Everybody wants to be the underdog

by David Benjamin

“All through grade school, I had seen the tall, the strong, the swift, the comely, the bright and affluent among my peers reap notice, bask in praise and collect loving cups while the rest of us gleaned consolation from the crumbs at their feet. We lived by the motto, “Nice try.” Without the words to express it, most kids sense that it isn’t just the victory that goes to the anointed. The chances to win at all are preemptively portioned out to a chosen few, to the kids who get picked first and promoted to the head of the line.” 

― David Benjamin, from The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked

MADISON, Wis. — Once, at a reading of my book, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, a conspicuous latecomer squeezed into the second row and fixed me in a gaze that seemed vaguely menacing. As I droned away, I started worrying about the question-and-answer period and what might be eating this very large guy. 

As soon as I opened the floor, he was on his feet. For a second, I pictured him vaulting a row of chairs and going for my throat. Instead, he broke into a grin, brandished his copy and declared, “This book is about me!” He went on, gushing about how I had evoked the trials and humiliations of his childhood. This was a disorienting outburst. I had written about a shy, scrawny, perilously cerebral and chronically unpopular white kid in rural Wisconsin. Here was an urban Black guy, burly, outspoken, taller than me by at least a foot and, simply by virtue of the space he took up, intimidating. Yet, he was, he said, my alter ego. He unraveled a tale of being the awkward fat kid bullied and shunned by his own gang of grade-school alpha males, pushed outside, left alone looking in. 

Even before this incident, I’d heard lots of similar testimony. Typically, a reader would corner me and confess that he — or she! — was “the last kid picked.” By and by, inevitably, the math started to puzzle me. In any group of kids choosing up to play a game, the last kid picked must represent, at best, a sixth or an eighth of the total kid pool. In regulation baseball, all the last kids picked in America would come to 5.5 percent of the kid population — and they’d all be stuck in right field. Nonetheless, despite the logical rarity of really being the last kid picked, the overwhelming majority of readers I’ve met insist on their lastness.

Moreover, many of the downtrodden nostalgics who profess this kinship with my last kid tend to be women. Now, because I’d grown up mainly as a boy, I wrote about boys, in the mid-century Midwest, hunting and fishing, playing two-line soccer and two-hand-touch passball, marbles, pom-pom pollaway and sandlot baseball. We didn’t play with girls. We wouldn’t have allowed one if she’d asked. I never saw a girl doing any of this stuff. Yet, in bookshops and libraries, women come up to me, wave my book and insist, “That was me!”

What’s really going on here?

The intuitive implication is that we tend to love our feisty little benchwarmers so much that, to identify with one, we’ll deny our gender, forsake our social status and hide our trophies. Perhaps ever since Minutemen with flintlocks defied and defeated the tall, handsome, rich and fashionable redcoats, Americans have been rooting for the underdog — so much that we all want to see ourselves as Ragged Dick and Rocky Balboa, even when the image waxes absurd. 

Our president, for example, is a silver-spoon bully who attended private academies, had someone else take his SATs so he could finagle his way into the Ivy League, bribed a podiatrist to keep him out of ’Nam and started out in business with only $413,000,000 of his dad’s money. Yet he’s desperate for us to see him as poor, poor and pitiful, put upon from pillar to post and pilloried by a press mob whose hatred has rendered him the greatest underdog anyone has ever seen, in the history of the cruel, cruel world.

“No politician in history,” he whined, “and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly.”

As this weird statement indicates, there are rich people, apparently many of them, who possess everything the world’s underdogs do not have — everything except humiliation, rejection and misery. But, they want that, too. 

I found myself studying this strange appetite — for the illusion of abuse — while I was editor of an English-language magazine in Tokyo. In my job, I fielded a steady flow of Letters to the Editor from expatriates aggrieved by their harsh treatment at the hands of natives. A large contingent of Tokyo’s gaijin community consists of young, affluent white Americans who happened to be our most reliable readership. This group, refugees from bucolic suburbs like Westchester and Lake Forest, were hypersensitive to what are now called “micro-aggressions” perpetrated against them by the occasional Japanese prankster. 

I understood why they felt ill-treated. I’d been in their shoes, sort of. For instance, one day at the Japan Rail Ebisu station, I was standing on a nearly empty platform, close to the edge where the train would stop. A rotund little lady — old enough to remember preparations to fight the U.S. GIs with broomsticks, followed by A-bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and seven years of Occupation rule by Douglas MacArthur — was approaching. She’d been walking exactly in the middle of the platform ’til she spotted me, all tall (compared to her) and Caucasian. As I watched in the corner of my eye, she altered her trajectory, steered toward me and, as she passed, thumped me in the back with an elbow. Then she shuffled back to mid-platform. She said nothing. I couldn’t do anything but smile.

However, my younger gaijin fellows tended not to be amused. They preferred to seethe with melodramatic rage over these odd spasms of geriatric payback. They were likewise miffed when groups of schoolkids, spotting them as obvious foreigners, went all giggly and shouted “Harro!” (hello). The insult here was being singled out, although genially, as turds in the homogeneous Asian punchbowl. 

They had not, as Mona Lisa Vito might say, “blended.” This set them not only apart, but below. The bourgeois expats of Tokyo had joined, at long last, a minority who — if they stretched the point — could style itself as “oppressed.” After a lifetime of prep school and privilege, they had attained an underdog status that, back home, had been exclusive to the Black folks, tomato-pickers and white trash with whom they had never associated. They could complain, for the only time in their lives, about discrimination, mockery and even physical attacks by vengeful golden-agers and raucous third-graders. 

I made fun of these crocodile tears, an attitude that got me crosswise with my twenty-something peers and fired by my politically correct publisher. Here was yet another of life’s humiliations, from which I formed a slightly clearer perception of the true underdog — who doesn’t bellyache, partly because he’s resigned to his degradation but mostly because, well, who would listen? One of the tells of the underdog is that he has no friends or, at least, none who aren’t fellow outcasts.

The underdog, as I explained in my book, finds refuge in a self-crafted mythology, a secret romance with his lonely exclusion. For example, as his default role model, my Last Kid Picked protagonist (along with half the other boys in America) chose a TV hero played by Richard Boone in Have Gun, Will Travel. Assuming the appropriate air of juvenile melodrama, I wrote:

“… What we knew was that each of us was a Paladin in his soul. We lived in the apparent comfort of home and hearth (well, furnace), just as Paladin occupied the opulence of Frisco’s fanciest hotel. But at a moment’s notice, we each might be cast (metaphorically) into the snarling wilderness, thrown from our horse, disarmed and bleeding from a bullet in our thigh, drinking only the bitter water we could suck from a barrel cactus, shaking a fist at the circling vultures and stalked by villains so merciless that no ordinary lawman dared stand up to them … Every kid I ever knew was ‘a knight without armor in a savage land.’…”