A Lion-Less Thanksgiving: Being an American Sports Fan in India

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When I woke up in Ambaji, Gujarat on Friday, November 24, I couldn’t help reaching for my phone to check the Detroit Lions score. Even though I was looking up the Lions’ score, I wasn’t particularly interested in the result. I would be no more happy if the Lions won or lost. Nonetheless, I felt compelled to see the result.

The Detroit Lions are a professional American football team that plays in the National Football League (NFL). The Lions have hosted an annual football game on the American holiday of Thanksgiving since 1934, with the exception of a break for six years during World War II (Archer and Woodyard, 2023).

As a person who has never eaten turkey on Thanksgiving, the traditional centrepiece of a Thanksgiving dinner, Thanksgiving has been marked by two things for me: family time and football. On Thanksgiving day (Thursday, November 23), I had spoken with my family before my Thanksgiving dinner, a Gujarati thali at the hotel in Ambaji. But, for the first time in 23 years, I hadn’t watched any football on Thanksgiving. For the first time in 23 years, I hadn’t watched the Lions play football on Thanksgiving. I had to see for myself that the Lions had lost. I had to mark the passing of Thanksgiving 2023.

An Indian Cricket Fan Is Born

Before I left for India, my Dad jokingly assigned me the task of explaining cricket to him by the time I returned to America. I knew that the world’s largest cricket stadium, Narendra Modi Stadium, was in my new home city of Ahmedabad, that cricket involved batting a ball, and that unlike baseball there was not any foul territory. Beyond that, my knowledge of cricket was pretty much non-existent. Learning cricket was a worthy side-project for my Fellowship term.

Our Orientation week was perfectly timed for this side-project. It coincided with the beginning of the 50/50 ICC Men’s World Cup. Learning the rules of cricket from Indian members of the Fellowship cohort who patiently explained overs, wickets, fours, and sixes to me was a fun way to connect. It also enabled a familiar activity: scoreboard watching. There was something comfortable and familiar about walking around Mehrauli Archaeological Park in Delhi and surreptitiously checking the India-Australia score on my phone to update some of the other fellows.

On the day of the World Cup final, my co-fellow Sydney and I met at Camilo Coffee in Ahmedabad to watch the India-Australia rematch. As it got dark, dozens of people gathered in the café’s seating area. It was the most electric cricket watching environment I had been in in India—the café erupted with each wicket that India took from Australia. Unfortunately, India was denied its storybook ending that night with a cruel loss to Australia after an undefeated World Cup run to the final.

For the weeks of the World Cup, cricket was a vehicle for connecting with colleagues, co-fellows, and hostel-mates who had spent their evenings and weekends doing the same thing as me. When members of a community sit down to cheer on their team, whether it’s a high school team, a national team, or their local professional team, it produces a rare simultaneity and unity in our era of polarization and diffused media content. As cheesy as it sounds, I value how watching cricket has enabled me to feel united as a small, minor part of the Indian community.

Geographical Barriers and Cultural Disconnect

The flipside of connecting to the Indian community through cricket is some disconnect from the sports I usually follow at home. In theory, even with the time change and my lack of a VPN, I could check the score of every NFL or NBA game, watch the highlights on YouTube, and then listen to as much commentary as I wanted. But, living in a place where almost nobody knows or cares about these games, I have almost no interest in doing so.

I also find the time change disorienting for following American sports. Even though it should be a simple calculation, it feels silly to check scores in the mornings or on days of the week where there normally wouldn’t be American football. In the heart of the American football season, the rhythm of watching games if I am free, or surreptitiously checking scores on my phone if I am not, is easy for me—Thursday nights there is an NFL game at night, Saturday has college football throughout the day, Sunday has NFL all day, Monday has an NFL game at night, and the other three days of the week I pretend I have other interests.

I’m not primed to wake up in India on Tuesday morning to check the halftime score of the Monday Night Football game. I’d rather just wait for that day’s 2pm cricket match.

Overcoming Geography

The move to India, however, has had almost no impact on my ability to follow distance running. I know when races are happening, who is running in the races, who won the races, which professional runners are changing teams heading into the 2024 Olympics in Paris, and even rumors about which runners might be about to change teams next. I know all the things a dorky former collegiate cross country and track (athletics) runner with a little bit too much time on their hands would know.

Unlike American football, there is not as predictable of a rhythm to being a distance running fan. There are important races across the globe throughout the year at irregular intervals. It takes effort to even know what races you should be anticipating. Often, you aren’t able to watch a race live even when you know when it is.

I am accustomed to putting in an embarrassing amount of constant effort to follow running when I’m in the US. I follow Citius Mag on Instagram to stay up to date with running news. I watch videos of races and interviews with athletes on YouTube. I listen to the Coffee Club podcast—a weekly podcast hosted by three professional runners. I check LetsRun.com for articles and online forum posts that might be interesting to me. I am up to date on running news now because I’m no less willing to go through that same effort when I am in India.

Conclusion

The effect that moving to India has had on when and how I can and do watch sports will continue to be an adjustment for me. Just as I was unsure what Thanksgiving was without the Detroit Lions, I may feel similarly about Christmas without the NBA, New Year’s day without college football bowl games, and March without the NCAA basketball tournament. It will feel odd because I will feel slightly disconnected from the American community I am accustomed to being a part of.

If there is a lesson in all of this for me, it is to keep in mind that I watch and follow sports because I enjoy it. I had a great Thanksgiving day even without watching football. The Lions will be there next year on Thanksgiving.

Works Cited:
Archer, Todd and Eric Woodyard. “NFL Thanksgiving Games: History, traditions and best moments.” ESPN, 21 Nov. 2023, https://www.espn.in/nfl/story/_/id/32646037/nfl-thanksgiving-day-games-history-lions-cowboys-play-every-year-moments-traditions-records. Accessed 30 November 2023.

About the Author:
Ben is serving as an American India Foundation (AIF) Banyan Impact Fellow with VIKSAT, Nehru Foundation for Development in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. For his Fellowship project, he is developing communication strategies for the successful support of organizational aims through documentation, grant writing, and corporate communications. Ben graduated from Colorado College in 2022 with a degree in History. Ben’s undergraduate thesis “A Legal Genealogy of Descent from Slavery in the British Atlantic to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism” discusses the use of descent in the context of slavery in the British Atlantic, British colonial laws in India, the Constitution of India, and international law’s prohibitions on caste and caste-like forms of discrimination today. While at Colorado College, he received a Keller Family Venture Grant to interview people in Nairobi and Eldoret, Kenya about Kenya’s Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission and the International Criminal Court proceedings that followed post-election ethnic violence in Kenya in 2007-2008. After college, he worked at the civil legal aid organization Montana Legal Services Association as a Montana Eviction Intervention Program Intake Specialist and as an Eviction Prevention Case Navigator. Ben looks forward to advancing VIKSAT, Nehru Foundation for Development’s mission of improving Land and Water Management, Water Sanitation and Hygiene, Sustainable Livelihoods, Institution and Capacity Building, and Environment and Climate Change during his Fellowship term.