“Do you like Huey Lewis?” Okay, I had to work in an “American Psycho” line in there somewhere…
I’m not “normal”, I’m not the sports fan in the house. If you’ll notice, I don’t have a category for Sports because I almost never talk about them. I’ll watch a few hockey games (if they’re even televised down here!) and if the Yankees are in the post-season I’ll try to see a game or two. I see more than a few Jaguar games a year but only because I want to spend time with Teresa and she’s obsessed with the damn team.
I gave up on sports years ago, they just don’t hold my interest. I used to like them, I used to get really caught up in rooting for a team and getting excited when they’d win. But one year it just fell flat for me. When the team won the championship, everyone started saying “Yeah, we won!” Or to a fan of a rival team, “We kicked your ass!”
Who is “we”? When are you receiving your championship ring? Your contribution to the team’s success amounted to ZERO! You love your team when they win, you hate your team when they lose. I remember sitting in the left field stands at Yankee Stadium and hearing this guy a few rows back hurl the worst insults at Dave Winfield all inning long. Then when Dave was at bat, this guy was his biggest fan. This seems to be the normal reaction I see among some of the sports people I know. Kick’em while their down, be their best friends when all is well. Sports fans can be so unbalanced!
What ever happened to the Little League type of play where if a guy screws up you just shake it off and try to get it next time? You’re not paying these people out of your own pocket, what investment do you have in insisting they get it right every time? As a team owner I can see you’re paying these guys a lot of money to play a fricking game for a living, you’d expect them to be their best. As a coach I can see that your job relies on getting these guys to play their best. But as a fan, why would you get so damn angry when a guy has a bad day or a bad week? Why all the passion in something you have no investment or control over?
Casual fandom, I get. I like things, I dislike things. My tastes change over time, the content changes over the years. I understand anticipating something new from someone whose last work you enjoyed. Some people wait for the next Michael Bay movie or the next starring role for Keanu Reeves. Some people can’t wait for the next book by their favorite author. Watching a game can be fun, following the ebb and flow of a team over the years can be exciting, but movies, books, CD and teams will occasionally let you down. When they disappoint you consistently, you move on and check out someone else. When Metallica put out more than a few disappointing albums, I gave up on them and stopped listening to them. But people will stick with a sports team their whole life, and BITCH about them continually! At least when I bitch about Metallica it comes from someone who had the smarts enough to give up on them.
Where is all this team loyalty coming from? What have these teams done to you that you will be a fan all your life through the good and the bad? Some people give up on their marriages during a bad spell easier than they’d give up on their sports teams. I just don’t get where the loyalty and heated passion comes from. I love certain bands, certain movies and directors but if I don’t enjoy their latest work, I just move on.
As you all know, I’m a big fan of up/coming author Scott Sigler. He wrote a book called “The Rookie” and it’s all about football, space and gangsters. I listen to everything he puts out, but he broadcast that story a couple years ago, I only listened to it a few months ago. It starts off with a description of a football play on the field, and when he first broadcast the story, I got lost in the first few sentences. I hate football so I just stopped the iPod and never picked it back up until he announced he was going to put it into print. I didn’t get upset that my team (Sigler) put out something I didn’t like, I didn’t call him names from the stands. I just waited for the next story and enjoyed that. And by the way, now that I’ve read the whole thing I actually enjoyed “the Rookie”. It just had a lot of football jargon in it that got me lost, but it was a fricking awesome book! You should go get a copy or come out with us on the 22nd when we’re all going out to have a few drinks with the author here in Jacksonville… Okay, enough pimping, back to the bitching. But it illustrated my point. Fans of most things can be dissapointed and handle it in rational ways. Sports people go nuts and they just can’t WAIT to talk to other sports nuts about it.
And another thing… Even though I don’t like sports, I listen to my brother’s radio show that’s all about sports… (Click the “Jeff and Jay” link in my Blogroll list) These guys not only talk about the teams and how the team is doing, but they know the names of the guys ON the team and how they are feeling this week and how that could possibly affect their game play this week. What the FUCK!? They’re picking the winners of next week’s games and the detail and stats these guys know off the top of their head just makes me whirl. On top of that, they do research into every team, every upcoming game, every injury… If they just substituted “companies” for “teams” in all of their research and knowledge and instead of picking next week’s winning teams picked next week’s stocks, they’d make a fortune as day traders on Wall Street!
Worst of all, if you’re the poor guy who’s “not into” sports, you’re the odd man out. I can’t tell you how many times I have sat there looking stupid as my co-workers went on and on about football stats, basketball games and fricking pit-stop times… I don’t care! I don’t want to be in on this conversation!
I fully expect to get some comments on this one as many of you are sports fans and I’m not running your love for the game down, I just really don’t get it. Educate me, make me into a sports fan, make me “normal”…
September 11th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
First of all, not all of us are bandwagon fans. You even contradicted yourself a little, saying how people turn on their teams when they are down, but later saying they have more loyalty to a team than their own marriage. Some people are like that. They are only fans of winning teams…once their team loses a few games, they turn on them in a flash. The rest of us are die-hard fans. Take me for instance: I will cheer for Florida State with everything I have, no matter their current record. “We” are having a rough time right now (and the past few years) but they are still “MY” team. I understand your comparison with books/authors, music, movies, etc. But I think what makes us go over the edge with sports is our competitive nature. Books don’t compete with other books. (Well, not directly anyway) But when two teams battle it out on the field, you kind of have no choice but to root for someone. If you saw two guys fighting, you would probably think to yourself, “Man I hope THAT guy gets his ass kicked.” Even in movies, you are “cheering” for one side or another. With sports, it is like watching a GOOD movie. One where you never know what is going to happen next. And when is the last time you saw a movie you couldn’t predict from the start? So we pick our sides and cheer them on to the final scene. After cheering for a certain team for so long, you develop a certain emotional attachment. Once you know the sport, a game can become very emotional. Take last weeks game between FSU and Miami. It was a back and forth battle all game long. There were 7 lead changes in the game! FSU had the lead late in the game, so I’m getting even more excited. Then, Miami has a huge play and scores with under 2 minutes left. It was like watching a tragedy. They came so close, but then the unthinkable happened. But wait, they have one last chance. They get a big return on the kickoff… a few plays later, the QB drops back to pass then takes off down the field for a huge gain. Then we throw to the endzone and it hits our receivers hands but falls incomplete. WAIT…. a penalty comes in! That sets us up with 1st and goal from the 2 yard line. We are down by 4 and need a touchdown, so no settling for a fieldgoal. We have to get it in the endzone, but the clock is running down under 30 seconds. We get a few passes off, but the defense does JUST enough to stop them. So close. Now its time for the last play of the game. The QB rolls out to the right, looking to run it in the endzone himself. but the bad guys are in the way. He sees a lone receiver in the endzone and quickly throws the ball his way. The receiver dives and CATCHES THE BALL FOR THE WINNING TOUCHDOWN!!! Wait, it looks like it hit the ground. Take another look and yes, it was an incomplete pass. Miami wins. WTF??? How is that NOT emotional? I was literally standing up jumping in front of the tv for the final minute. When I saw that last pass hit the turf, my heart broke a little bit. Now, go through that kind of emotion over and over for years and you will become pretty emotional about the team. And you know what? They ARE “MY” team! I stuck with them through thick and thin, rooting for them no matter what. Now, not every game is going to be such a thriller, just like movies and books, but when your team wins so do you. And whether you believe it or not, I DID help them win. No, not by turning my hat backwards, spinning in a circle and doing a voodoo chant (although I can’t discount that completely). But look at 2 teams. The Yankees and Florida State. I use them because they are 2 very different teams (PRO vs College, Baseball vs Football) How do you think the Yankees win so much? With all their money. Where do they get that money? The fans. Not just the people buying jerseys, but the people who call themselves fans and want to watch the Yankees… so thats who the networks show. They can afford the best players. College football is a little trickier (well, thats if we tell ourselves there is no money involved in recruiting, lol) But if you were a great football player being recruited by a bigtime college football program with the best facilities and games on national tv (getting recognition from pro scouts) or the SCLSU muddogs (the waterboy) with poor facilities, no fan support, and no pros watching… which would you choose? I’m not saying I am responsible for a team winning, but if you add up the millions of fans, it really does help.
OR…. here is another theory: you ever notice how much beer is consumed at football games??? lol
September 11th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
WOW! That was one long, incoherent rambling from an overly obsessive fanatic. My bad!
September 14th, 2009 at 11:05 am
I can see where it looks like I contradicted myself and since I often do, I can’t say that I didn’t…
But, what I was commenting on were two different types of people. Some are wishy-washy, others are die-hard but all of them are in-your-face and kind of a pain in the ass. How long you stay with your team is one of the points I was making, but both the long-term fans and the fair-weather fans are always talking shit about “their” team and how much better they are. Competition I get, competition over something you have no input over… I don’t get that part.
And while I understand your argument about fans generating income helping the team, I think it’s bullshit. At least in the short-term, game to game, even season to season basis. The fans are attracted to high profile teams, high profile teams get income from those fans therefore becoming more powerful, repeat… By that reasoning you’d have a handful of teams who corner the market and the smaller teams wouldn’t stand a chance against them. If that were true you’d see one team dominate things like the Hall of Fame and they’d have won far more championships than any other teams. One would think that if sportsmanship and fair play were of any importance to these people, they’d make sure this kind of unfair advantage was never allowed. [Close Yankee rant]
But in the long term, someone buying a hat and t-shirt doesn’t make them a part of the team and doesn’t allow them to rave about how they won the Super Bowl.
September 14th, 2009 at 11:39 am
That wasn’t my main point. It does play a role, but not an immediate role. I can’t say I directly helped FSU to a championship, but having tons of fans didn’t exactly hurt. And as for a couple teams cornering the market… thats actually pretty true. That’s why I love college football. There are 120 teams to choose from, but there are probably still only 20 big name teams. Unfortunately, Florida State isn’t really one of them anymore. No one cares about the Seminoles anymore and it shows. We aren’t getting the recruits we used to because they are no longer an elite team. My main argument was more about the emotion and why we get so emotional. The other thing was just kind of a sidenote, but what do you think about the emotional thing?