Rant: I hate losing and I hate sports

[JL21]

i guess this is more of a rhetorical question, but how on earth does one become a fan of such a weird assortment of teams?

marx and geography aside, I think a lot of people have weird assortments of teams they love because of being front-runner fans young. I know a guy lives in Columbus, no home affiliation to anything, who is a Braves/Cowboys/Bulls fan. You can do the math real fast in your head and figure out roughly what year he was in grade school and becoming a sports fan. My dad grew up in Central IL and is a Packers/Cardinals/Celtics/Bruins fan. He was a total front-runner guy young and stuck with those allegiances.

I had a little bit of that going on as a kid, but it was always a combo of those teams, plus the ones in my family. In other words, I was ALWAYS a Cardinals fan, always a Mizzou fan (even in the lean 80s), plus the Braves (in the Murphy era), plus Clemson (around the time of the national championship). Then I picked up the Red Sox because I liked Clemens and hung with them even after that. I picked up other regional ties because I moved a lot. Specifically, the Badgers and Packers.

But I've also found that the older I get, the more I abandon the bandwagon garbage and the more enthusiastic I am about the ones I grew up with. If you asked me who my favorite team was when I was 7, it was the Braves. At 20, it was the Red Sox. Now? I hope the Cardinals kick their ass every chance they get. The same applies for Mizzou compared to Clemson and Wisconsin.

In short, I always assumed bandwagon fandom was something you dumped once you grew up.

[jim]

Central Illinois growing up when I did baseball was the only sport that was based on geography. We all had helmets and jerseys we would wear when we played football (that was popular back in the day), and it was just all over the board. I was a Dolphins fan (early 70s), lots of those - but I remember Packers, Raiders, Vikings and Steelers. One kid was a Cardinals fan and we laughed at him. One kid we knew had a Bengals helmet because his parents were cheapskates. Early 70's Bengals helmets were lame, and the stores that carried them would put stuff like that on sale. We laughed so hard at him we made him cry and go home. Nice present Bengalboy parents. Make him get picked on.

Basketball I was a Bucks fan - again early 70's and the had Oscar Robertson, Kareem (Lew Alcinder), Bob Dandridge etc...

Cardinals all the way, baseball was local. Almost everyone Cardinals fans, a few Cubs fans sprinkled in. Springfield is more Cardinals fans.

[fanforever]

Northern NJ....grew up being:

#1-baseball-St, Louis Cardinals fan-Bob Gibson was my idol. And I played the game like Ted Simmons (was a catcher) and batted from both ides of the plate
#2-football-Philadelphia Eagles-We Knew and were friends with Vince Papale/Pete LIske.
#3-Hockey-Philadelphia Flyers...The Broad Street Bullies...do not need to say anymore....we beat the crap out of the Soviet Army team
#4-basketball-Philadelphia Sixers (76ers)-Still waiting for the next Julius Erving

Seton Hall alum

[Fat Strat]

I approve of this rant.

I'm a long suffering Chiefs fan. The last two weeks have been torture for me. We're poised to make a run at the AFC West then play a short week at Oakland in horrible weather where the Raiders treat the game like it's their Super Bowl. Terrible loss. Then it's Denver, who we can't beat and a game I knew we had to win but couldn't win. So, we're 7-5 and all set for another 9-7 or 10-6 season and either just missing the postseason or losing in the Wild Card round. We're rarely terrible, but never great. We're always just good enough to get fans hoping... and just bad enough to get those hopes squashed on an annual basis.

[jim]

The Sixers are unbelievable. I remember the 9-73 team back in 72/73, this one is worse.

[Freed Roger]

The baseball Cardinal defeats. we all know it.

Liked Minnesota Vikings -thanks to NFL Films weekly show, Bud Grant, the mud and snow at the old stadium. Suffered -I mean tears and all - thru the 4 superbowl defeats.

Big Red didn't get my hopes up to dash too often, but [expletive] Neil O'Donaghue missed field goal in 1984
http://www.pro-football-reference.com/b ... 160was.htm

Rams losing SB to Patriots - fortunately was my busy season at work and I avoided all media for a couple weeks.

I'm not a big enough hockey fan or NBA fan to suffer lasting damages.

Was on board with the NCAA basketball Fighting Illini circa 83-84. Hometown guy was on that team. Was Final 4 bound until screwed by refs in tough loss to KY

I really took my HS sports team defeats hard. If it was a team I played on that that lost, the game would be in my head night and day - at least until the next game.

[dmarx114]

Update.....Cuse hoops is on the outside looking in, and the team I hate most in sports just won a miraculous Super Bowl. Still in the biggest sports slump of my life.

[ndistops]

I root for either teams that have never won anything in my life or, maybe even worse, teams that did a lot of winning before I was old enough to appreciate it (ND football and the Bulls). Probably why it pisses me off so much that I literally have a half-dozen friends with no connection to the Patriots, or to Michigan for that matter, that root for Tom Brady at least as much (certainly as vocally) as their own team.

[pioneer98]

I read that the Sixers this year had these records that followed square pattern: 2-4, 3-9, 4-16, 5-25, 6-36

[pioneer98]

I grew up a Hawkeye fan. When I was a kid it was Hayden Fry and Dr. Tom Davis. Ferentz has had some good years but basketball has floundered ever since Dr. Tom left. Too many tough losses to mention them all. How about: If the Hawkeyes face Duke in a "neutral court" 30 miles from their campus in the NCAA tournament one more time, I might personally track down the NCAA schedulers and pummel them. As I've gotten older though I've become disillusioned by NCAA scandlas and Hawkeye scandals, though.

We lost our minor league basketball team and have almost lost our minor league hockey team like 5 times. Sorry for the long post but you need to understand the background...The Mallards hockey team went through a terrible 4 year stretch. There were rumors they were going to fold every year. The rumors were always started by these douchy reporters in Fort Wayne, IN. They have a good and popular team there. They'd start these rumors even when our team wasn't even in the same league as theirs. I believe they spread rumors as an attempt to damage the reputation of our team and keep them down. The rumors can become self-fulfilling. What corporation is going to sponsor a team that is rumored to be folding? Also, Fort Wayne fans are the most obnoxious I've ever encountered (both when they come to our building and when we go to theirs). After losing our AHL team, the Mallards were revived in a league that the Fort Wayne team owners ran. They set up their own rules, where penalties were not called as often. This is not a joke - they billed it as "old time hockey". As an expansion team, our players were not used to these rules. I expected an expansion team to be bad, but my God, it was brutal. The other one that was maybe even tougher to swallow was a couple years later. We had the highest scoring team in the league, and the league MVP. But they missed the playoffs because they went like 4-16 against Fort Wayne and Evansville. They just did not match up with either team. So many were close losses, too. To add insult to injury, Fort Wayne has signed our best player in the offseason each year for the last 3 years. One year they signed 2 of the best players. One was that MVP, and the next year was the MVP runner-up. Imagine the Cubs signing away the Cardinals' best player, 3 years in a row. I know, you can't.

Yeah, I took this stuff too seriously. I know most people think minor league sports are throwaway entertainment. It's a little different here. This area really lacks civic pride compared with other places I've lived, and minor league sports are/were huge here and gave this area something to be proud of. In hindsight, I realize we have too nice of an arena and are too big of an area to simply have minor league sports to go away completely. It's hard to keep that perspective, though, when the rumors are flying and the team is losing.