by Lehua La’a
I get it; you hate Tom Brady. His ugly mug is plastered all over my Facebook feed thanks to you. He’s a cheating pile of (insert poop emoji here), and guess what? He keeps winning in life. He’s married to a gorgeous lingerie model (Gisele Bündchen), his net worth is $180 million and he now owns five hideous Super Bowl rings.
It doesn’t help that Tom Brady’s fan club includes the most unpopular president in recent memory, Bimbo Fox-News-wannabe Tomi Lahren and White Nationalist/Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer as proud members. While I loathe these members of the Alt-Right, I can’t help but notice a trend: People who are hated by a vast majority cheer for the Patriots because A: They love Tom Brady and the Patriots for all their football glory, and B: They experience schadenfreude, a German word which means getting pleasure from another person’s misfortune.
“Lehua, I’m not a sadist,” cries my Patriots friend.
You are correct, Patriots friend, you are not a sadist. A sadist means you enjoy inflicting pain on others. Schadenfreude means that you enjoy watching Atlanta Falcons fans, and probably a good chunk of the United States, lose their minds when the Patriots annihilated a 25-point lead in the second half of Super Bowl LI.
We all have a little bit of schadenfreude in all of us. It comes out when our rival high school loses to our alma mater in a sports tournament. When your favorite musician wins an award over your least favorite artist and the camera captures a half second reaction of their loss. Hell, the schadenfreude comes out when you get the last slice of dessert that your sibling was eyeing throughout the night. Experiencing schadenfreude means your instinctual pettiness slips through your moral cracks of being a good person and allows you, even if it’s just for one second, to be an indignant schmuck.
Hating the Patriots is similar to the Sith and the dark side in “Star Wars.” The more frustration and energy we spend cursing the Patriots, the stronger Tom Brady becomes. Brady’s Sith Lord “Deflategate” tricks will only anger the football nation, which in turn will make Pats fans even more tickled pink with glee. For the Jedi to properly balance the universe again, we must use the Force: drink decent beer and remember that football is just a game.
Love,
Lehua the Football Cynic
