Sandra and Kyle Fu smile for a picture during a tour of The Big House on Dec. 23, 2014. Credit: Courtesy of Wayne Fu
Shoulder to shoulder, I was watching players sing “Carmen Ohio,” when someone yelled, “Fight!”
The arm-to-arm lines broke, bodies shoved forward, and suddenly a herd of 200-pound, 6-foot-5 athletes surrounded me, surging toward the center of the field.
In the scuffle, my eyes started burning with an overwhelming smell of pepper spray in the air.
I stumbled out of the horde, gasping for air, just in time to see Jack Sawyer rip the Block ‘M’ flag out of Rod Moore’s hands.
That was the moment the rivalry had fully sunk in for me.
The Ohio State-Michigan rivalry isn’t the jokes, chants or mythology I absorbed from seven years of living in Ann Arbor, just minutes away from The Big House. It wasn’t even the hatred or the distaste for anything related to the Mitten State radiating out of the state of Ohio.
It was the way the game weaved its way through my life, reshaping the way I moved through campus, through the state and even my own family.
For someone who arrived at Ohio State as the kid from “That State Up North,” the rivalry became something I didn’t just watch, but lived.
And now, as I return to The Big House as a student journalist, I understand why this game defines people on both sides beyond the final whistle.
In fact, the game had defined me before I even knew it.
Sandra and Kyle Fu wrestle on the Block ‘M’ during a tour of The Big House on Dec. 23, 2014. Credit: Courtesy of Wayne Fu
My father got his master’s in manufacturing in Ann Arbor, the same place in which my parents met at a graduation party later on.
When I applied to college, my parents were both working at Michigan.
Currently, my brother is a freshman at Michigan.
Football was never on our radar. To this day, I have only attended one Michigan football game at The Big House.
But I grew up familiar with the giant looming Block ‘M’, the endless bleachers and my classmates’ hatred for all things Buckeyes.
Choosing to go to Ohio State wasn’t easy. It was a while until the dread of answering the question “Where are you going to college?” faded away.
The stares of judgment made me hate graduation, just standing in line, waiting for high school to be over.
I just wanted to leave.
But in Columbus, I walked into another pit of snakes.
As I stood in an auditorium filled to the brim with incoming Ohio State freshmen and their parents in July for orientation, I slowly rose to my feet after the faculty member on stage asked for anyone in the room from “That State Up North” to stand up.
I should have expected the stares.
The expressions were universal: Confusion, distaste, a hint of suspicion.
It was the first time I felt the weight of the rivalry not as something I’d grown up near, but as something that now defined the space I was stepping into.
In Michigan, being indifferent to football didn’t make me the odd one out.
In Ohio, simply being from Michigan made me the enemy.
Now, as I return to The Big House as a student journalist, I do so with a new perspective.
I’ve come to love this place: the people, the energy, the traditions that make Ohio State feel like home.
I know what it’s like to feel the surge of thousands of fans, to see the Block ‘M’ nearly planted into the Block ‘O’, and to feel the rivalry press in from every direction.
I’m excited to take it all in, and finally tell the story about all of it, all without the pepper spray.
The Lantern photographer Sandra Fu covers the Ohio State Ohio University football game on Sept. 13, 2025. Credit: Courtesy of Doral Chenoweth
