Misunderstood Philip Rivers was hate for the wrong reasons
Philip Rivers was not loved beyond the tribal borders of Charger fandom.
He was respected as a competitor, yes, but his Byzantine legacy suggests the mediation of a doppelgänger; a fake Rivers who drowns puppies, steals from the offering basket during mass, and never lets one of his nine children win in a game of H-O-R-S-E.
Casual viewers misunderstood Rivers for a variety of reasons: trash talk, complaining with the officials, contraceptive rejectamenta, fumbled snaps, and interceptions all fed, like tributaries, into the Rivers Hate.
If you were to ask them they would tell you rooting against him was easy because he came off like such a cry baby. Cry me a Rivers.
He never played in a Super Bowl. He didn’t star in any commercials or launch his own line of craft ciders. He never sang backup for Huey Lewis and the News, or, if you prefer, Brad Paisley.
When the Chargers relocated to Los Angeles the idea of Phil going Hollywood was as laughable as the their first attempts to ingratiate themselves to their new digs.
How different would we view Rivers if he had spent the last seventeen seasons quarterbacking for the Dallas Cowboys? For America’s Team. Would we celebrate his folksy charm as a pitchman in an endless rotation of commercials?
Would Dadgummit be a household word?
In Dallas, Rivers’ patented gun-slinging, trash talkin’, homespun Southern propriety would stoke the embers of nostalgia in the same way Roy Rodgers films must when they pop up on Turner Classic Movies. Why deny that that idyllic goodness inherent to Philip Rivers, whether real or imagined, evokes the way Americans want to be perceived.
He is the boy scout accepting a plate of cookies; blushing uncomfortably in the neighbor’s praise because, after all, he would have rescued her cat out of the tree anyway — beacause it was the right thing to do. Gaaaaaaw-lee!
Perhaps because we are inundated by negative energies and apocalyptic prophecies (the siren’s lull of doom-scrolling), the temptation then, is to aggrandize the minutia. Whether it be plastic in the oceans, affordable health care, or the Russian provocation in Ukraine, to call attention to it nowadays entails suggesting that if we don’t discuss it soon then the Republic will surely crumble.
The sky is always falling.
This exercise in hand wringing takes place perpetually in sports. Player empowerment. Tanking. Television contracts. Fan violence. Twitter beef. Madden rankings. Hold outs. Hold ins. Kneeling.
In the most idealized sense, sports should serve to educate us on how to cope with both winning and losing, without becoming antisocial.
They are games, after all. Though it has become hard to tell sometimes.
How crudely must we treat one another in cheering our side on? Does the hero’s existence demand the creation of a heel? Jackson Mahomes presents a cloying sideshow, but is he enough of a reason to hate on his brother Patrick?
As a functional barometer for gauging societal anxieties, Sportsmanship, and spectator etiquette, have been launching think pieces since we started charging admission.
Surely those first Olympics were followed by a stringent oratory on how the Mycenaean contingent overindulged in their wine sacks before sleeping it off under a parapet reserved for olive and fig merchants who lost thousands of drachmae when forced to relocate without notice.
2023 is no different. It’s a show on ESPN called First Take; a baseless takedown from Emmanuel Acho; a cherry-picked stat from a sports betting account. Who cares if zero context is given or that the argument does not hold up? As Harrison Ford says in the DIAL OF DESTINY, “ It’s not what you believe, it’s how hard you believe it.”
Uncredited photo courtesy of the NFL and the LA Chargers
Tribalism is having a moment.
Marvel and DC. Pro Life and Pro Choice. Cowboys and Indians, or Commanders is what they’re going by now. Globalists and Nationalists. Omnivores and Vegans. Mac People. PC People.
Affirmation of LeBron James is synonymous with the denigration of Michael Jordan.
Chargers receiver Keenan Allen praised Justin Herbert for staying after practice to continue to throwing routes. When reporters asked Allen why he was chuckling to himself he said, “Philip never stayed after a practice to throw the ball.”
Allen was being honest, but you can already see how the internet would transform that small praise into clickbait. Keenan Allen Has Hilarious Admission About Philip Rivers.
You can’t even give someone a compliment without throwing collateral shade.
Culturally partitioned lines are everywhere these days — even amongst our own fan base.
We craft hermetic bubbles or ‘followings’ on X, the platform previously known as Twitter, to nod in agreement with, and we troll outsiders with pointed barbs to elicit an emotional response; taking pleasure in the more ire we stoke; the sorer the wound, the closer it must be to the heart of it!
We see the world through a strange relationship of how much, or how little, anger a subject will invoke.
The uglier an exchange becomes the more entertaining to devour. Going viral is last remaining communal dream.
I don’t know if Philip Rivers was polarizing or not, but fans of the Chargers would agree that he was certainly misunderstood. The Rivers Hate mystifies us; our tribe still bristles at the disrespect.
For Charger fans the questioning of his Hall of Fame candidacy is moot. (And better left for 4K words at a later date.) What interests me more are the lies we’ve told ourselves to fuel our grievances.
Haters gonna hate. Isn’t that what they say?
The Philip Rivers caricature arose from traits that deviated from the classical portrait of a quarterback such as stoicism, dignified airs, and the general appearance of having been there before.
The idea of being so wrong in their attempts to quantify leadership through personality reminds me of another quarterback maligned for not fitting into the mold, but there will be plenty of time to examine him at a later date.
“When I got in the National Football League I hated the guy.” said Von Miller, who began his career with the Denver Broncos. “I thought he cried too much.”
Looking back, it probably stems from a December 24th game against the Denver Broncos in 2007. Played on a Monday night before a national audience, the game did not make for compelling television.
The viral moment that stuck in the collective memory was Philip sending some charitable holiday wishes across the field to the Broncos after they failed to convert on a 4th-down late in the game.
No sideline microphones captured the exchange, so fans were left to fill in the blanks themselves.
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