Archive for January 2012
Why I’ll be There Next Year
Yesterday, I watched the sports team with which I’ve had my longest allegiance, the Green Bay Packers, lose to the trending New York Giants. A team which had six fumbles lost all year lost three in one game; which had won or tied the turnover battle all season lost the ratio four to one; which had very few drops, errant throws, coaching mistakes all year, made six drops, threw away third down conversions, and never noticed a special teams unit standing still on every kick leading up to a trapping failure of an on-side attempt.
I watched the game with two important people: my partner who, despite a household of Lions fans, has been wearing her Packer’s hoodie with pride next to me all season, and my good friend, whose knowledge of sport and staunch allegiances makes her once-untested Packers fandom a welcome addition to the fold. I tried my best to keep quiet throughout the game, to avoid making my usual defeatist commentaries that set me up for the potential failures. But I sensed immediately—from Aaron’s errant throw over Greg when the latter released off his route—that we were in trouble. When had we ever really settled for three points all year because of missed execution? And then the onside kick, and then the missed tackle on a half back running out the clock, and then the Hail Mary, and then the faints and the flickers and the all is lost. I all but wrote of the team’s chances when Charles’s arm only faintly connected with a football launched forty yards down field in tactical desperation because, well, until that point (and for what I was sure would be the rest of the game), I had not seen the team I had grown to stupidly fall in love with as the season progressed. The team I saw yesterday wasn’t the team I loved. There was something different about this group of players, the looks on their faces, the matte of the gold in their helmets. They had lost something of their professional burden and gained something of their humanity. This team was populated, without a doubt, with men who had lost the edge to play the game—and I do not blame them at all for losing that: the wins came too easy, the rest came in excess, the tragedy came so suddenly, and the game got away all too quickly.
As the post game began, my fellow watchers were feeling helpless, empty, devastated, frustrated, angry, cheated, disappointed, the way a fan’s fan feels, and I wanted to comfort them and let them know that these moments make the fan, and that these moments are what make the victories so fulfilling and blah blah blah, but didn’t believe the filmic tropes as much as I can write them out in earnest. I walked away from the loss misguided and searching for justification. I, in all my high and mighty, cited the numerous times in which this team had let me down. Three straight play-off losses to Aiken’s Cowboys; Terrell Owens’s catch; Michael Vick sub-zero running; Brett’s interception and the field goal that finally, mercifully, went through; Aaron’s did-that-just-happen moment in the desert: all cited so that I could somehow feel better about this loss, so that the context would knock this loss down the ladder of disappointments I’ve got hanging in my garage of memories (whoa did that metaphor take over).
Truth is, this loss is the hardest I’ve faced with this team. I can’t cheapen it. This loss and this team is my Icarus of losses and teams. From a distance, I cheered Tyree’s catch years ago, revelling in 18-1. This team rose to a comparable height and failed on a far greater level. They didn’t just hit the ground: they found a fissure to fall through and they kept going. What living this loss solidifies for me is this: the intensity of feeling that comes with a loss in no way compares with that of victory. I’ve seen my Packers win two Super Bowls, under two quarterbacks I deified in their moments, yet I cannot recount for you an appropriate or expected feelings in those moments when the games were won. I didn’t cheer, I didn’t raise my arms, I didn’t do much more than let a smile creep through in appreciation. My fourteen year-old self somehow knew it best: he was level-headed about the whole thing. He watched Brett and Reggie and he didn’t know what to do with so monumental victory, so he didn’t do anything. He just sat there, living some kind of uncanny parallel experience in another world in which he was ahead of his maturity and understood that mistaking that moment as a joyful moment is, indeed, a mistake—because the best you can hope for is for them not to lose. The most I allowed myself after last year’s victory was, well, relief, but I couldn’t celebrate the championship. I couldn’t take pleasure in my efforts to follow the team all year, to watch all the games, to read all the stories, to buy all the swag, to dedicate myself daily to my fandom. In the end, I was just relieved that, for one year at least, they had not disappointed me. They had, for one year at least, spared me the usual feeling of helplessness, emptiness, devastation, frustration, anger, the feeling of being cheated.
There is (I have no doubt now) several degrees of masochism which comes with any dedication you make to a professional sports team: you take your mediocre job and your small living space and your family problems and you put them into the hands of celebrity athletes and near billion-dollar corporations, and you tell them to make you feel better for brief moments throughout the year and the season. But I only vividly remember the disappointments, and never take a full sense of pride or ownership in the triumphs. More and more, I’m having trouble reconciling this dynamic, this imbalance within myself. More and more, I hate myself for coming back to my teams, my players, my games. If I can’t celebrate the victories, what am I gaining from this relationship? And yet I can’t turn away. I can’t. I can’t not (‘scuse the Double Neg) get excited at the ironic turn of getting what came in the mail today: I can’t not get excited about seeing my first letter arrive in my mailbox from the Packers ticket office documenting my slow climb up its season’s tickets waiting list. My fandom is my burden, and I guess I’m OK with that, but that’s likely because I just plain refuse to fully reconcile its intricacies. I just hope, and think, and (have to) believe that I’m not the only one who sits sombrely even after a win and wonders why it doesn’t feel better, and what keeps drawing him back?
