The Left Coast Biased

Nobody has ever summed up being a sports fan better than the New Yorker's Roger Angell in his piece "Agincourt and After," in this passage about Carlton Fisk's famous home run in the 1975 World Series:

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

We care about sports. We care deeply and passionately. The society in which we live offers so little to attach ourselves to emotionally that we end have ended up swimming in materialism, as our possessions are the only way that we have left to identify ourselves. Not only does a sport offer an object for emotional investment where you can feel such great and immediate fluctuations, but it provides a community that is altogether absent in today’s world, a community that comes from sharing those emotional ties. No one else cares about the things that matter intensely to me. You don’t care about what I am reading, what my kid did at kindergarten today, or the terribly engaging minutiae of my job. No real conversations will ever be born out of those topics. You will listen politely wait, either to subject me to your own inanities or to make a hurried exit. And I wouldn’t blame you. Sports is a different topic. I can go up to someone in a Liverpool jersey anywhere on the planet and have a 3 hour conversation on the merits of Captain Fantastic and the impotence of Robbie Keane (20 million pounds?!?! Really?!?). I live in a relatively large town, and I can go up to almost anyone in the city and talk about the Arizona basketball team for hours, and at the end of it we have a relationship. I may not know his name but if I ever run into that hypothetical conversational foil again we will share a nod and feel better knowing yet again that we are not alone in the world. This is what sports give to us.

With that understanding, the deepest and greatest love of my life is the aforementioned Arizona Basketball team. I’m certain that I am entirely to blame for this allegiance. I grew up in an almost quaint little town on the Arizona/Mexico border in the 80’s. Arizona didn’t have a baseball team, I couldn’t support a team who wore purple, and take a moment to think about what the Cardinals have been like for the last 2 decades. Jake Plummer was a highlight. On top of being the only game in town, the Wildcats were good. I was awakening to sports consciousness in the late 80’s when Sean Elliott and Steve Kerr carried us into the national spotlight where we lived in comfort for the next 20 years. I can count on one hand the number of times that I didn’t think we could win a national championship. Being the UA point guard was practically synonymous with “future NBA All-Star”. When we rioted in ’97 after winning the title I went out in my yard and threw some rocks and lit a small pile of weeds on fire and screamed our triumph into the night. Quietly, so I didn’t upset my parent’s. In 2001 I forged a hatred for Duke so deeply entrenched that when my sister got a job there I almost didn’t talk to her, and settled for burning a Duke shirt in effigy.

The point is this. I love the UA basketball team the way I have loved few things in my life, and I want you to understand both the immensity of this affection and it’s impact on my life, my relationships and my community. I want you to understand it, so you can understand what these last few years of watching it fall apart have done to me. It is like having a brilliant and beautiful daughter, who you love more than anything in the world, who is the light of your life. She is good at everything she does, maybe not always as good of a student as she could be, but she is so pleasant in person that you overlook those little things. But then something happens. She goes off to school and you hear rumors that she is falling of the deep end. You don’t believe it because when she comes home she is still so bright and beautiful, but the grades are dropping a bit more each year and then BAM! It happens. She drops out of school and starts turning tricks for crack. You can’t really believe it until one day you are driving and you see her on the corner flagging a guy down. And to make matters worse your next door neighbor has a daughter that was always a little behind every curve there was, but you were always nice to her, because she was so far below your own daughter that it didn’t matter. But then she went off to school, blossomed into a Rhodes Scholar who married a doctor. It hurts so much. Every time you see a girl who is beautiful, funny, successful, you cry a little bit, because that what your daughter used to be. Then every time you see a girl hooking for crack, you cry more, because that’s what your daughter is! You are torn between trying to forget the past and all its glory, or ignoring the present and living in the past. Then our girl shows up for Christmas and she is cleaned up and gorgeous and she dazzles the whole company with her wit and charm and you start to think that maybe, maybe things aren’t as bad as you thought. Maybe there is hope for your little girl yet. For those of you who need it spelled out, the stroke/Lute going crazy was the drop out of school moment, ASU is the girl next door (or even UCLA. What a crappy block), losing to UAB on national television at home was seeing her on the corner, and last night’s victory over #4 Gonzaga was the brilliant holiday dinner. Now listen to me closely. The dinner is a lie. She isn’t your bright and beautiful girl anymore. She is a filthy crack whore who every now and again remembers what it is like to be incredible. You are in for a long and miserable decade, filled with weeping and the gnashing of teeth. You will see her out on the corner many more times than seeing her wash up and remember who she is.

This is my advice. Live in the past. Block out this painful reality and dwell on all the brilliance of the last twenty years. In fact, we need a dvd: Lute: The Glory Years. It will have interviews and player profiles on the college and NBA careers we have been witness to- Kerr, Elliott, Tolbert, Rooks, Mills, Stoudimire, Reeves, Bibby, Terry, Dickerson, Edgerson, Wright, Jefferson, Woods, Arenas, Frye, Iguodala, Gardner. Have games from all the great teams- ’88, ’94, ’97, ’99, ’01, ’03, ’05. Have a CGI representation of the Team That Didn’t Happen- Jennings, Bayless, Buddinger, Negedu/Horne, Hill. Show the entire ’97 tourney run. Show the three biggest heartbreaks, also- ’01 final (The Great Referee Robbery), the ’05 Illinois game (The End of an Era), and any of the any of the end of tournament losses in ’88, ’89, ’94, ’99, or ’03. Or the Santa Clara game. We need this dvd, to get us through the times to comes. Please, someone make this happen.

Labels: sports