Deadbeat Dad Frank McCourt losing his custody battle with MLB reminds me of a time so far away it seems like another life--a time when I cared about baseball and loved the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Everyone remembers Mr. October. Well, I remember Bob Welch striking out Mr. October with two on and two out in the top of the ninth in the '78 World Series. Everyone I knew was cheering for the Yankees that year but I, always compliant, never oppositional, (!) rooted for the Dodgers. They lost that year, but they beat those Damn Yankees in '81.
I went to seminary in Atlanta. I had nothing but contempt for the Atlanta Braves. The Dodgers were a proud franchise. The Braves were living off the legacy of one player--Hank Aaron--and he had retired years ago. I spent most of Greek school running my mouth about the Dodgers (who were in the same division as the Braves at that time), not parsing verbs.
Then a funny thing happened. The Dodgers choked. The Braves won the pennant--the first of fourteen straight division championships. I picked a horrible decade to short sell the Braves. I sank into a deep depression over the weekend as I thought about all the crow I'd have to eat on Monday.
Fortunately my classmates were Christians, not jerks.
I learned that weekend that losing hurts worse than winning feels good, and from that moment on, I cut most of my emotional ties to sports. Does it make sense to hitch your emotional wagon to college kids playing games? To millionaire 26-year-olds? It does not. In fact, it is madness.
I still follow some sports: college and professional football, college and professional basketball, and oddly enough, the Tour de France, the only competition with more performance enhancing drug usage than baseball. I do like it when my teams win, but my teams don't win too much, which has also contributed to my more philosophical take on this aspect of human existence.
It also gives me a strategic advantage over my rivals. They care; I don't. So when they beat my team, I go "Meh," but when my team wins, I turn the obnoxious meter up to 11. If losing hurts worse than winning feels good, then nothing feels better than schadenfreude. Which is why I've been posting articles about the UNC football scandal on Facebook--to torment the Tar Heel fans who care!
I don't follow baseball anymore. Baseball is a boring sport. Watching a double play in person takes your breath away--the grace and athleticism. But mostly it's guys standing around spitting and scratching. Watching guys on TV spit and scratch? No thanks. And please don't go George Will on me, waxing poetic about the open, non-linear, no slave-to-the-clock nature of the sport. Nothing much happens in baseball. I don't have time to care about who's winning a game in which nothing much happens.
So it's a good thing that in the late '80s the only guys with tattoos were Hells Angels, WWII Navy vets and Axl Rose. If tattoos were as popular then as they are now, you know what I'd look like? I'd probably have "Dodgers" in cursive on my right arm, and a Big, How Bout Dem Cowboys star on my left arm.
And that would be bad because while I'm indifferent to baseball, I positively hate the Dallas Cowboys and their homer fans. Because when I cared more about sports, I was a homer fan. Cowboys, Dodgers and Lakers--you can tell which decade I came of age in!
I'm in grad school. I can't afford tattoos. Fortunately, I'm old enough so that I don't need to be able to afford tattoo removal.
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