Professional sports have a way of prompting visible manifestations of fans’ most powerful emotions – despair, rage, exuberance. And stadium cameras capture even politicians in the ecstatic throes of fandom.
On the football field on Sunday night, the hometown Cowboys sealed a playoff victory over the Detroit Lions with a sack of quarterback Matt Stafford. In the owner’s box, New Jersey governor and potential Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie leapt up and looked to deliver a happy double-high five with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Jones, however, was immediately distracted by his son, Stephen, the Cowboys’ 50-year-old executive vice-president, who hopped and screamed ebulliently a few inches from his father’s ear.
Christie, a Cowboys fan since childhood despite his residence near New York and Philadelphia, refused to be denied. He surged his upper torso towards the Jones men and initiated an intimate, clutching, three-way hug, each man’s face turning a bright beet red with a mix of unrestrained joy and gnawing self-consciousness given the thousands in attendance at AT&T Stadium and the millions watching at home.
The Jerry Jones-Chris Christie hug/dance was pretty weird. https://t.co/ZwcrP8KEht
— Jim Roberts (@nycjim) January 5, 2015
After the game, Christie went into the Cowboys’ locker room to congratulate the players. Their feelings about the governor’s endorsement remain unknown.
For public figures as emotional as Christie and the elder Jones, such displays are only slightly above average. Christie’s allegiances, while not those of the average New Jersey fan (most prefer teams in or near their state), have been known to provoke strong feelings.
I cannot get enough. RT @TotesMcGotes: @TheFix pic.twitter.com/pQhiYIcP9W
— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) January 5, 2015
Christie has expressed a profound adoration for the rock star Bruce Springsteen, for instance. He has seen the Boss perform more than 125 times and screamed at political events that “No one is beyond the reach of Bruce!” The two men’s political views, however, do not align – Springsteen campaigned for President Obama twice, and mostly ignored the governor’s passionate approaches until the aftermath of hurricane Sandy in 2012, when the two hugged after an event to raise recovery money.
Christie said at a news conference that “there was a lot of weeping” after that hug, and Obama, then helping Christie with the recovery, arranged a phone call between fan and Boss.
Is Chris Christie not allowed to hug people?
— Margarita; Noriega. (@margarita) January 5, 2015
That elation soured in 2014, though, when comedian Jimmy Fallon and Springsteen sang a duet mocking Christie over the “Bridgegate” scandal, in which New Jersey officials close to Christie were implicated in shutting down traffic lanes leading to a major bridge for political reasons. The governor still pines for a rapprochement: “I still live in hope that someday, even as he gets older and older, he’s going to wake up and go, ‘Yeah, maybe he’s a good guy. He’s all right, you know. We can be friends.”
Jerry Jones & Chris Christie in a Bosom Buddies reboot. #chrisJerry80ssitcoms
— Harry Enten (@ForecasterEnten) January 5, 2015
Finally, any number of comments have raised Christie’s hackles and made him lose his self-control, à la his actions in the owners box at AT&T Stadium on Sunday. He has called a reporter “stupid” for asking questions he didn’t want to answer, and told a teacher she didn’t have to teach if she didn’t like the pay.
He also once engaged in a shouting match with a law school student, finally declaring “after you graduate from law school you conduct yourself like that in a courtroom, your rear end is going to be thrown in jail, idiot … Damn, man, I’m governor. Could you just shut up for a second?”
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