Hawaiian Home Field

So I’m a little upset right now, because the University of Hawaii lost to the University of Colorado this weekend. I had been looking forward to this game for a while, because it meant that I got to stand in the middle of the CU student section wearing nothing but UH green and a stupid grin on my face. Then of course, UH decided to suddenly start choking like octogenarians at a care home steak buffet.

Now throughout the week I got a lot of criticism for rooting for Hawaii instead of Colorado. Apparently they thought that I was not being very loyal. This confused me, since I thought that rooting for Colorado, a school I have been associated with for less than four years, over Hawaii, a place I have lived for 18 years, was the exact opposite of being loyal. Besides, I pay the University of Colorado tons of money. If anything, they should be loyal to me. The board of regents should be showing up to my exams and holding up signs and doing the wave in the back of the room.

Besides it’s not like I chose to come to CU because I grew up watching all the great CU teams (if there were any). In fact, I was unaware there was a state called Colorado up until about six years ago, and I only found out then because I did a Wikipedia search on Coors. If the University of Hawaii had a journalism school, I would be there.

Of course I don’t really expect everybody to understand. Growing up in Hawaii with no pro sports teams, most sports fans there have very wide and varied tastes when it comes to the pro teams the root for. Some people have good taste, while some people root for the Denver Broncos. I mean, my dad roots for the San Francisco 49ers while I root for the Jacksonville Jaguars. Now, even I know that it is pretty hard to have two teams farther apart without somehow involving Alaska.

But UH is the one thing that all people in Hawaii have in common. And it’s not just football. I’ve watched (and genuinely cared about) everything from volleyball to water polo. I remember a few months ago, UH’s women’s softball team went to the World Series tournament while my parents were up here visiting me. This of course meant that instead of actually doing anything, we sat inside and watched the game. Well my dad and I watched. My mother actually affected the game by screaming at the television. At one point, we were all ready to leave for sushi but she would not leave until one UH girl finished her at-bat. Did I mention that it was a 19-pitch at-bat?

But it’s not just UH. We tend to root for any team with Hawaii ties. The most recent example was a Hawaii Little League team that went all the way to the final before losing to a group of robots from Japan designed to look like children. I never watch Little League, but I watched every single game Hawaii was in.

I also like watching national TV coverage of Hawaii teams. For some reason, they always feel the need to play generic Hawaiian music while showing cutaway scenes of beaches and people surfing. I’m not sure why; it’s not like we are a foreign country or something. You never see them playing country music while showing people drinking on lawn chairs in the dirt when Alabama plays do you? That and they can never pronounce the names of anybody on our teams.

Anyway, despite losing to Colorado, which is a truly humiliating thing, I am, and always will be a UH fan through and through. So I may take a bit of heat this week. A lot of people have been teasing me about how UH used to be the rainbows, and how gay that apparently is. I invite them to say that to these guys.