Me and My Teams


This year’s baseball playoffs have brought me to a couple decisions, or opinions if you will.

1. The one game playoff for Wild Cards is bullshit. Yes it brought drama to the game, but it lets too much ride on chance, and not who the better team is. Personally, I think if they want to go with two wild cards, they should do a three game playoff, that is fairness.

2. I will not root for any team that isn’t my team, no matter what. I will hope, I will respect, but I will not root for any other team. I will, however, root against teams.

Baseball is my favorite sport, not sure why, but it always has been on some level. I wasn’t really all that good at it, but I collected the cards for years, and I have watched it even longer than that. Growing up, we had TBS before we ever had ESPN, and because of this, we got Atlanta Braves games. This basically meant that you loved them or you hated them, luckily I have a dad that loves them, and that helped bring me to the side of good!

I always watched, but I never got REALLY into baseball until I started working at Borrowed Bucks Roadhouse in Grand Forks, ND when I was going to the University of North Dakota. I would put the TV on the Braves game while I worked the door, or if I was barbacking one of the bars. It was easier to watch on slow nights, but I spent more time then I ever had watching this team, this team that I had always liked, and that like turned into a true diehard love. The Atlanta Braves are my team, and I love them!

This season was a hard one for me, Chipper Jones announced at the beginning of the season that he was retiring at the end of the season. My all time favorite player was calling it a day after 19 years playing the sport he loves. Watching him was bittersweet because every time he did something awesome, you knew he still had some time left in him, and I wanted him to come back, but I also knew what he was doing and why, and I respect the hell out of him for it. So it was hard knowing that the last game of their season would be his last, but I held out hope that it would be a storybook ending. It wasn’t.

No, the Braves got the top wild card spot, and the Cardinals got the number two spot, so they were flying to Atlanta for a one game playoff. I was optimistic, but scared. Optimistic because the Braves are a great team, scared because it only took one thing going wrong for the Braves, and their season would be done. Well 3 or 4 things went wrong. They had errors that cost them, they couldn’t hit with runners in scoring position, and there was that damn in field fly call that still baffles me. Braves lose, Cardinals go on.

That brings me to teams I will root against… The Cardinals, obviously are one. Two years in a row they took our spot in the playoffs. 2011 we lost the last game of the season, so they got in. Fine, that’s not much to bitch about. 2012 they beat us in one of our shittier games, and I was kind of okay with the outcome, until I heard what they did. The Cardinals were celebrating and they began to chant Infield Fly. This basically means I have only one course of action, that being to lose all respect for the team, to forever root against them, and to utter Fuck Them, when I think of them.

I am not a fan of the way the Yankees spend money to buy a team, but then I still kind of respect them, so I can’t root against them, per se. The Phillies, though, are another story. They are in our division, so they are rivals, and they have bought a team for a while now. The funny part of it is that it really bit them in the ass this season, even if they did start righting their ship towards the end of the season, I still laugh.

Growing up I always seemed to have another team I would root for in the post season, but no longer. It is Braves or nothing, that’s just what it is. I won’t have an AL team to go with my NL team, I won’t have any other team. Braves or nothing, that’s it. I have respect for other teams, but I will not root for them. I will like individual players, but I will not root for their teams. This is true for Baseball and for all sports.

Football

I love the Cowboys, because of my Grandpa Rafe, who was a big fan of theirs. Dad has always watched football, but never really had a team, whereas Grandpa Rafe always talked about the Cowboys, and I guess it rubbed off on me. I had a soft spot for the Vikings for a long time, apparently because when I was little I really liked purple, and they were purple. Well, I still like the color purple, hell it might be my favorite color, but I will not root for the Vikings, just won’t do it. Funny enough, the Philadelphia Eagles are in the Cowboys division, and so, I hate them as well…poor Philadelphia.

Much like baseball, I hate the Philadelphia team that my team has to play, but the other teams in the same division I don’t have as strong feelings about. I want my Cowboys to win when they play them, and I want them to have worse records, but I don’t openly hate them like I do the Eagles. I don’t know why exactly, but I don’t really care either.

See, this is sports, my feelings about it don’t have to make perfect sense. Being a sports fan means that you can be irrationally emotional about your teams, you can feel tied to them enough to say We, Our, and Us when referring to them, you can cry when your favorite player retires, you can get pissed when they lose, you can do all these things and that is perfectly fine, because sports don’t have to be a rational world. If I want to hate a team because of one thing that happened, I’m going to do just that, and I won’t apologize for it.

That brings me to hockey, more specifically NCAA Hockey.

I had never been around hockey until I went to UND in 1999. I had watched a bit of it on TV to get me ready, but not knowing the rules or having a team to focus on made my understanding and love of the sport get pushed to the future version of me, the 1999 version of me. The Fighting Sioux, as we were known, have always been a powerhouse in college hockey, and I was soon introduced to them and taught why.

An exhibition game was to be played at Ralph Englestad Arena between UND and the Canadian National Team, and my friend Chad was to be my guide. As we lined up outside the student entrance, Chad told me that he would explain the game to me as we watched, that he would teach me the chants, that he would answer any question I had, and that one of two things would happen, I would love it or I would hate it. After UND have beat Canada and we were leaving the Ralph, he looked at me and said “So?” I looked back and said, “Yeah, we’re going to every game”!

We did just that, every home game we lined up outside the doors, Fridays and Saturday nights. Road games found us at his apartment watching, until I turned 21 and then we could hit a bar and watch. I was spoiled by the talent that UND had that year, and once March rolled around, we found ourselves in the national title game against Boston College.

Chad and I went to a local sports bar to watch the game, eat some food, and drink some beer. UND played beautifully, but ESPN could not help but suck up to BC. Two things about this telecast stand out to me, the first being that during one of the intermissions ESPN followed the coach, Jerry York, and the little guy on the team as they showed Doug Flutie around campus and then gave him a jersey, the same one he was wearing whenever they showed him in the stands. The second thing that stands out is that, after UND scored it’s empty net goal to insure the victory, the announcers for the game said “Well, North Dakota is a one show state, so they have to be pretty happy right now.” This pissed me off, and I’m not even from North Dakota, but it was just such a bullshit thing to say, especially since they weren’t talking about how great the hockey team was. Well, from that day forward I have hated Boston College, everything about it, all sports, just the name will make me cringe and get a little riled up.

To all my friends in Canada, if you ever see me say I hate BC, I don’t mean British Columbia, I mean Boston College. I tweeted this hatred once, and had some incredulous responses, so let this be my great explanation from here to the end of my days.

Of course, as a student of the University of North Dakota, I also have to hate the University of Minnesota, although I respect them, to a point. Denver University though, I hate those guys, their coach, but just for hockey, I could care less about the rest of that university. DU and UND do have some great fights though.

Pro Hockey

I have only really had a team for two years, I never adopted one, just always kind of watched where UND players went, and called it good. After being on Twitter for a while and always hearing about the Vancouver Canucks, I got caught up in them, and started watching them, and now they are my team. I am still new to the NHL, though, and so I don’t have the teams I hate, well, maybe Boston, but none of the others that my friends up there have, and that’s fine. That’s the beauty of sports, I get to come up with my own hated team or teams, and I get to come up with the reason behind it, no matter how crazy it seems.

College Football

I have always been a fan of the teams in the lower divisions, because I went to those colleges, but also because I prefer a playoff system for my sports. So basically in this realm I have UND and the University of Montana, the two colleges I have attended in my life. With the liking of these teams I was able to have in state rivals to scorn, and hate on. North Dakota State University and Montana State University, easy enough, right? Of course it is that easy, it’s sports, that’s how it works! It is nice when sports makes it easy like that for me!

Basketball

Couldn’t care less, I really don’t watch it. I have had teams here and there I root for in the NBA, but never on a level that sucked me in, and because of that, I haven’t watched pro basketball at all in the last couple years, and I don’t think I am missing anything.

College basketball is different, and much more fun to watch, but I basically keep that to just March Madness, which is awesome! With March Madness I love watching and rooting for the underdog, and there are always dramatic games, in the first few days of the tournament, that suck you in and thoroughly entertain as they play out.

There are the major sports and the teams I have in each. I can’t really think of anything I left out.

The list of teams I will root for is set in stone, at least on these levels. Minor leagues don’t count and I can like whoever is local for that. Like I said, it doesn’t have to be rational.

There are probably a few sports that I don’t have a team in, and I will get one as I continue this journey called life, or I won’t, doesn’t really matter.

That’s the beauty of it, I get to decide, and I get to have whatever reason I want for my decision, and no one can really question it.

Why can’t you question it?

Because I decide what I like in this life, and I choose the reason, that’s the fun of it.