All right. I will admit it. I'm a completely over-the-top sports nut.
I bought an XM Radio a couple of years ago, but it wasn't for the commercial-free music or anything like that. It was because I was tired of not being able to hear my favorite sports talk show on the way to work because of bad reception.
I selected XM over Sirius because of the better (in my mind) sports programming. I chose Major League Baseball, the NHL, the PGA Tour and Fox Sports Radio over the National Football League and NASCAR. Of course, in the post-merger era, it doesn't really make a difference, but back in the day it was an important consideration.
But as I said, I have a problem with pro sports. I live in a city with awful teams. I come from a city with lousy teams. I went to college in a city with one of the worst professional football teams in history. I lived for five years in a city with only one major league sports team. That team--the Stockton-Malone Utah Jazz--was pretty darn good, but the lack of other teams to root for wasn't. And I'm still pretty angry about the uncalled foul that Jordan committed on Bryon Russel to get clear and hit the game-winner in the clincher.
I'm not a front-runner. I know lots of people who are Steelers fans and Red Sox fans and Laker fans and Detroit Red Wings fans just because those are the teams that are winning right now. Heck, my own kids will come into the living room to find me watching a game, ask me who's winning and then declare that that's who they're cheering for. If Latvia's playing Ecuador in a women's water polo exhibition game--I'll only watch if it's a close game near the end because I have my standards--and Latvia has a one-goal lead, I worry that my son will go online in an attempt to buy the commemorative pink water polo helmet with the Latvian flag emblazoned on the side.
Unlike my son, however, I am true-blue with the teams I've rooted for all my life.
(At least he's learned that there are certain teams that he is not allowed to cheer against even if they're getting slaughtered and others that he must not cheer for even if they're winning. Those, of course, are Dad's favorite team and its arch-rivals. I'm glad my children aren't like the son of a dear friend of mine, who is a Dallas Cowboys fan specifically because his dad likes the Redskins.)
At a certain level, it's fun to cheer for a bad team. It's a good time to be completely myopic about their talent level, their coaching and their prospects for the future. It's quite enjoyable to totally overreact to every little piece of news that comes out of team headquarters. But when a team is consistently bad, it gets a little bit tiresome. Clearly, overreacting to wins beats overreacting to losses, and by a wide margin.
Fortunately for me, my teams have won championships and gotten some accolades. But it certainly seems pretty long ago and far away, especially when the NBA finals are starting and my team couldn't inbound a ball or make a half-dozen more free throws to be there. It's an empty feeling.
But there's always next year.
No comments:
Post a Comment