"Tarps Off" Is Pointless, Stupid, and Necessary

Why the dumbest trend in sports is also its most hopeful.

This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture, and politics—and how they all bleed together.

If you like what you read, please click the button below, join the mailing list for FREE. And if you’ve been reading for a while, please consider joining the list of paid subscribers to unlock paid posts and allow me to expand Throwbacks’ offerings, and please share it with one or two people you know.

Twitter

---

I.

It was a Friday night in San Francisco, one of those absurdly frigid late-spring evenings that kept growing colder as the fog rolled through. That’s when the dudes in center field began stripping off their shirts. The Giants had just given up nine runs in a single inning in what’s been a vexing season full of underachievement and misery, and we were shielding ourselves from the wind by consuming overpriced bourbon and gazing out into the bay at an armada of sailboats. This is the advantage of attending games at the most picturesque ballpark in America: Even when the Giants absolutely suck, the 300 level of Oracle Park might as well be the deck of a Viking cruise ship, offering an unparalleled view of the vast expanse of the Bay.

For an inning or two, the air kept getting chillier. The Giants continued to strike out and ground out and pop out, to grind away through an offensive slump that looked as if it might last through the decade. Finally, a handful of the fans, wracked with frustration, did something they almost never do around here: They began booing their own team. Nothing was going right, and nothing seemed like it would ever go right. And I can’t say this is what led the dudes in center field to strip to the waist and wave their shirts above their heads, but I also can’t say it wasn’t the reason, either.

At first, as a bunch of middle-aged dudes with little to no awareness of modern pop-cultural trends, we had no idea what the hell was happening. But then the epidemic became contagious, and there were men of all ages and sizes and shapes stripping to the waist and waving their shirts above their heads like rally towels. This, it turns out, was the latest iteration of a trend called Tarps Off, a movement so utterly pointless and relentlessly stupid that it aroused the amusement and envy of a pair of seventy-something television broadcasters.

For a brief moment, Tarps Off livened up a miserable game in the midst of a miserable season, in the midst of a miserable moment in America characterized by a relentless torrent of bad news. And as it turns out, that’s pretty much the only reason for its existence.

---

II.

On an October afternoon in Stillwater, Oklahoma, things were going terribly for the Oklahoma State Cowboys. They had started the season 1-4, they had fired longtime coach Mike Gundy, and they were trailing 36-10 to the Houston Cougars. That’s when an Oklahoma State fan named Callista Bradford turned to her brother, Trent Eaton, in an attempt to liven things up. I’ll give you ten bucks, she said, if you go to one of those dead sections, take your shirt off, and wave it around above your head.

Why not, Eaton thought. He worked his way over to Section 231, which was completely empty, he stripped off his shirt, and he began waving it above his head. He was soon joined by another fan he’d never met, who asked if he could join. In time, there were a half-dozen of them.

And then, inexplicably, it caught on elsewhere. Some kids at a local high-school volleyball game went tarps off. The following week, fans at Camp Randall Stadium in Wisconsin and at the Rose Bowl for a UCLA game did the same thing. Then everyone started doing it. Tarps Off has now become a regular occurrence in baseball, where fans in St. Louis and Anaheim and beyond have begun to embrace the pointless idiocy of the thing. But it is worth noting that in nearly all the places where it started, it emerged out of a sense of boredom and frustration with the on-field results.

“You're not always on top,” one Oklahoma State fan told Yahoo. “But you can also always have a good time.”

---

III.

I was lucky enough to attend college at an irreverent moment in American history. The problems of the world in 1990s, in the wake of the Cold War, felt laughingly lightweight in retrospect. We draped ourselves in tie-dye and listened to ridiculous proto-folk music and watched movies whose stakes were defined by slacker angst. Very often at my sprawling public university, when something cool happened—or when nothing happened at all—we amused ourselves by gathering in the street and screaming and cheering until the cops could convince us to move out of the way. The vast majority of us were not driven by any sense of anger or toxicity. We just understood that our youth was a gift, and part of that gift was to engage in the kind of innocuous antics that we’d someday look back upon as pointless and stupid.

I can’t imagine what it’s been like to grow up in an age where morality itself has become so twisted, where toxic masculinity has become a performative stance, and where the future feels (for lack of a better phrase) so relentlessly fucked by billionaires wielding powerful machines. And maybe I’m reading too much into what’s happening here, but I wonder if that has something do with the popularity of Tarps Off: It is a harmless and stupid way for young people—and young men especially—to confront the shittiness of the modern moment and make it feel a little bit lighter.

I imagine the trend won’t last, but I’m hoping that maybe the vibe will—that maybe we’ve had enough of the dourness of modern America, and are starting to create our own fun in order to compensate. Maybe this is why the Savannah Bananas, a team grounded in absurdity, just drew 100,000 fans to a college football stadium in Tennessee. Maybe this is why even the flailing San Francisco Giants have begun celebrating their rare victories by engaging in a hip-thrusting celebration so absurd that it apparently drew the ire of Major League Baseball’s purse-clutching schoolmarms.

In so doing, the Giants also triggered the worst of the Internet’s incessant whiners and raging homophobes, many of whom already view this city as a modern-day Gomorrah. But I’d like to think that’s part of the fun, too; I’d like to think that decent young people have grown so tired of the culture being dominated by some of the worst among them that they’re beginning to reclaim the conversation. In such a toxic world, there is something to be said for exposing both your stomach and your own vulnerability. It is a reminder—both to them and to us—that while things might be bad right now, it won’t be like this forever.

---

This newsletter is a perpetual work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Respond to this newsletter, Contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please join the list and/or share it with one or two people you know.