Ben wrote:New York is, along with Boston, one of the top two sports cities in the country.
Give me a fucking break. I have no quarrel with Boston fans, but the majority of Yankee, Met, Ranger, Islander, Jet, Giant and Knick fans are FUCKING CRETINS.
People live and die by the Yankees and Mets.
Sure, sure, when the team is doing well. Of course, when there are 8 million people in a given city, a simple ballpark is going to sell out regardless of how the team is doing, but sure. Right on!!
Nobody lives and dies by the Devil Rays.
Well maybe people should. NO team in the last 25 years of professional sports has had as much shit flung at it as the Devil Rays, and no fan (I agree there aren't many) has had less to get excited about than Devil Ray fan.
Let's say the Devil Rays get a little better. Let's say that they keep ahold of Huff, Kennedy improves a bit -- whatever. Let's say that they do in fact go out and improve their team. Well, hahaha, the joke's on them! They get to play a weighted schedule against the Yankees and Red Sox! Hee hee hee! Two teams that the league whose year to year success the league would like to ensure. They are thrown into a division where two teams WILL win 90 games each year, and another (Toronto) that will win at least 80. Yet, do you hear Devil Ray fan whining? Do you hear him complaining? No! If you hear him at all, you're listening to him suck it up and fucking deal with it.
I have no respect for somebody who can follow a team that makes the goddamn playoffs every fucking year. Not simply because of their following of a good team. You point out an organization like the Devil Rays (or, yes, the Saints, he said without irony) that blows fucking chunks year in and year out and I will be able to present you with a
fan, Mister Parrish.
Nobody lives and dies by the Rockies.
The fans out here really are lousy.
Nobody lives and dies by the Dodgers (anymore).
True.
And nobody SURE AS SHIT lives and dies by the goddamn BLUE JAYS.
Ha-ha. You know, I only engage in this tete-a-tete because I care. I see where you are going with this. Had you been a different man, a lesser man, you would have brought up the "tradition" argument. I've seen it many times. And it curdles my blood each and every time I see it.
"The Blue Jays? Fuck the Blue Jays. They have no tradition." -- Every fucking Chowd on the Face of the Planet
But what the hell is tradition worth? Tradition? We live in a world where Carlton's Fisk UTTERLY MEANINGLESS game six home run -- a home run that extended a series that the Red Sox fucking LOST -- is shown more times than the single most dramatic at-bat in baseball history (Joe Carter v Mitch Williams, the first time a guy ended a World Series with a single swing when his team was losing). That's what tradition is, motherfucker. Tradition is there being more people in Boston than in Toronto, so some group of wire-rimmed maggots on Madison Ave desperately panders for their dollar and tells you that, seriously, Fisk's moment was "priceless." Priceless. FUCK YOU. Rose, Bench, Morgan and all those other crazy fuckers beating every team in the A.L. that came up to face them was fucking priceless. Oh, but there's just not quite as many people living in Cincy, is there?
I'll tell you this much. When the Blue Jays won their championships, there wasn't a single despicable human being that played a significant role. (I state it like that because Chunks Wells was on the roster, unfortunately.) Sports are oftentimes a meaningless distraction, but if there were one group of guys in all of sports that I could point out to my future brood and say, "Be Like Them" it would be the 1992 and 1993 Toronto Blue Jays. No cocaine-snorting 20 year olds like your precious 86 New York Mets. No whore-throttling, syphilis-riddled pieces of crap like your precious 27 Yankees. And no Drunken Micks either, if you're digging my ditch here.
I call a bad fan one who got free tickets and spends most of the game on the cellphone. I call a bad fan one who hadn't even heard of the team before people starting waving flags from their cars. Who skips out early to beat the lines at the cappucino/latte stand. Who lives anywhere in California or Florida.
I call a bad fan one that is completely ignorant to the laughable economic disparity which provides the only real advantage that their team is able to rely on. I call a bad fan one that doesn't read the box scores when their team is out of the playoff race. I call a bad fan one which has never had to go through a period of time -- a stretch of motherfucking years -- where their team had NO FUCKING SHOT of even making the first round of the playoffs due to the miserable incompetence of their owner, staff, and coaches.
And a good fan? A good fan, you ask? It's not being two hundred pounds over weight and throwing beer at somebody wearing an Orioles cap in your downtown "Escape From New York" style park. A good fan can name the starting lineup of their team that year when they lost 13 games in football or over 100 in baseball. A good fan hops onto an NFL Blitz 99 machine and plays against his friends as his own, horrible team even though he's got Heath "Fucking" Shuler handing off to Mario "Fucking" Bates. A good fan is one that has gone through more sports-related hardship than any sane person would, and still refuses to do dick-all but watch with interest and intensity when their team is playing. NONE of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with you. You're locked up in here with m -- wait, shit, I am losing focus and channeling Rorschach all of a sudden.
But I will tell you this, mon ami: being a fan comprises more than just, say, identifying by far the best team or person in a given sport and then only following THEM... or in your case, I guess, "him." You MISERABLE, FRONT-RUNNING BASTARD.