My passion project
For 30 years now, my feelings have been tied to a football team in a way that is irrational and not altogether healthy. What's worse is I'm kind of proud of it.
The San Francisco Giants held a five-run lead in the bottom of the seventh inning of Game 6 in the 2002 World Series. They were eight outs away from clinching the championship, which would have been the franchise’s first since relocating to San Francisco in 1958.
The Angels scored three runs in the bottom of the seventh1, another three in the bottom of the eighth against San Francisco’s closer Robb Nenn to force a Game 7, which Anaheim won. Now I am not a Giants fan. My friend Davey Bamford, however, is. I’ve known Davey since my family moved to California in 1990, and I recall talking to him on the phone in the weeks after that World Series loss, and he told me that he actually felt depressed. I remember him being kind of sheepish about this, acknowledging it might seem kind of silly to be that bothered by a sports loss. We were almost 30 at that point, and he had gotten married the previous year.
“I actually had the champagne out and on ice,” he said.
That story best explains what I think it means to be a true sports fan: Your mood is tied to the fate of your team in a way that is entirely irrational and not altogether healthy. This is where the magic of sports actually resides. At least for me. You can’t experience extreme happiness as a fan without risking abject pain, and while we all hope to relish a championship at some point, we’re always aware of how suddenly the rug can be pulled out from underneath us. My friend Davey — a reader of this here newsletter2 — has now seen the Giants win three world championships, and I will always be convinced that those triumphs were sweetened by the pain he experienced back in 2002. “Joy and pain, sunshine and rain” as the great Milli Vanilli Rob Bass once intoned.3
I mention this now to try and explain the happiness that I have felt during this college-football season in general and the past five weeks in particular. The success of the Washington Huskies has brought me a degree of happiness that I almost feel I should apologize for. See, I was a journalist for a number of years, and that is a profession that prides itself on a level of detachment and objectivity. Now, I’m trying to be a writer with a capital ‘W’ and working on a book about my relationship with my stepfather, which I hope will be a literary memoir. This seems too distinguished a genre for someone who doesn’t even have the decency to be embarrassed by how emotional he gets while watching sporting events involving students who happen to attend the same college he graduated from. On the contrary, I’m actually proud of how strongly I feel about this team.