of sport is an important conservative article of our civil society. And one that should be encouraged to flourish among our people. Allow me to explain.
An Okie by breeding but ensconced this last year and a half in New York City, I find myself a long way from home. The people here talk funny. The BBQ is all wrong. And I can go a week or two without seeing a pickup truck. It can’t fail to make me a little homesick.
Sometimes, I think of those lines by George Eliot.
A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amid the future widening of knowledge . . . The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.
Just so. When Oklahoma was cut down by the U of Houston, it hurt — as it did for 3 million Okies a thousand miles away. That’s not nothing. For three hours, if only in spirit, I was back among my kin.
We talk a lot about politics and the great contest of ideas. And that’s all well and good; it’s important and needs doing. But we shouldn’t forget that a deeper, Burkean understanding of our country reserves an honored place for the more important things in life: like family, and church, and community — and college football. Isn’t that what conservatism is all about, anyway? Aren’t we after that moment of ordered liberty when we, the citizenry, can safely ignore whatever they do in Washington as fundamentally secondary to the principal things in life? When Churchill spoke of his hope for times of peace and of “broad, sunlit uplands,” I think that’s what he had in mind. And that’s why the twelve Saturdays in the fall — when your alma mater takes the field to trumpets and pageantry and singing — are as important as any other institution in our country. When Michigan plays Ohio State, when the Gators meet the Crimson Tide, and when Oklahoma lines up against Texas in October’s Red River Shootout, something special happens.
Eliot said that humans flourish when “well rooted in some spot of native land,” deeply familiar with “the sounds and accents that haunt it.” Ah yes. I know just what she meant. And I’m sure you do too.
I’m Sooner born and Sooner bred
and when I die, I’ll be Sooner dead
Rah Oklahoma, Rah Oklahoma
Rah Oklahoma, OK U!