Dear Cal and Stanford,

Why are you running away from California?

Yes, the collapse of the Pac-12 Conference—occasioned by the departure of eight schools seeking better TV contracts—leaves the two of you without a home for your sports teams.

But your flailing around for a new sports home on the other side of the country looks pathetic. Your desperate appeals to join the Atlantic Coast Conference would be a joke, if it weren’t such a crime against geography.

And if that doesn’t work out—and it’s not looking good, since those Atlantic schools don’t want to share their TV sports revenues with West Coast interlopers—what’s next?

Are you going to play in the Arab League?

Instead of seeking unworkable new affiliations three time zones away, please take a breath and a good look at your home state. If you stop panicking and start thinking intelligently—and intelligent thinking is supposed to be your brand—you’ll see that the best opportunity to build your athletic futures is right here in California.

You two, as educational leaders, are naturally positioned to bring together universities from every region of the Golden State to form a new college sports powerhouse.

Call it the California Conference.

This is not a new idea. Intriguingly, sports leaders also suggested it the last time your conference broke up. It was the 1950s, when you played in the Pacific Coast Conference.

As recounted in the book Roses from the Ashes: Breakup and Rebirth in Pacific Coast Intercollegiate Athletics, conference officials discovered in 1951 that the University of Oregon’s football program paid student-athletes from a secret slush fund; the University of Washington, it turned out, did too. The ensuing turmoil resulted in the PCC’s dissolution in the 1958–59 school year.

During the scandal, Los Angeles oilman Edwin Pauley—a longtime UC regent so devoted to college sports that UCLA named its basketball arena after him—suggested that California schools form their own conference. That didn’t happen. But the two of you, Cal and Stanford, helped create a new conference of schools from Western states. This became the Pac-8, and, with subsequent expansion, the Pac-10, and then the Pac-12.

You should start your own conference again. But this time, with the growth of California and its universities, you won’t have to look outside the state for partners.

Football is the revenue machine that drives college sports, and California now has 11 universities that play in the highest division. Two of these schools—USC and UCLA—have gone to the Big Ten for now. But the other nine—you two, plus Fresno State, Sacramento State, San Diego State, San José State, UC Davis, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and the University of San Diego—could make an entertaining and diverse conference for football. These California teams might be happy to jump from their current, non-elite conferences (the Mountain West and the Big Sky) to a potentially higher revenue-producing California conference.

For sports beyond football, the California conference could include more than 20 universities, including seven University of California schools, and 10 Cal State campuses. The California Conference would be a basketball powerhouse, raising the profile of outstanding but lesser-known programs, like St. Mary’s and CSU Bakersfield.

You’d remain the top dogs, academically and athletically, but by bringing in the California schools, you’d elevate them in a way that might ease resentment of your elite institutions.

You should know, though, that a number of these schools can hang with you. Take San Diego State. Its football team is often better than yours. Its men’s basketball program just made the national finals. San Diego State is also a rising academic power, second in selectivity among the Cal State schools only to Cal Poly SLO, whose graduates make nearly as much money as yours do.

A California Conference schedule wouldn’t be a big adjustment, because you already play many of these California schools in many sports. Both of you have a long history of playing football against San José State (the Stanford–San José State rivalry even has a name, the Bill Walsh Legacy Game, in honor of the late Stanford and 49ers coach, a San José State alum).

Sports media executives may question whether intra-state games will draw audiences, but that’s because they don’t understand California. College football is about rivalries between regions, and California’s regions are as populous as most states. I, for one, can hardly wait to see Cal or Stanford go to Bulldog Stadium on a Saturday night with a conference title at stake. You’ll see how Fresno State’s storied football program produces more passion than your wine-and-cheese fan bases might muster in a decade.

The new conference also could spawn cross-cultural local fights—working-class Sac State against hippie UC Davis, or the uptight Catholics of the University of San Diego against loose-living San Diego State.

A California Conference would have ancillary benefits. For example, it might revive the Rose Bowl, an essential California New Year’s tradition killed off by the same forces that exploded the Pac-12. Instead of becoming just another quarterfinal game in a national college football playoff—its current fate—the Rose Bowl could pit the California Conference champion against the best team it can get from the rest of the country.

And with any luck, this new athletic union would forge more academic collaboration between California-based schools, who face the same threat—a United States that is increasingly hostile to higher education, non-partisan teaching, and California’s liberal values.

The California Conference would start with one void: It wouldn’t have USC or UCLA. But if the conference could launch and perform well, it’s easy to see those schools leaving the Big Ten and coming home. USC and UCLA athletes, after a few years in the Big 10, may discover that they prefer less travel, fewer missed classes, and better game weather.

It’s also going to be hard to justify, to the state of California and on-campus constituencies, the climate impacts of burning all that additional jet fuel. Teams in the California Conference could get to most games by train or electric bus.

So that’s the pitch—save the planet, save college sports, connect California. Why not take a swing?

The post Let’s Create a California Conference appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the rare case presented by Florida State University (FSU) and its Seminoles mascot and Chief Osceola emblem. FSU’s mascotting situation is unique in that its school and teams benefit from a special relationship with an indigenous nation, the Seminole Tribe of Florida (STF). The STF has cosigned FSU’s mascotting practices for over 40 years, thus providing credibility that most teams and schools simply do not possess.

This situation may be special, but it still illustrates one of America’s longest-running cultural debates: the factors influencing the line between the acceptability and offensiveness of Native American mascots.

Such mascots were once commonplace and rarely questioned. Native American mascotting culture arose at the turn of the 20th century once most indigenous nations were on reservations following the close of the Indian wars. Such nations’ symbols became safe to appropriate at that point, and helped the burgeoning imperial nation sow its roots in nature and in frontier-like bodily performance. (The latter was also seen played out in Boy Scout culture, the rugged cowboy persona of Theodore Roosevelt, and in advertising for masculine products like tobacco and cars). “Playing Indian” in these ways connected with stoicism, fortitude, honor, and physical prowess. These qualities translated seamlessly to sports competition, thus the increase of Native American mascots.

With indigenous numbers having dwindled and reservations spatially separated from metropolitan areas, resistance to such mascots was slight.

That changed in 1968, when the National Congress of American Indians publicly critiqued the practice of mascotting as detrimental to indigenous communities. Since that time, and across the expanse of professional, collegiate, and even high school sports, a controversy has raged over the meaning of such mascots. Do mascots honor Native American cultures or stereotypically misrepresent indigenous people, thus continuing the debilitating work that colonization started when Europeans began settling the Americas?

As researchers and authors, we’ve examined the unyielding positions of those on both sides of mascot questions and the debate’s various counterpoints: honor versus hate, valor versus colonialization, stoicism versus violence. We’ve also sought to get beyond the pro and con arguments to understand what the conversation around the issue means. We’ve analyzed a national survey of fans and gathered a trove of public documents from teams, fans, and Native and non-Native activists to explore the primary rhetoric of parties involved in the controversy. Some well-known cases of offensive mascots are easy to understand, in particular football’s Washington R-dskins, who have made a brand identity from a racial slur so offensive that we don’t spell it out fully in our published works. But others are not so clear-cut, and raise complex issues of history, consent, and culture.

The question of Florida State and its “Seminoles” offers one such multifaceted case. So deep is the relationship between FSU and the Seminole Tribe of Florida that when the National Collegiate Athletic Association issued sanctions on schools with Native American mascots in 2005, FSU received an exemption. Unlike the University of North Dakota Fighting Hawks (née Fighting Sioux), FSU did not have to change its mascot name; and unlike the University of Illinois Fighting Illini, FSU was not compelled to retire its visual imagery (i.e., Illinois’s Chief Illiniwek logo) and its rituals (i.e., Illinois’s halftime “crazy dance”). FSU kept the name “Seminoles” intact along with Chief Osceola as a visual and the “tomahawk chop” as a performance.

FSU’s integrity and authority, however, do not stand unchecked. The much larger Seminole Nation of Oklahoma does not support FSU’s mascot. Moreover, other Native nations disagree with the imagery shrouding the Seminoles moniker. These other indigenous communities argue that FSU began mascotting the Seminoles well before the STF issued an agreement and that said agreement only came to pass because of political and financial ties.

So who decides whether a mascot name, visual representation, or ritual can stand or be excised from sport culture? Fans? Native Americans? Teams and schools? Who can represent Native Americans writ large or within a particular tribe? Those tribes closest to the school? The answer is far from clear. Schools and teams purport to own and control their mascots. They trademark them, relying on Western law to trump Native cultural connections to these symbols. They pack them full of traits with which they and their students and fans may align. And this, in particular, is what inflames anti-mascot activists, who view such control as a repeat of colonial history; that is, in the same way that Native land was taken by non-Natives throughout U.S. history, so too are mascots said to be symbolically stolen from Native Americans.

Ultimately, mascot debates have been contests over public opinion, and here the picture is more complicated, because opinion depends on context and specifics. In our surveys, sports fans think and feel differently about the FSU mascot depending on the rhetorical form that the mascot takes. In a survey, fans generally found the name “Seminole” (6.73 on a 10-point scale) and the mascot’s spear logo mostly acceptable (6.98), but had more difficulties with the Chief Osceola logo showing an actual Native American face (5.42). And the rituals at FSU—the “tomahawk chop” (5.05) and the “war chant” (4.75), in particular—were more likely to be seen as offensive.

By and large, Americans have come to acknowledge that there is something questionable about using Native American mascots. In the least, the issue is certainly on the public’s radar. Thus, when it comes to how mascots represent Native Americans, people are not “all in” or “all out.” The U.S. public does not debate all the rituals of the Washington R-dskins team, but rather the name itself, given that the word “r-dskin” has been used as a racist epithet for two centuries. In Cleveland, it is not the name “Indians” but rather the caricatured “red face” of the Indians’ Chief Wahoo logo that has drawn ire, so much so that Wahoo was retired by the Cleveland franchise as of October 2018.

The mascot debate is not just about cultural representation, but also about cultural politics in terms of who has the authority to change mascots and what it could mean for fans. While teams worry that abandoning a mascot will alienate fans, we found in our research that fan culture and devotion does not usually change when a mascot is retired. Fans at FSU reported that, yes, they would be upset if Chief Osceola was remanded to the sidelines, but that they would still watch games.

The real issue, it seemed, is that fans specifically said they’d be angered by the perception that such a change might be precipitated by “political correctness.” Similarly, University of Illinois fans, whose Chief Illiniwek was removed in 2007, reported some 10 years out that their fandom was unchanged a decade later. But, they still lamented that “political correctness” had run amok. Further comments revealed that their underlying complaint was the shift in the balance of power that organized opposition to the mascot indicated. One wrote “No! Tired of minority people getting catered to.” In this sense, the mascot controversy has come to mirror wider political polarization in the US, with no one embodying the “stoicism” that the mascots supposedly symbolized.

The post Sports Fans Don’t Love Native American Mascots, They Just Resent ‘Political Correctness’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the 20th century, Samoans, native Hawaiians, and Tongans gravitated to the area to seek a different sort of refuge. They soon found direction from a new priestly caste—a cosmopolitan group of football coaches who crafted a micro-culture of football excellence at and around Kahuku High School.

Over the decades, Kahuku has developed hundreds of collegiate and pro players, including winners of several Super Bowl rings. Just since 1999, Kahuku has played in 12 of Hawai‘i’s 19 state championship games, winning eight times.

Along the way, football became the North Shore’s civic cement.

This is a sports story that began with a sugar plantation and a Mormon temple. As the Kahuku Sugar Plantation fired up its boilers in 1890 and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) built a temple in nearby La`ie in 1919, the area attracted an array of proletarian wayfarers, including Samoans, Tongans, and Mormons from Utah’s Great Basin. Driven by different agendas, plantation managers, and Mormon elders saw sport as a way to shape those they recruited to work and worship. These newcomers to the North Shore and their descendants embraced sport and built an ethos of their own.

Today Samoans constitute the most disproportionately overrepresented ethnic group in the NFL. This trend dates to the Samoans who began playing football on the North Shore before World War II, decades before their brethren in American Samoa adopted the game. Many were Mormons who came when the LDS decided to consolidate its La`ie beachhead with the new temple. Thirty-five miles north of Honolulu, the once aboriginal fishing village of La`ie sits between Hau`ula and Kahuku.

Hundreds of Samoan converts came to build the temple, making La`ie a close approximation of a Samoan village. They adapted on their own terms in a church-owned, plantation town, retaining a culture of fa`a Samoa—in the way of Samoa. The temple, the first dedicated outside the continental United States, became a gathering place for the faith’s South Pacific converts. One can hardly overstate its importance—a temple is the only place where the ordinances required for salvation can be conducted and redemption sought for family members who died before completing the sacraments.

The North Shore’s Samoan community expanded after the U.S. Navy closed its base in American Samoa in 1951, sending another wave of migrants to refuge in La`ie. Youth from the town of La`ie came together at Kahuku High with their counterparts from Hau`ula, Kahuku, and the more northern shorelines where the Banzai Pipeline attracts some of the most intrepid surfers in the world.

Football quickly became entrenched at Kahuku High. During the 1940s, coaches Mits Fujishige, a Japanese American, and Art Stranske, a Canadian expat, led the school to its first titles. And, in 1945, Alopati “Al” Loloati, born in Samoa and bred in La`ie, debuted with the Washington Redskins, becoming, with little fanfare, the first Samoan in the NFL.

The Polynesian wave that would reconfigure collegiate and pro ball was still decades away. But back on the North Shore, Kahuku’s teams were becoming more and more successful. In 1956, Kahuku won a state title under coach Harold Silva, a Portuguese American, who infused the program with a tough, principled athletic code and showed the community that its boys could compete with anybody in Hawai‘i.

With the sons and grandsons of earlier Samoan immigrants at its core, Kahuku became the first mostly Samoan squad anywhere in the world. As the sugar industry declined along the northern coast, football gave generations of boys a way to find their place in the world.

A few years after Silva retired, native son Famika Anae returned and became the first Samoan head coach at any level of the game. Famika was the son of a Mormon from Western Samoa who had answered the call to build the temple. Both Famika and his half-brother—that Samoan NFL pioneer Al Lolotai—were the products of La`ie’s tough blend of religion, fa`a Samoa culture, and football discipline.

Famika’s father was initially skeptical of the game’s value. “Can you eat the football?” he asked. Famika eventually would have an answer when the game took him to Brigham Young University, where he played on an athletic scholarship. Famika returned to Kahuku in 1966, believing that excelling at the game was a way for local boys to go to college.

Famika, who led Kahuku until 1972, won two titles and brought Samoan players to the fore. During the summer, he conducted clinics in American Samoa with Lolotai. Famika appreciated how growing up in Samoa readied boys for football. “A Samoan boy starts hard physical labor even before he reaches school age,” Famika explained. “He must climb a coconut tree 100 feet tall, barefoot and carrying a machete, tear the coconuts loose and even cut away the fronds… By the time a boy is ready for high school football, his muscles often are as defined as those of a weightlifter.”

For training and bonding, Famika took his Kahuku players to a nearby island, Lanai, which the Dole Company ran as a plantation. They picked pineapples for six weeks each summer and returned with money in their pockets, in shape to play. He knew how much that money meant to boys whose families lived so humbly.

Upholding fa`a Samoa on the North Shore was demanding. “It is very hard on a Samoan kid who doesn’t do well, or what his father thinks is well,” Famika acknowledged. “He is felt to have disgraced the family.” A tongue-lashing and beating were often his punishment. “A loss,” Famika said, “reflects on the parents, the chiefs, and the race.” As their coach, he channeled his boys’ fear of failure into a relentless attacking style. “Samoans are very physical people,” he underscored. “They simply can’t stand losing—either in sports or in life.”

Sport meant battle and players readied themselves for games by performing the siva tau, a war dance. Their younger fans made Kamehameha Highway, the only way out of town, a gauntlet for opposing teams, pelting buses with gravel and coral stones from the shadows.

In the 1990s, Kahuku often reached the championship but repeatedly lost to Honolulu’s Saint Louis School. To be crowned king of Hawaiian football, the school had to dethrone Saint Louis and its legendary coach Cal Lee, which had dominated state football for two decades.

In 2000, Kahuku was coached by Sivaki Livai, who had played for the school after migrating from Tonga. Thousands traveled to Honolulu for Kahuku’s championship game with Saint Louis. After Kahuku delivered a historic victory, a caravan of buses, cars, and pickups snaked its way northward past cheering crowds gathered along the black-topped road. The buses stopped in each town so that players could perform a siva tau. Arriving home after midnight, they were greeted by supporters basking in a sense of fulfillment.

Since 2000, Kahuku football has maintained an almost unrivaled level of excellence. It’s become the story that many tell about their town to the world, a story about people who work hard and play harder, who lose but persevere, and in the end are heralded for their accomplishments. The flow of boys to college football has not slackened and many use football to gain an education and launch careers in and out of sport.

“I don’t think there’s a high school program in the United States that has benefited more from sport than Kahuku,” Dr. Allen Anae, son of the former Kahuku coach Famika Anae, argues. Eighty percent of its current student body participates in interscholastic sports. “Now we have parents thinking, if I support my kids’ football—and not only football but women’s sports—they can get a college education,” Anae observed. Maybe you can eat that football after all.

The post Why Samoans Are So Overrepresented in the NFL appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

He was calling to tell me about Steve Sarkisian, who had been named the head football coach of the USC Trojans. Sarkisian’s hiring may be the single most brilliant move in the history of the 133-year-old South Los Angeles institution—at least, to Armenians living in Southern California.

Henry Sahakian, a salesman from Glendale, told me, “I hope this inspires the Armenian community to follow and play more football.” His wife, Margaret, chimed in, “We are all so proud.”

Growing up in Los Angeles, an Armenian-American and member of the second generation of my family to be born here (in 1954, in my case), I often heard the words “Armenian” and “proud.” I learned to be proud that Alexander the Great only “partially” conquered my ancestral land. Proud that Armenia was the first country on earth to proclaim Christianity its national religion (in 301 A.D.). Proud that TV detective “Mannix”—Mike Connors, né Krikor Ohanian—was Armenian. Proud that four-time Formula One champion Alain Prost, the main rival of Ayrton Senna, was half-Armenian.

I was also proud of singer Charles Aznavour, California Governor George Deukmejian, artist Arshile Gorky, astrophysicist Viktor Hambartsumian, chess champion Garry Kasparov, financier Kirk Kerkorian, singer Cher (Cherilyn Sarkisian), composer Aram Khachaturian, Russian MiG fighter plane designer Artem Mikoyan, writer William Saroyan, and World War II pilot Anthony Krikorian, my dad. Heck, I was even proud of the creator of The Chipmunks, Ross Bagdasarian.

And, decades before Steve Sarkisian walked a college football sideline, my Uncle Aram revered Notre Dame football coach Ara Parseghian, who led the Fighting Irish to national championships in 1966 and 1973.

Sadly, over the past decade, the image of Los Angeles Armenians has been marred by an increase in criminal activity. In the 1940s, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy told my Uncle Harry that no Armenian was ever in the county jail. Today, there are scores in Men’s Central. (For the record, I was there myself three times.) The Armenian Power street gang is known for credit card fraud and auto thefts.

But it is that hit to our reputation that makes this USC news so welcome.

I’m one of those Armenians who remember Sarkisian from a golden period of Trojan football. In the early 2000s, when USC was dominating college football and its head coach Pete Carroll was showered with praise, my cousin Dave and I knew the real reason. The offensive coach was Armenian. To us, Carroll was a figurehead. The real star of the sidelines was his assistant, Sarkisian.

Of course, not all Armenians see this the same way. Shant Ohanian, a lawyer and UCLA alumnus, points out some chinks in Sarkisian’s Armenian armor. “It’s funny, as soon as Sarkisian’s hire was announced, you saw all over Facebook Armenians, especially USC students and fans, celebrating the hire—not necessarily as a USC fan, but more as a ‘fellow’ Armenian,” said the self-described “die-hard UCLA fan” as he started slinging Bruin-tipped arrows. “Many, however, don’t know Sarkisian’s Armenian background; it’s mostly his Armenian last name that matters. I don’t think Steve Sarkisian himself speaks a word of Armenian; his father is an Iranian-Armenian who immigrated to the USA when he was 18. He married his wife, Steve’s mother, who is Irish-American. Steve was born in Torrance.”

Ohanian went on, “Nevertheless, as soon as he has some success with USC, you will see more and more Armenians claiming him as one of their own.”

Ohanian was married just five weeks ago to Silva Sevlian. I went to their wedding at the St. Leon Armenian Cathedral in Burbank. For their honeymoon, I gave them my list of places they should see in Paris. They had a lovely time. A fairytale wedding followed by a dream of a honeymoon. But this week, with the announcement of Sarkisian as the new Trojan head coach, that honeymoon seemed over.

Silva went to USC and didn’t like Shant’s even slight criticisms of the new coach.

“My husband’s opinion doesn’t matter. He is nothing but a Bruin,” said Silva. “Sarkisian becoming coach is second only to an Armenian becoming the mayor of Los Angeles.”

The post You Hear About Sarkisian? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s not to say that SC fans don’t care about the UCLA game; of course we do. They’re our “noisy neighbors” (to borrow the moniker that Sir Alex Ferguson, legendary former coach of the English Premier League soccer franchise Manchester United, bestowed on their local rival, Manchester City). Lose to UCLA, and SC fans can expect to hear about it from the tens of thousands of Angelenos who regularly attend UCLA games. My wife, an SC alum who’s not much of a football fan, only cares if SC beats UCLA so she doesn’t have to hear about it from acquaintances.

But that’s the limitation of the SC-UCLA rivalry, and of any local fight in this global city: It’s only the neighbors who care.

And, for the past generation, it’s been hard for anyone but the most passionate football fans to care, since the games have rarely been close. UCLA owned the rivalry in the 1990s and was undefeated from 1991 to 1998. SC has dominated since 1999, going 12-2 until last year (two of those wins have been vacated by penalty of the NCAA). In seven of the last 12 games, SC has won by more than 20 points. Last year, UCLA won by 10. In the entertainment capital of the world, a rivalry has to produce close, entertaining games to be truly great.

The rivalry also isn’t as physically close as it once was. Until 1982, when UCLA relocated to the Rose Bowl, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum served as both teams’ home stadium, despite being essentially across the street from the USC campus. The shared home turf spawned the tradition of both schools wearing their home uniforms in the game. Although an NCAA rule change halted that tradition, it restarted a few years ago when the schools agreed to ignore the rule.

But UCLA hasn’t won at the Coliseum (the site of this year’s game) since 1997. The last time the teams met at the Coliseum, SC blew out the Bruins. Instead of wearing their home colors, UCLA wore “special” all-white uniforms. Apparently they took the surrender color seriously, capitulating 50-0.

That game reminded me why it’s hard to take UCLA seriously as a rival. The Bruins have a great basketball tradition, but little of that enthusiasm spills over to football. UCLA has a band but not much of a student section. The Bruins couldn’t even fill the Rose Bowl for last week’s pivotal game against Arizona State University. That’s understandable—their stadium is 27 miles from their campus—but the smaller crowds mean less energy for UCLA football, and for our rivalry. SC, on the other hand, is overflowing with the tradition and trappings of college football: “Fight On,” the horse known as Traveler who runs on the USC sidelines, our band playing “Conquest,” two-fingered victory salutes, the drum major planting the sword in the field, the fourth quarter lighting of the Olympic torch at the Coliseum. And then there’s the tradition on the field: SC has played in 31 Rose Bowl games—the reward for the Pac 12 conference champions—on New Year’s Day. UCLA hasn’t played in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day since January 1, 1999.

So who is SC’s biggest rival? I say Notre Dame. The Trojans have played the Fighting Irish more times than they’ve played the Bruins. The SC-Notre Dame rivalry is national, not local. It is college football’s greatest (and really only) inter-sectional rivalry. And Notre Dame has the sort of college football tradition that makes it a serious rival for USC. While UCLA won a national championship in the ’50s and even managed a Heisman Trophy in the ’60s, that record pales in comparison to Notre Dame. Notre Dame won 13 national championships (SC claims 11) and seven Heisman trophies (SC has six).

My view of relative weakness of the UCLA rivalry isn’t universal. I’m sure there are some SC fans who care more about beating our noisy neighbors, if only to silence them. And I don’t want to create an impression that I don’t care if SC wins or loses against UCLA on Saturday. I care deeply. But in that bleak and boring eight-month stretch known as the college football off-season, the pain of having lost to Notre Dame this year will far outweigh any satisfaction gained by our recent string of victories this season. Even a win over UCLA won’t dull the ache of that defeat in South Bend in October. It’s the kind of pain that only your biggest rival can inflict.

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