Watch ball!

I was spending time with a friend of mine on Saturday who was visiting from out of town, and since she's a huge baseball fan, the subject of sports and our formative fandoms came up. It was World Cup Final Eve, and our conversation made me think of one of the aspects of the World Cup that makes it simultaneously one of the best and one of the most annoying sporting events: it invites participation by people who don't normally watch sports.

Now, fans of inclusiveness and global celebration may not be able to see a shred of bad in that, but I hate those things, so it drives me a little crazy. When dealing with people who have spent their lives riding the rollercoaster of sports spectating, you learn important lessons over the years that make you a more understanding person. You quit seeing things as a good vs. evil, realize that just because one team beats your team doesn't automatically make the cheaters, start understanding other people's heartbreak and triumph and just generally start to enjoy it a little more.

In any case, it made me wonder if I could list out the big turning points of my sports spectating life. You know. For the blog.

So won't you join me on a ride down a subject I've written about before? Won't you?

Houston Astros vs. New York Mets, NLCS Championship Series, October 1986
This was the absolute peak of my villainizing fandom, where I started into the first of too many hatreds of sports teams. It seemed so completely unjust that the Mets could beat the Astros like that. It seemed totally wrong that my neighbors down the street whose parents were from New York could root for the Mets over the Astros even though they lived in Houston!! I lived with a pointless hatred of that team for a good decade until I realized that they were pretty much going to always suck, and I guess that made me feel a little better.

January 3, 1993
I say without fear of overdrama that I lost a little bit of my heart that day. Not only were my beloved Oilers on the losing end of what is still the biggest comeback in NFL history, but I was old enough to appreciate that it was only because it was my team that lost that I wasn't able to appreciate this unbelievable, once-in-a-lifetime game.

What little was left of my heart was completely destroyed the next year, when the Oilers put on a tremendous regular-season push to the playoffs...only to get comebacked again by a 106-year-old Joe Montana, who was playing for a team that no one except Oilers and Chiefs fans will ever remember him playing for.

These losses and the move of the Oilers to Tennessee really took a lot of the emotion that I had about sports out. I wish I could feel the same way about a team that I did about the Oilers back in the late '80's and early '90's, but a couple of key losses can do that to you.

Carolina vs. Duke, 1997-2000
Long story short, it was in these years when I learned that fans are just fans; that the choice of a different college or a move to a different city, or a slightly different group of friends can completely change the way you feel about a team. I got caught up in the "Evil Empire" talk about Duke for a brief time, only to finally grasp how arbitrary and ridiculous it is to villainize another team. If I could have gone to Duke, I would have, and I would have hated Carolina instead. I would have preferred that my parents move to New Jersey instead of Houston when I was eleven, and then I would have loved the Jets (I hope) and would have been crushed by the Knicks' loss to the Rockets in '94 and, like the rest of the country, couldn't have cared less about Houston sports and wondered if anyone was really an Astros fan.

Astros vs. White Sox, 2005 World Series
I learned the following things:

1. I could say that I was just happy that the Astros made it that far and actually mean it, to my surprise as much as anyone's.
2. I could be both deeply disappointed at the Astro's loss as well as really happy for the long-suffering White Sox fans.
3. I could still feel really thrilled when one of my teams won.