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2010: Year of the Underdog

By Gaveliers, The Gavel Media Team, on January 19, 2010 9:02 PM

Brendan Benedict, Editor Opinion -

2009 was a red-letter year for bankers in the red. The thought was that some financial institutions were too big to fail, so it became necessary to prop them up. And so the year became one for the powerful, the top dogs, and the front-runners. Goldman Sachs and a handful of other banks towered above the rubble with newfound profits.While ordinary laborers were struggling to make ends meet, hedge fund managers and day traders cashed record bonus checks. The top dogs triumphed outside of banking: the cash-laden New York Yankees coasted to a 27th World Series win. While 2009 saw the rich get richer, 2010 is a different story – for many reasons, a time that will be remembered as the year of the underdog.

No millionaire celebrity can more visibly personify the underdog than can Conan O’Brien. Tall, geeky, and ginger, he has worked years to get his shot at hosting the Tonight Show. Just seven months into his admittedly subpar ratings, NBC devised a plan to pull the plug on Jay Leno’s primetime show and move the chin to O’Brien’s timeslot, delaying the Tonight Show by thirty minutes. Yet CoCo did not go quietly into the late-night; he resisted with a public statement and gave a scathing critique of NBC’s management in his nightly monologues. The battle lines were drawn: on one side stood a failing network (and like the few powerful banks, deemed too big to fail) propped up by the world’s largest corporation, General Electric, and their restless large-jawed motor enthusiast; on the other side stood the quirky host with a niche audience. An uneven matchup from the start, O’Brien will walk away with millions from the Peacock network instead of having the Tonight Show shelved to tomorrow.

While the Yankees won the World Series having outspent every other team in baseball, their cross-town football counterparts, the New York Jets, have a different history. As a Jets fan, I can hardly begin to express the annual heartache that comes with the team’s strong start and inevitable collapse into mediocrity. Fans share their frustration in their adoring moniker for the team: Same Old Jets, which is strangely fitting to utter at a stadium named for another team. At this season’s start, the organization hired a rookie head coach, who in turn started a rookie quarterback, who in turn shoved the ball into the hands of a rookie running back most of the time. Nobody expected the Jets to be going to the playoffs, not even head coach Rex Ryan, who wrote the team off after their loss to Matt Ryan and the Falcons. But the team persevered, besting Bengals and Bolts to earn a game against the legendary Peyton Manning.

In Massachusetts, for better or for worse, the political underdog is having his day. The Senate seat held by President John F. Kennedy and for 47 years by his brother Ted Kennedy, in the most heavily Democratic state in the nation, is suddenly within reach by Republican candidate Scott Brown. Democrats are pouring time and resources to defend a seat that used to be won with 40-point margins – President Barack Obama himself paid a visit on Sunday. For better or for worse, the election shows that even the strongest bastion of the front-runner is prey to siege by the underdog in 2010.

These stories of the disadvantaged are merely pop, politics, and sport – nothing compared to the tragedy in Haiti. The country long plagued by poverty and political instability now has Mother Nature as an enemy. The earthquake ravages the people of Haiti but that does not stop them from rebuilding and recovering. When loved ones are missing, the searching begins. When their churches have been wrecked, they take to the streets in prayer. And the message to Haiti from the Obama administration is supportive, “We’re pulling for you.” Americans love an underdog and the nation’s generosity is our way of cheering them on. We want to see Haiti recover and prosper in the future, and their victory over natural disaster will cement 2010 as the underdog’s year. There’s no need to fear.

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