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Sore Winners
By MALE PATTERN FITNESS | April 3, 2007
I haven't had many chances to celebrate championships. In all my years of playing sports, I was only on one team that won anything. That was my senior year in high school, when our football team won the conference championship. I remember celebrating in the usual way, by getting drunk. Unfortunately, I threw up after I got home. Even worse, I didn't come close to making it to the bathroom. (My older brother cleaned up the mess, and for that alone should be eligible for sainthood.)
As a fan, my favorite team has four championships in my lifetime: 1964 (when I was seven), 1967, 1982, and 2006. The only one I publicly celebrated was in 1982, when I was in downtown St. Louis, watching the climactic Game Seven in a bar that was less than a mile from the stadium. The post-game scene was both giddy and weird. Everyone out on the streets that night was smiling and shaking hands with everyone else. Race, politics, social class, hygiene -- nothing seemed to matter at the moment.
Given that experience, I've never understood why fans of winning teams feel compelled to riot. But I guess that says more about me, and perhaps about my hometown, than it does about typical sports fans:
A Cardiff University team quizzed 197 male rugby supporters going in and out of the city's Millennium Stadium.
They found those who had seen their team win or draw were more aggressive than those who had seen their team lose or had been questioned before the game.
Researchers said fans may get caught up by the euphoria of a win and lose perspective, increasing aggression.
I love that polite, nonjudgmental choice of words: "lose perspective." As in, "When I robbed a convenience store, beat five innocent people unconscious, and then set that police car on fire, I seem to have lost perspective."
The reason why fans lose perspective after their team's victory is both obvious and oft-cited:
"It is known that winning causes an increase in testosterone, which has been associated -- although far from established -- to increases in aggression."
I guess I just didn't have enough in me to make me think of looting.
That's not the only testosterone news this week. At the opposite end of the age spectrum is this:
Researchers monitored the amount of nighttime sleep for 12 healthy men, ages 64 to 74, and then measured their morning testosterone levels.
The study found that the amount of sleep was an independent predictor of the men's total and free testosterone levels in the morning.
"The results of the study raise the possibility that older men who obtain less actual sleep during the night have lower blood testosterone levels in the morning," study author Dr. Plamen Penev said in a prepared statement.
This does have some interesting implications, since we also know that poor sleep is associated with an increase in diabetes risk. But when we look at it side-by-side with the first story, we get a clear-eyed picture of the adult male's rise and fall:
1. Soccer hooligan
2. Work, marriage, kids, stress, more work, more stress
3. You'd rather sleep than have sex.
The more you think about it, the more you realize this isn't as crazy as it once seemed.
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