Rooting for the Underdog

Victor C. Bolles
May 28
5 min read

Americans love an underdog. In baseball we always had the Mets and don’t forget the Cubbies. When I lived in New York City in the late seventies the Mets were dead last in their division the whole time. And when I was a kid in Chicago the Cubs went almost forty years without getting into the playoffs. And all our cheering in the bleachers at Old Tiger Stadium for Mark “the Bird” Fidrych couldn’t get the Tigers into the playoffs either.

Seems like my favorite teams during my years growing up were relegated at or near the basement. But who cares? It was fun rooting for the underdog. Of course, all that changed when I went to the University of Michigan when Bo Schembechler was coach of the football team. But the biggest roars from the one hundred thousand plus fans in Michigan Stadium was when woodson

loudspeakers announced the scores for Slippery Rock State Teachers College. We loved our underdogs even we had to search around the country to find one.

Rooting for the underdog is part of our American nature. Horatio Alger rose to fame writing about Ragged Dick and other street boys who rose from humble origins to middle class respectability. But for much of American history rooting for the underdog did not include Americans of African descent. African Americans were enslaved for centuries and even after emancipation were treated as second class citizens – the worst kind of underdog. Kept down on purpose.

All this discrimination against African Americans was supposed to end with the civil rights movement and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In fact, to make up for past discrimination, remedies included affirmative action and preferences for minorities and women on government contracting. But even with these preferences plus additional legislation as part of the War on Poverty many African Americans remain underdogs with little hope of rising out of dependency on government handouts and subsidies.

But Jackie Robinson did not break into the major leagues because of affirmative action. The Brooklyn Dodgers signed him up because he was a superior athlete. Teams that wanted to win signed up more and more black athletes. The professional sports leagues of today are the ultimate meritocracies and African Americans are well represented in these sports because they earned it. Most of the players in the NBA are of African descent and black players are overrepresented in the NFL and many other sports (except for maybe hockey).

When I (and many other desperate fans) root for our Cubbies, Tigers, Mets or whoever, we want them to do better. But we don’t want the referees and umpires of the games to alter how they call penalties or change regulations for our teams to do better. That wouldn’t help our underdogs - It would ruin the game. If our underdogs won because the refs gave them an unfair advantage, there would be no victory to celebrate.

Can the same be said for life outside the arena or stadium? Some would say that real life is different but I am not so sure. Talented young athletes of all races and ethnicities get special attention from coaches who work them hard to build their strength and skill. They often go to special schools that specialize in training professional athletes. The meritocracy of pro sports requires not only the best talent but the best training.

So does real life. Parents need to train their kids to thrive in the real world. The younger brother of my best friend in college played for the Junior Red Wings (and if you know hockey you know this is elite level play for a high school kid) and his mom drove him all over Michigan and even Canada for games and practice. Ice time at 3:00 a.m. a hundred miles away was not uncommon. Asian Tiger Moms make sure their little darlings are practicing piano, playing chess or studying for spelling bees.

But many African Americans (along with a bunch of European Americans) are being short changed. Not everyone can be a pro athlete or concert pianist but most kids can grow up to have successful fulfilling lives if they receive the proper motivation from their parents and education from their schools. Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty has turned out to be more like a war on black culture. Famed economist Thomas Sowell has frequently pointed out that African Americans made greater gains during years of Jim Crow repression than they have since the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty. Welfare and special programs eviscerated the motivation needed to get ahead in life. Black families broke apart, children to unwed mothers exploded, middle class values that had sustained African Americans during Jim Crow were derided as the culture of white supremacy. Hard work and a good education were rejected.

And the schools that helped Italian Catholics and Polish Jews get ahead now tell our young underdogs that, although the problems they face are not their fault, there is nothing they can do about it. Youngsters that can’t read or do basic math will be hard-pressed to be productive members of a modern society. They are being trained to be welfare recipients by a public school system run by left-leaning teachers’ unions whose empathy for our young underdogs is really poorly disguised contempt for their ability to thrive on their own.

Charter schools have shown that young African Americans and underdogs of any ethnicity can excel academically. This is why the progressive left hates charter schools and tries to block them at every chance they get. What would happen to these leftists if our underdogs learned that they could actually do things on their own? It just takes hard work and discipline. A study by the Brookings Institute shows that the poverty rate for young adults of all ethnicities who follow the “Success Sequence” (graduate from high school, work full time, and don’t have kids until you’re married) is only 3% compared to 52% for those who don’t. The success rates for black and whites are virtually identical. (see also my commentary The Sequence of Life, published March 30, 2018).

If community organizers really want to help poor people (our underdogs of whatever ethnicity) they would advise them to develop their own agency and not rely on politicians who promise benefits and entitlements that actually destroy the soul and ruin a culture. We know what it takes to turn an underdog into a champion – and it isn’t government.

One community organizer that did just that recently passed away. Bob Woodson grew up under Jim Crow and worked his way through civil rights organizations (NAACP and the Urban League) and the American Enterprise Institute to found the Woodson Center dedicated to helping people to develop the agency to control their own lives. Bob Woodson died May 19, 2026 at the age of 89. Check out the Woodson Center at www.woodsoncenter.org. You may also be interested in my commentary, Old Black Men, published February 3, 2021.