Brush Every Time (Tanner Palocsik)

Title: Brush Every Time

General Information about Item:

Informant Data:

D.E. is a 20-year-old student athlete at Dartmouth College in the class of 2024. He is from Arizona and is on the Track and Field team where he participates in the javelin throw. He played many sports growing up and kept the same mindset for his performance through them all.

Contextual Data:

Cultural Context: D.E. grew up under a lot of influence from his coaches. He takes a lot of pride in their advice and tries to be like them. He played a lot of sports growing up and was always taught to respect what they taught him and always work his hardest.
Social Context: D.E. has been doing this since high school. He picked it up from a coach that told him many great players have done and do this superstition. It is meant to give him performance powers and he does the superstition right before putting on his last piece of equipment (hat or helmet) or right before he heads out to his competition surface.

Item:

The item here is a superstition that D. E. has performed since high school. He takes a brush to his hair before putting his hat on during his meet. Even if he doesn’t wear a hat, he still brushes his hair back.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript:

“When I was 15, I was a freshman in high school and one of my coaches told me that an old superstition in the sport of football is, if you brush your hair back under your helmet, you’ll be faster than every guy on the field. I’m not sure where this came from or where he learned it, but he passed the info on to me. I don’t play football anymore, but I still perform in the Javelin throw for Dartmouth. So, before every meet, I still brush my hair back into my hat with the belief that it will give me a great performance. At this point it is more so just a habit of tradition and I don’t really believe that it makes me perform better.”

Informant’s Comments:

He doesn’t think that this really changes anything but practices it out of habit of the tradition. It’s a force of habit for him at this point and on a side note he also told me he plans to pass this down to his kids or a younger teammate someday.

Collector’s Comments:

This is a great superstition. I think that everyone has their own unique performance techniques that can help them, but they don’t always have some supernatural power. Maybe this is one of those. I think Derek may just do this out of respect for his old coach now.

Collector’s Name:

Tanner Palocsik

Dartmouth College

Russia 013 Fall 2021

Professors Apresyan and Gronas

Dartmouth Folklore Archive