National Underdog Day

Honor the world’s greatest unsung heroes, runners up and unlikely winners who have pulled off the unexpected on National Underdog Day! For those that may not know, an “underdog” is a person in a competition or other event who is popularly expected to lose or fail. The individual expected to win is called the favorite or top dog.

Learn About National Underdog Day

National Underdog Day is all about loving the underdog. On this day, cheer on the team that is expected to lose in the competition!

Often when it comes to sports, there are three ways that a person decides what team they are going to support. Most people will support their hometown team. There are then those that will support the same team as their parents’ support. Finally, there are some people that simply support the team that is winning at the time. Well, on this date, the final approach is thrown out of the window! Instead of only cheering on the team that you expect to win, it is important to cheer on the underdog instead.

The underdog is the individual or team that is most likely to lose based on statistical data. Being an underdog can often make you feel like there is no one on your side. This is especially the case if you or your team has been losing for quite some time now. This is why National Underdog Day is so important. It lets the underdogs of the world know that we are cheering them on and that we have their back.

Of course, there are a lot of people like Kawhi Leonard that thrive on being the underdog. There have been a lot of great stories about the underdog over the course of history. You could spend some time reading into these and finding out about different situations where people prevailed even though the odds were heavily stacked against them.

This includes the 2004 Greece soccer team, the men’s U.S. hockey team in 1980, and the Miracle in Medinah, which is considered one of the greatest sporting comebacks of all time. You can truly get lost in all of the great underdog stories that are out there, and it can give you inspiration too, in any walk of life!

How to Celebrate National Underdog Day

Watch Underdog Movies

One of the best ways to celebrate underdog day is to get together with friends and watch some movies that have famous underdogs in them, like the aforementioned Karate Kid, any of the Rocky movies, or Sherlock Holmes. Stand and Deliver is a good film to watch if you want to watch something on National Underdog Day that is not related to sports.

Host an Underdog Party

Alternately, you could throw a costume party where each of the participants has to dress up as a famous underdog, like Robinson Crusoe’s man Friday, Forrest Gump, or Kung Fu Panda.

Some other famous underdog winners include characters like Rocky Balboa or William Wallace in Braveheart–despite the rather thin or simply unlikely plots of both of these movies, they have both become cult classics, proving the status of the underdog character. Enjoy them during an Underdog Party!

Consider Some Sports Underdogs

Or perhaps Michael Jordan, if you can growl out his famous 2008 quote, “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed” anywhere close to as well as he did, sending shivers down the spines of everyone who has ever not tried something for fear of failure. It is important to recognize that all of the underdogs of the world are not athletes. We tend to think about athletes when we discuss underdogs because in sport there is a clear winner and loser.

Root for Everyday Underdogs

Underdogs come in many different forms, ranging from authors to scientists. Everyday people can be underdogs as well. This phrase applies to any situation whereby the person in question has the odds stacked against them.

History of National Underdog Day

Originally, an underdog was a shipbuilder who stood in a dark pit and helped to saw planks of wood from beneath whilst the overdog, a supervisor of sorts, sawed the planks from above.

The underdog got all dirty and covered in sawdust, yet the overdog got all of the credit for the hard work carried out. The first recorded uses of the term occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century; its first meaning was “the beaten dog in a fight”. An “underdog bet” was a bet on the underdog for which the odds were always considerably higher.

Established by Peter Moeller in 1976, National Underdog Day is the time to honor all of life’s unrecognized hard-workers.

Nowadays, the underdog character has become quite popular in pop culture, from Forrest Gump to The Karate Kid. Famous unlikely winners, such as Britain’s Got Talent’s Susan Boyle or Paul Potts have also been especially liked for their underdog status.

In fact, mankind has always rooted for the underdog. Perhaps there is something central to the human experience that means we all feel a bit like our lives consist of collecting the sawdust of life, and so we dream about the prospect of one day emerging from this filthy, splintery mess victorious.

It would seem that people find it much easier to identify with the imperfect underdogs whose accomplishments often go unnoticed than the heroes everyone talks about and revers. It is hard to identify with the perfect, infallible characters who always know exactly what they’re doing and make no mistakes, the simple reason for this being that that’s not what reality looks like.