My Name is Bob and I’m a Sports Fan

Being an ardent sports fan is, at best, a mixed blessing. When your team wins, you are adrift on clouds of Euphoria. It’s as if you hit the game-winning homerun or caught the deciding overtime touchdown pass (for you desperate Clemson fans), but when it loses, the dejected seeps into your bones. It’s as if you not only struck out with the bases loaded and lost the game, but your bat slipped out of your hand and hit one of those Make-A-Wish kids, the one whom you told, “I’m going to hit one out for you tonight, Jimmy.” It’s as if you not only couldn’t hold onto the potentially game-winning touchdown pass in the end zone, but that you tumbled wildly out of bounds, crashing into the team’s mentally retarded water boy, who’s also the coach’s son, rendering him temporarily unconscious.

Realizing the vicissitudes of athletic fandom in my mid-teens, I decided to totally eschew any familial or geographic loyalties, and jump on the bandwagon of proven winners, and I conscientiously followed this plan with a few notable exceptions. For an NBA team, I chose the Boston Celtics, who were in the process of establishing their dynasty. For an NFL team, I started off watching the Washington Redskins, not because of their success, since they had none in those days, but because they were the only game in town in Charleston in the mid-50s, but I didn’t make my final selection till Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts exploded onto the gridiron in the late 50s. My MLB team was automatic, the New York Yankees, the most successful sports organization of all time. And once I had made these life-altering decisions, I “stayed the course” and yes, just like W, I did so even when a team continued to have seemingly endless losing seasons, because I had faith that they would one day be winners again. Faith-based team support, I guess you could call it and, in the case of the Colts, they haven’t made a trip to the Super Bowl since 1971. So keep the faith, we’ll be out of Iraq in 34 years at the most.

The few notable exceptions to the above selection plan occurred in college sports. I attended The Citadel as a member of the corps for a fun-filled year, and then returned to get a graduate degree 33 years later, but I have never been a serious fan of either the football or basketball teams for obvious reasons: They are perennial losers. On the other hand, I have been a frequent supporter of their baseball team, for the opposite reason. That is until the College of Charleston, where I got my undergraduate degree, fielded a team, which is now superior to The Citadel’s. And I am also a fan of the College of Charleston basketball team, well, since the John Kresse/Tom Herrion eras, since they are consistent winners. In the 50s and 60s, the Maroons, as they were called then, were not taken very seriously in the collegiate basketball world, for two reasons in particular: 1) Half the team didn’t know how to play basketball. The coach could have grabbed some people randomly out of the stands and gotten better production. 2) Only about half the team, at game-time, was sober, not always including the coach. Although I knew and enjoyed drinking with many of the team’s members, often just prior to the game or at halftime, I could never motivate myself to hitch on to a team’s bandwagon, while half were falling off a wagon of a different kind. The singular example of my becoming a serious supporter of a team for familial reasons was when a cousin was a cadet at West Point in the late 40s and early 50s, and I became a fan of their football team. I’m still a fan today, although I’ve had little to cheer about since the Davis/Blanchard teams following WWII.

But without a doubt, my most egregious transgression of sports fan loyalty occurred in 1985 at a Clemson pre-game rally, during which I transmogrified from a 30-year USC supporter to an orange-inundated, Howard’s Rock-fondling, Gamecock ass-kicking Tiger fan. As anyone who’s lived in this state for a few weeks or more knows, each state resident is mandated to choose by his or her 13th birthday whether he or she will become a Clemson or a USC fan. I had selected, though with minimal enthusiasm, to support the Gamecocks somewhere in the mid-50s. My reasons were somewhat nebulous, though one of them was definitely not recognition of a prolonged record of athletic achievement. My decision was based on factors such as: 1. It’s the eponymously named state university, despite not even knowing the meaning of “eponymously” at the time. 2. Most of my peers were Gamecock fans. 3. All those Clemson people were a bunch of yokels, while the Gamecocks, regardless of pruriently referring to themselves as “Cocks” every now and then, were urbane sophisticates.

The transformation was instantaneous. I remember looking out over a stadium rocking with 40,000 orange-togged Clemsonphiles. There was an orange band blasting “Tiger Rag,” and orange, white, and purple floats, and this was in a small country town, the day before the game. I was very impressed, to say the least. And I began to think about Clemson football history. A long record of athletic achievement with enormous fan support, but most significant of all, a national championship just four years ago. Next I compared this to Carolina, and the contest was over: No national championship, a pathetic record stretching back to the previous century, and faithful but long-suffering fans whose waking and sleeping thoughts are: “Wait till next year!” And finally came the realization that USC did not even meet my own selection criterion: It was not a proven winner. I must also disclose that there were also non-athletic influences for this change in the form of doltish administration personnel in the state agency for whom I worked at the time, who were all whacked-out Gamecock devotees, and I found it increasingly difficult to have anything in common with them beyond sharing the same employer, which was bad enough. Or to put it less politely, it gave me borderline orgasmic spasms to see the Tigers beat the living (or otherwise) crap out of the Cocks practically every year, with the added bonus of imagining these feckless saps taking turns pulling each other away from an open three-story window after each soul-grinding loss. Is there a possibility that if Steve Spurrier turns Carolina into a legitimate winner, I would reverse my decision? No way. In the first place, Spurrier’s very good, but he’s not a miracle worker. And in the second place, which incidentally is probably the best he can hope for, there’s something a little absurd about pulling for a team that has a chicken for a mascot.

As I end this, the Yankees have been knocked out of the playoffs by the Angels, the Colts are 4-0, and the Tigers are 3-3, after 5 very close games, but my disappointment over their unimpressive record so far is mitigated by the Cocks’ abysmal 2-3 performace and a wellspring of schadenfreude.

Such is the life of a sports fan. Thank God I don’t take real life that seriously.