There’s something daring about rooting for the underdog. You’ve chosen to support the one who will likely lose. You’ve opened yourself to disappointment and heartache, hoping for a victory few think will happen. Even though the selection of winners is hardly ever objective and not always fair, it usually takes a blend of hard work, talent, and luck to land yourself a victory. In real life, most of us root for those who have such qualities in spades (I’m looking at you, Yankees!).
We, however, prefer when our fictional characters are faced with impossible odds: the hearing daughter of deaf parents dreaming of becoming a singer (CODA), the son of a coal miner yearning to enter the Royal Ballet School (Billy Elliot), the—considered past her prime, yikes!—20-year-old daughter of an irresponsible nobleman seeking to marry someone who’ll love and respect her (Pride and Prejudice). We wholeheartedly root for underdog characters, knowing they’ll prevail in the end. At least in the comedies and feel-good dramas they populate.
But what happens when you have no choice but to root for a real-life underdog? Particularly when you love that underdog with all your being and don’t want them to have unrealistic expectations that will be crushed if (when!?!) they lose. But, of course, you don’t want them to abandon the hope of winning either because, underdogs that they are, there’s a slim chance they will. This is the conundrum my husband Nate and I found ourselves in when our nine-year-old son Santiago and his Wyland Elementary teammates won an award that qualified them for the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals.
What is Odyssey of the Mind, you ask? I took a stab at explaining it on my first post about the Wyland team, but I understand it better now. Odyssey is an international organization (12 countries attended World Finals) that teaches children and teens to hone their scientific, storytelling, problem-solving, and performance skills by working in teams to complete two kinds of challenges. The long-term challenge includes creating some mechanical object that completes a number of very specific tasks they must work into a skit that team members write and perform on a set while wearing costumes, everything made from recycled materials. For the second challenge—called spontaneous—the teams are given a surprise task. They then have one minute to ask questions and plan their approach and eight minutes to complete it.
Everyone I talked to after we made the twelve-hour(!) drive to Iowa State University’s campus had been going to Worlds for years. One of our Pennsylvania teams had been around since kindergarten. They were now high school seniors who went on to win first place in their category at Worlds—their joy overwhelming and contagious. There are schools where Odyssey is a class you take, working on your project with your teacher every day during the school year. Our beloved coach Ann worked with our team in her living room. Ann and her son Josh had gone to Worlds last year (and, as expected for beginners, their team hadn’t placed very high). Besides the two of them, everyone in the Wyland team had never done this before. Hell, Nate and I had never even heard of Odyssey until last fall.
Our novice-ness became ominously clear when we watched the skits from the New York teams competing in our category. Their props and costumes might not be Broadway-ready, but Off-Broadway? Yup! Pretty much. Their skits featured protagonists who learned big lessons and villains who got their due, and their scripts were brimming with expertly delivered puns that had us all in stitches. Wyland’s props were wonderful, but our costumes suffered from an overreliance on our yellow team-uniform t-shirts. And our skit stopped making sense two-thirds of the way through, much like the other skits we’d seen at State Finals.
This was Worlds, though, and we were outmatched. But… like all underdogs we had something going for us in the remote-control car the kids had built in Ann’s living room—How? I have no clue—but its wheels worked separately, and it nimbly completed the byzantine tasks required for their challenge. Our team was also made of caring children whose skills complemented each other, and they worked beautifully together and thought well on their feet. We were outmatched, but not out. Not quite. Not yet.
Maybe you already know how it ends. Maybe you don’t. Either way, here’s our real-life underdog journey:
Unearthed Photo
One of my most formative underdog experiences was co-founding a digital peer-reviewed journal with a group of fellow grad students while getting my PhD at Purdue University. We spent years (literally) meeting weekly as we debated possible journal names, article word limits, and what in the world should go on our website’s footer. It was like simultaneously getting a second PhD, but this time we were our own professors. Even if, like Team Wyland, we had talents that complemented each other, we were still stumbling around in the dark. It’s terrifying enough for grad students to submit their work to peer-reviewed journals. Let alone come up with their own journal from scratch.
In this 2012 photo, we’re celebrating the launch of our journal, which was the brainchild of Josh Prenosil (second from the right, cowboy hat, sheriff badge). I remember we took a portrait in regular clothes, but Josh wanted this goofy one too. In it, I am a fairy holding my eldest son William (who came to every meeting, first inside my body and then in person). It’s the version we ended up using to announce the launch. And it worked. We weren’t pretending to be established. The journal came from grad students who donned dalmatian hats and feather boas—and it (improbably perhaps) was here to stay. Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society is now on its 9th volume and 27th Issue. Ah, the power of the underdog.
Learning from Hard Goodbyes
In 2016, I stepped down from my role as a Present Tense editor to co-found a second peer-reviewed journal, constellations: a cultural rhetorics publishing space. In “The Mass Exodus: Why People Are Leaving Academia and What We Can Learn from Their Stories,” a conversation I moderated on constellations, Sonia Arellano, Will Kurlinkus, and Caitlan Spronk explain why they chose to walk away from the Ivory Tower. Caitlan (front row, high-heeled boots in the Present Tense launch photo) is one of my dearest friends and a fellow Present Tense co-founder. She bid academia farewell during grad school, while Sonia and Will put years into professorships that didn’t value them back before they decided to leave. I hope this piece can be a (partial, of course) map to guide us as we continue to transform our profession so that, in the future, brilliant people like Caitlan, Sonia, and Will can have satisfying academic careers. Tough assignment, yes, but as I’ve been discussing in this post, tough doesn’t have to mean impossible.
Stories that Transfixed Me (and May Transfix You)
Thank You For Listening by Julia Whelan
In this irresistible novel, an actress loses an eye and pivots, becoming an audiobook narrator instead. She then meets a “notorious rake” at a bar in Vegas. He’s Irish, witty, and oh so mischievous. They part the next morning, trusting they’ll never see each other again. But… you’ll have to read the book to find out how that sentence concludes. It sounds over the top, but it isn’t. Not at all. Julie Whelan (a former actor turned book narrator and author) unspools a tale that is equal parts mesmerizing and profound as it explores loss, reinvention, and the creative process.
The Idea of You by Michael Showalter
Like (I’m guessing) many of you, I fell in love with Anne Hathaway in The Princess Diaries. I was surprised the star who played the film’s ordinary-teen-turned-royal is now old enough to play a 40-year-old divorced mother who strikes up a romance with a much younger boy-band superstar (Nicholas Galitzine). Time passes quickly, particularly when you’re watching a delightful film where an actor you’ve seen grow up on screen gives love another chance. It’s a fun and sexy romantic comedy with a backbone that makes you think deeply about aging, motherhood, and the cost of celebrity.
Copyedited by Natalie Cohen