Thank God it’s baseball season. Yes, I know that we’re only starting spring training, but March is an important month for sports fans, because it means that we’ve just gotten through the worst part of the year– the fallow cold depths of February, when football is over, baseball hasn’t begun yet, and basketball doesn’t matter yet. When the highlight of the month is the Basketball All Star Game, we’re talking sports wasteland.
But once we stagger through February, we start a beautiful run:
- March: March Madness, bracket pools, spring training.
- April: the glorious return of baseball!
- May and June: baseball in full bloom, and basketball playoffs.
- July and August: more baseball, and football training camps
- September: King Football!, and baseball pennant drives.
- October: More football, and baseball playoffs.
- November: Even More Football, and maybe some people get excited about basketball coming back.
- December: FOOTBALL FOOTBALL FOOTBALL
- January: Football playoffs, made sweeter by the looming specter of February.
- February: You want to kill yourself. (Yes, I know you get the Super Bowl, which is fine, but it’s just one stinking game).
So we made it through another horrible, horrible February, which means that we have months and months of wonderful sports to come.
As you might have guessed, I’m one of those guys who loves sports, watches a ton of games, follows all the major sports (King Football, Baseball, Basketball), plays fantasy sports, all that stuff. It’s the one “guy” thing that I do, since I don’t know anything about cars, can’t do much more than screw in lightbulbs around the house, have shot guns like twice in my life, etc.
And when it comes to sports, I have a confession to make: I am a New York fan. As I’ve noted before, of course, I’m absolutely in love with New York City, which is one of the driving forces behind writing this blog — my commitment (however wavering) to maintaining my connect to this city that I love to death even while I was forced into exile.
But when I say I’m a “New York fan,” I’m more precisely referring to my relatively odd and unusual quirk as a sports fan — I root for all the New York teams. Virtually everyone else pledges their allegiance to one team or another — if you’re a Mets fan, you hate the Yankees; if you’re a Giants fan, you hate the Jets; if you’re a Knicks fan, you barely can even muster up enough passion to be mildly disinterested in the hapless Nets. For most people, rooting for a team is like making a commitment to a spouse — you have to forsake all others.
Not me. I root for them all, as long as they play in New York. I’m like a New York Sport Polygamist. I root for the Yanks, the Mets, the Giants, the Jets, the Knicks, and try to muster up a passing interest in the hapless Nets. I don’t really follow hockey, but I root vaguely for the Rangers, and don’t really have any hate for the Islanders or Devils. I love them all, so long as they are from New York (let’s just ignore the fact that the Giants and Jets actually play their games in New Jersey, which is an accident of geography and good taste). That said, like any good polygamist, I do have my favorites — Yankees over the Mets, Giants over the Jets — but that’s only when they’re playing each other. Otherwise, I always root for New York teams over any other city’s teams.
Most “real” fans hate me for that. Sporting polygamy is heresy. Even fans that have weird non-geographic allegiances, like New Yorkers who like the Mets or Yankees yet somehow became Dallas Cowboy fans (largely, of course, because the Cowboys were good when they were growing up, and the Giants and Jets were terrible), look down on people like me who root for two teams in the same sport. I also get a lot of flack from out-of-towners who insinuate that I root for them all so I can talk smack about whatever team is good, which is totally true. My friend Scott, a true Boston fan exiled to LA right now, get apoplectic that I can mock him for both Bill Buckner (Mets) and Bucky Dent (Yankees).
I don’t get it. I don’t understand how “New York” fans can root against New York teams. I mean, I see their point about committing to one team, but how can they ever root against a New York team? You see these Met fans, who are also usually Jets fans who absolutely HATE the Patriots, but who will root for the Red Sox over the Yankees. I totally don’t get that. I wouldn’t root for the Red Sox if they were playing Al Queda.
And there are, of course, some great advantages to being a polygamist New York fan. I get to count all the championships when smack talking with people from other cities. I double the odds that I’ll have a good team to follow in any given year. I can cherish the memories of all the great teams: the 1986 Mets and the 1998 Yankees, the 1969 Jets and the 1986 Giants, the Patrick Ewing Knicks teams and, okay, not so much with the Nets.
Most importantly, I get to save all my hate for the people who deserve it, like the people who root for Boston and LA. I don’t waste that hate on the New Yorkers that I love.
