[In honor of the very strange ritual that is Groundhog Day, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such quirky and fun traditions, including Phil himself on Friday. I’d love to hear about quirky traditions you’d highlight in comments!]
On three
ways to contextualize a very strange “sports” tradition.
1)
Exotic Animals: As the father to two sons who
are quite obsessed with alpacas and make an annual pilgrimage to a wonderful alpaca farm (which is in fact
going to be part of my wedding in a few months!), I’m certainly not here to
critique the longstanding American and probably universal human tradition of
falling in love with random exotic animals. But it is pretty darn random, as
illustrated by the evolution of Chandler, Arizona—a small town that became home
in
the early 20th century to a number of ostrich farms (for reasons
that I can’t seem to suss out from any of the write-ups, so if anyone out there
knows why or how this got started please add your thoughts in comments!) and
that now more than a century later hosts an annual Ostrich Festival featuring not just
racing (on which as an overall practice more in a moment) but it seems all
things ostriches.
2)
A Silly Rivalry: There’s raising exotic
animals and then there’s racing them, and when it comes to ostriches the
development of the latter practice in particular seems to have been even more
random still. In 1959, the editor of the Virginia City, Nevada Territorial Enterprise newspaper printed
a fake story about
camel racing in the community; the San
Francisco Chronicle believed the story was real and reprinted it. The next
year, to get back at the Nevada paper for having been duped, the Chronicle borrowed camels from the San
Francisco Zoo and brought them to Virginia City for an actual race. This event
has evolved into an
annual tradition, one that features not only camels but also zebras, emus,
and, natch, ostriches and that will run for the 64th time this
coming September. Virginia City isn’t America’s only site for annual ostrich
races—Minnesota’s Canterbury Park features them at its annual
EXTREME DAY, for example—but I’m willing to bet that the practice evolved
just as randomly in each case, and yet has become an iconic tradition in each
as well. America!
3)
Sports Betting: Unfortunately (to my mind,
anyway) another longstanding American tradition, and one that is only becoming
more ubiquitous in our current moment, is taking advantage of every possible
opportunity to gamble. I didn’t know for a fact when I planned this post that
folks out there bet on ostrich races, but I was willing to, well, bet that that
was the case; and lo and behold, one of the first results when I Googled “ostrich
racing” was this short
video of a race from Hollywood Casino at Penn National Race Course in
Grantville, PA. I have overall problems with gambling, in terms of what it too often
means for the individuals and families (and communities) affected by it; but I
have even more problems with gambling on animal racing, as it seems very likely
to me that it can lead to the animals being mistreated or at least treated as a
source of income rather than living creatures. So this is one quirky tradition
I’d love to see end, or at least evolve.
Next
quirky tradition tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other traditions you’d highlight?
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