For the record, I am one of those rare mutant individuals who couldn’t possibly care less about sports.
I know it plants me in a very small minority to admit this, but I honestly don’t like any sports. Not professional, collegiate, amateur, major league, minor league, varsity, JV, Little League, or pick-up in the alleyway behind the office. Not ball-centered sports, not motorsports, and certainly not — ugh — extreme sports.

So what’s my problem? Why don’t I care about the games that probably the majority of everybody else out there find so endlessly rewarding? Well, let’s see… the so-called “action” of team sports bores me. The roar of the crowd sets my nerves on edge. The physical outbursts — like throwing stuff at the TV — that often accompany wins and losses strike me as distasteful. And the obsessive knowledge of obscure statistics that is commanded by many fans simply baffles me. (I’m fully aware of the self-inflicted irony there, and that somebody who spouts sports trivia is fundamentally no different from me knowing everything I know about Star Wars. But the way I see it, Star Wars is cool, and sports are, well, just sports.)
Hell, I don’t even like board games.

That said, however, I always look forward to the annual football rivalry between Utah’s largest institutions of higher learning, the University of Utah and Brigham Young University. Not because I care about the football, you understand. The game itself is of no more interest to me than any other sporting event. No, it’s the culture of the rivalry that I find interesting.
Or perhaps I should say the clash of cultures that surround the rivalry, which is known in these parts as “The Holy War.”

Allow me to explain for the out-of-towners: you see, this is no mere sports rivalry. There’s a lot of cultural baggage attached to this particular match-up, and it’s all informed by the constant tension in this state between the Mormons and the so-called “gentiles,” i.e., the non-Mormons.

BYU is owned by the Church and the vast majority of its students are Mormons; if that wasn’t enough of a damper on the fun times, the students are required to adhere to a strict code of conduct that forbids pretty much all the things college-age people like to do (namely, drinking and “fraternizing” — nudge nudge, wink wink — with the opposite sex). As a result, BYU has a reputation for sanctimonious goody-two-shoeness.

The U of U, on the other hand, is a state institution open to all comers, and it’s widely perceived around here as a liberal hotbed and a den of iniquity. (In the interest of full disclosure, the U is my alma mater.)

These are gross generalizations, of course, and not entirely fair, but they’re not entirely untrue either. You’re not likely to ever see a chapter of Delta Tau Chi at the Y, and you’ve got reasonably good chances of scoring with a loose hippie chick if you attend the U. It’s kind of like these two schools are alternate-universe, fun-house-mirror images of each other, the Federation vs. the evil Spock-with-a-beard Empire.

Anyway, all of blather is a rather lengthy prologue to the point of this entry, which is to mention the opening of the latest front in The Holy War: the Great T-Shirt Battle of 2008.

It apparently began when BYU football coach Bronco Mendenhall — doesn’t that sound like a total movie-character name? — came up with a pithy new slogan for the program this year: “Fully Invested.” Naturally, this quickly became the must-have item of apparel (available here) for every Cougar fan in the state:

And just as naturally, somebody from north of Point of the Mountain (the dividing line between the Salt Lake Valley — U of U territory — and Utah Valley, where the Y resides) came up with a smart-alecky, mirror-universe response to Brigham Young shirts:

You can get the details on how to get one of these bad boys here, if you’re so inclined.

And such is autumn in Utah… I love it!