THE MALCOM X-FACTOR: Harvard Likes Bubble Baths?

The life of a Harvard sports fan is a learning experience. There aren’t many of us true believers around these parts, so you realize a lot of things rooting for the Crimson.

Being a fan here is a freshman seminar to the large lecture class experiences of fans elsewhere—small, quiet, and intimate, as opposed to big, loud and rowdy.

Last year, I realized that when I die, a triple-overtime thriller in the New Haven twilight may very well be the single greatest game I’ve ever witnessed in person. Last month, I realized that Bill Cowher’s jaw really is as, um, “defined” in person as it looks on TV.

And two weeks ago, at a Harvard men’s lacrosse game against interstate rival UMass, I learned something new: Harvard boys like bubble baths.

At least, that’s what one fan kept telling me.

But that wasn’t all the heckler had to say. He gave us poignant tidbits regarding how we were somehow inferior because of our intelligence, he cheered when junior midfielder Zach Widbin was spitting up blood on the sideline after an illegal hit, and he barely backed down when a quasi-security guard told him to “take it easy” and stop his ridiculousness.

Even a fellow pro-UMass man, an old guy proudly sporting his Minutemen baseball hat, made it a point to tell the guilty party to shut his trap. Eavesdropping on the conversation he was having in front of me, he seemed concerned about the expletives being showered down in the vicinity of the kids nearby.

I, on the other hand, had a different problem with his cheers and, more importantly, his jeers: they just weren’t any good.

The saddest insult in the book is the one levied towards the smart kid, and especially at a place like Harvard, it’s not going to make anyone feel bad. Yeah, we’re smart. Smart is the new cool. Making fun of the smart kid is something that only one person ever does: the dumb kid.

You can laugh at our guy when he takes a big hit, too, but there’s nothing to laugh at when he gets up, jogs off the field, spits out a little blood and gets ready to get back into the game. I guess I’d be upset if my school was tougher, too.

And so what if we like bubble baths? It also happens that we like the Earth, and bubble baths are a far more environmentally sound use of our water than those inefficient UMass boys are accustomed to.

But I shouldn’t criticize the kid from UMass too much. After all, if it wasn’t for him, I don’t think I ever would have realized just how good our cheers were.

We were at our best at the Cornell men’s hockey game a few weeks back. While Big Red fans were attempting to come up with some convoluted wordplay about our mothers, we cut right to the chase, and our chants of “You are dumb!” were the highlight of the night.

Maybe it’s because we’re smarter that we realize it doesn’t take the complicated prose of our academic papers to embarrass, belittle and antagonize our opponents. Maybe it’s because, through the laws of environment, the world rewards those who treat it best with a better arsenal of insults.

Or maybe it’s because we’re tough—we know that it takes a lot to get under our skin, and since you’re not as tough, it shouldn’t take much to get under yours.

The fan at the UMass game might have gotten the last laugh, in the form of his school’s 11-10 win, but what’s really important here? A meaningless non-conference game that nobody will remember in a few weeks? Or the clever insults that pierce a man’s soul? You may win regarding the former, name-less obnoxious UMass fan, but when it comes to the latter, us Harvard boys (and girls) excel, just like we do in everything else that makes you hate us so much.

The most important thing I’ve learned during my time as a Harvard sports fan is that, while we might not be the best on the field, the ice, or the turf, we’re always the best in the stands. When we actually show up, that is.

We’re surely never the biggest, so we’ve got to make up for it in some fashion. And as Ludacris, in his Oscar-worthy portrayal of Skinny Black in Hustle & Flow, put it so perfectly, “it ain’t the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

—Staff writer Malcom A. Glenn can be reached at mglenn@fas.harvard.edu.