The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"

My dad remembers when “Hang on Sloopy” (Apple Music, Spotify) first became a thing. This was in October 1965, just after the McCoys’ record hit #1 in the single charts. He says the Ohio State marching band had played an arrangement of the song at halftime earlier in the year, to muted applause. Three weeks later, the Buckeyes were back in Ohio Stadium, bogged down in a defensive struggle with Minnesota. The home team had the football and were trailing in the 4th quarter. The band played a short snippet of “Sloopy” on the sideline between plays, and Ohio State converted a third down. The crowd cheered. The band played “Sloopy” again. The line surged, the crowd roared—another first down. Well, this is working. Let’s keep doing it. From the top then: “Sloopy.” Ball snapped, chains moving, fans losing their minds.

Left for dead on a Saturday afternoon in the days of grainy black and white, the Buckeyes rose up. Band, team, and fans rallied around a shared swell of belief: we can win this. Argue correlation vs. causation all you want, but as Richard Abruzzi tells it, The Best Damn Band in the Land Sloopied the team down the field to set up the winning score that day. Ohio State 11, Minnesota 10. The rest is history.

So let’s talk some more about home, letting drop for now What We’ve Left Behind in favor of What We Keep with Us. There is so much to stand for here, so much to be proud of—so much to, well, hang on to. I should be be clear: I don’t mean this to be all about sports. It’s just that for at least the last fifty years, and probably longer (I only know from 1973), sports has been the most regular and socially acceptable way to express regional pride. Ohioans want to dunk on the South? You could compare literacy and teen pregnancy rates, or talk about how Ohio-born William Tecumseh Sherman set their biggest and best city on fire because they soooooo had it coming. But the safer play by far is to remind them of 85 Yards Through the Heart of the South.

Bama fans don’t need ChatGPT to frame their own killer response to this: Ohio State’s overall record against Alabama and the SEC more broadly is putrid. And we have to eat that.

But this gets to the core of what it means to be from Ohio. The victories don’t come on the regular. The weather isn’t fair, the officiating looks hella sketchy, and all too often you’re hanging on to hope, imagining the improbable ways you can still pull out a win, while the clock runs down to zero. And for those who might be inclined to read this too literally, I’ll clarify: I am most emphatically not talking just about sports here. For those of us who hail from the Rust Belt, victory has a habit of hanging in the air just out of reach. But you still strive for it, because that’s what you’ve been taught. Try and try and try again, and if you ever succeed—if it takes seventy-five years or more (talking about sports again: try and keep up)—it will mean so much more to you than if you’re from … I dunno, just grabbing an example out of the air here: Boston, Massachusetts.

The 39 championship banners hanging in Terminal C of Logan Airport should outrage any fair-minded human being whose soul has not been corrupted by Boston sports fandom. It’s only slightly less distasteful that they hang over the security line for outbound passengers, rather than in baggage claim, where they could really stick it to out-of-town arrivals. Could be the intention here is to make life just a bit easier on the TSA staff, by reminding all the traveling Massholes—who at least while in the airport actually have good reason to be grumpy as hell—about The Good Things in Life. But for those of us whose loyalties lie elsewhere, this snarky chorus of banners seems to ask: “Are you sure you want to fly out and leave all the riches behind?”

Hell, yeah, I do. I’m taking JetBlue to Cleveland this morning, so I can watch My Beloved Guardians try to score more than two stinking runs in a baseball game.

I’m coming up on 25 years living in the Boston area, and thus far I have held my ground. I still walk among the native-born New Englanders here as an alien and an insurgent. Oh, there’s tons to love about New England, for sure: the history, the universities, the (largely) sensible politics, the furniture stores with IMAX theaters in them … I could go on. But I don’t need to puff Boston up any more than it already is. My point is, as much as I love it here, I have not adopted the sports teams and I won’t call it home. My loyalties lie elsewhere, and as long as I live in the 617, I can and will remain stubbornly committed to The Resistance.

Some markers through the years:

• October 1998. Wrapped head to toe in Cleveland Indians regalia, I am chased by angry Sox fans up Commonwealth Avenue to the Red Line train after a playoff game in Fenway. (I very nearly collide with Sen. Edward Kennedy rounding off the sidewalk into the Harvard Club.)

• Spring 2001. I vigorously contest a traffic ticket, declaring my right, as a transplanted student, to carry an Ohio driver’s license. The court clerk shuts me down and I pay the fine, but not without inscribing further words of protest on the memo line of the check.

• September 2007. I begin the practice of carrying my infant kid into day care like he was a sousaphone, singing “Le Regiment” (Apple Music, Spotify), the march TBDBITL plays when it performs “Script Ohio.”

• Opening Day, 2013. The propagandists in Butler Elementary give the students pictures of Wally the Green Monster to color. My first-grader draws a big red X over Wally, flips the page over and draws instead a picture of “SDRBL CBERA”—that is, Asdrubal Cabrera, then the Indians’ shortstop.

• October 10, 2016. Cleveland closes out the ALDS against Boston, ending David Ortiz’s career. We drive up through the Back Bay blasting “Cleveland Rocks” (Apple Music, Spotify) out of open car windows. (Returning to form, the Indians would succumb to the Cubs—the fucking Cubs—in a seven-game World Series.)

Growing up in Ohio will make you an incorrigible underdog. We are proud not because we are winning, because usually we aren’t. We are proud because we keep playing. You can say what you like about Sisyphus rolling that rock up the hill, and really, Vegas should have suspended the betting by now. But these rubes from Ohio keep coming in and putting their money down on him. And why wouldn’t they? Dude has displayed such strength of character over the past half-eternity …

The Michael Stanley Band was Northeast Ohio’s contribution to heartland rock in the early 1980s. I mean, they actually named one of their albums Heartland. In 1983, a year before Born in the U.S.A., MSB released “My Town” (Apple Music, Spotify). I was going on ten years old, and I felt a kind of wonder and pride as the song climbed the Billboard singles charts. I had spent the last two years watching alien beings from far-flung locales perform on MTV; it hadn’t occurred to me that rock music could come from just up the road. (Nobody had told me Devo was from Akron. This would be a shock later.) But the Michael Stanley Band wore its Cleveland on its sleeve, and never more so than in “My Town”:

This old town’s been home long as I remember. East side, west side, give up or surrender. Been down but I still rock on. This town is my town, all right? Love or hate it, it don’t matter. ’Cause I’m gonna stand and fight.

It ain’t Springsteen, or even John Cougar, with or without the Mellencamp. But there’s a strong message here—something to rally around, and one that sits in real tension with the views Chrissie H. expressed last week. I’m a lawyer, and moreover I have attained the wisdom that comes with middle age, so I am able to hold two conflicting ideas in my head at the same time. I can write last week’s post and this one, too. Don’t ask me to pick a lane.

Here’s a thought experiment: suppose the Ohio State Marching Band had played “Louie Louie” (Apple Music, Spotify) at halftime on October 9, 1965. Would snatches of “Louie Louie” have lifted the team on its final drive, three weeks later? Would “Louie Louie” be the official song of the State of Ohio, a half-century later?

I’m skeptical. For all “Louie” and “Sloopy” have in common musically, “Hang on Sloopy” carries a very particular sentiment that resonates with Ohioans.

Consider the first line: Sloopy lives in a very bad part of town. And everybody, yeah, tries to put my Sloopy down.

It’s a well-known fact across America that the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969. This information has propagated across the decades and generations because people can’t stop talking about it. What’s not generally known is that at various times the Rouge River, the Buffalo River, and the Schuylkill River were burning, too. For some reason, though, smug folks always have something to say about our neck of the woods, and too often without any provocation:

Now consider the next line: Sloopy, I don’t care what your daddy do. ’Cause you know, Sloopy, yeah: I’m in love with you.

And this is the crux of it. Talk all the shit you want about Ohio. Lay it all at our feet, and see what it does for you. We’ve heard it all before, and still every last one of us will flip a table over and yell I-O!!! the minute a stranger in a Block-O hat utters the O-H prompt. Wherever we are, we find one another, and we show our solidarity.

One result of the state’s half-century of decline is that Ohioans are everywhere now. And for this you should be thankful. We’re some of the kindest, friendliest, most reliable and loyal people you’ll ever meet. If you’ve got something to celebrate, we’ll be there lighting the candle. More importantly, if you’re up against it and you’re questioning yourself, we know what that’s about, too—and we’ll be there to listen, to help, and if need be, to build you up. In my life thus far I’ve been lucky not to have faced very much adversity. But I take comfort knowing that if—when—That Other Shoe even drops, I’ve got enough Ohioan in me, and enough Ohioans in my life, that I’ll be able to pull through that adversity.

Being a underdog isn’t the worst thing in the world. You can take pride in it, draw strength from it, and find real joy in it. If you don’t think so, come to the Horseshoe or Progressive Field and wait for the band or the PA to play “Hang on Sloopy.” See how tens of thousands of us Ohio underdogs respond.