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| Iker Casillas and Spain celebrate winning the World Cup. C/O The Guardian |
I’ve always been one to get emotionally involved with my
sports teams: I was in middle school in 2001—only a few months after 9/11—when
my beloved Yankees lost the World Series to the Diamondbacks. I wept for hours
after Luis Gonzalez’s bloop single, and I was sullen for days. In 2003, Real
Madrid was narrowly edged out of the Champions League by a
probably-paying-the-ref-but-shh-I-don’t-wanna-lose-my-job Juventus; I cried
like a baby.
But the fact is, I’ve been lucky with my favorite teams:
since 1995, I’ve celebrated at least one championship in every sport except
basketball, and gotten two in most of the other ones (Real Madrid, Spain,
Packers, and the aforementioned evil Yankees). Maybe this luck, and the
accompanying crushing weight of high expectations, is the reason I react so
badly to watching my teams lose.
You wouldn’t expect someone with my track record—that’s a
lot of winning teams, and no, I’m not apologizing—to feel any empathy for (dare
I say it) Red Sox fans. Simply supporting a team that seems hell-bent on
crushing your dreams—for me, pre-2010 Spain, for Sox fans, pre-2004)—doesn’t
necessarily make you feel for anyone else in a similar plight. In fact, it comes
with this circle-the-wagons, you-don’t-get-it-man
mentality: no other fans can understand that feeling of inevitability that
comes with watching your cursed team.
