Passion Plays and Glory Days

When people ask me how I came to get into broadcasting, I start off by mentioning that my Dad was in radio and television, and of course they think that is the reason. It is not even close to the major reason, even though the fact that your father does something makes it seem very realistic. To put it more frankly, there are many times when you are growing up that your Dad doesn’t seem all that impressive to you, so if he can do something, surely you can.

He did give me the opportunity firsthand to see the workings of the industry, because I spent countless weekends in my youth at a combo radio/television station in Boston. I was around cameras and microphones constantly.

But by far the biggest reason for choosing broadcasting as my profession was that I loved sports with a passion. In fact, even though I was a good athlete and participated in all sports and loved it, I loved watching and analyzing them even more. I can remember countless times when my Mom would kick me out of the house to go out and play, when I was planted in front of the television watching a game.

America’s love affair with sports obviously is rooted in many of the same reasons as mine. It’s generational, passed on from fathers and mothers to sons and daughters. It’s rooted in the memories of youth, and from a spectator’s standpoint, often is fueled to a new level by the college experience. Almost every fan played sports at some level, and if it extended to high school, friendships and “Glory Days” stories are a major part of the love affair.

For most, from a team participation standpoint, it ends there. For some, college then often creates a new narrative, the collective spirit of rooting not just for a team, but for YOUR school. Whether or not your college experience denotes “the best years of your life”, it still is a milepost that can be carried on through the years, and repeated with wearing the colors and heading back to campus.

We do indeed try to hang on to the playing part in many ways, through individual endeavors like running or golf, or keeping the team dream alive in beer league softball and the like. But for most the adult sports experience is spent watching and listening.

Kansas City passions were formed in many cases in ways analogous to mine in Boston. When I was just entering my teens the miracle 1967 Red Sox won the pennant, after a generation of miserable Boston baseball, about as astonishing as the recent rise of the Royals. Much like the Chiefs of the late eighties, hockey’s Boston Bruins rose up in the early 70’s after being a laughingstock for years, and they had a transformative figure in my favorite athlete ever, Bobby Orr.

As we saw first with the Chiefs example, and then maybe even more with the Royals, the passion that comes with discarding the shackles of years of hopeless fandom is far greater than when a good or great franchise achieves success. If it happens to you at a young age especially, it cements your love affair with your team.

You see it in examples like the stories of the Red Sox and Cubs, even though historic, large market franchises, they went close to, or more than a century without winning a title. Old men and women literally now feeling like they could die in peace after having seen their team win. Is it a bit absurd that we care this much? Pragmatically it is, but tossing aside our usual sensible natures is exhilarating.

Tears of joy flow as much after great victories as at weddings and the births of our children. You can say that’s crazy, but fan is short for fanatic, and if not for passions like sports, or music, or art, or hell, “Fortnite”, where would we be?

I am an extremely rational person to a fault, and I also have worked as a sports journalist my entire adult life. Those are two surefire ways to mute the passion that burns inside you for your school or your team. You get too close, you know too much, you see many of the hypocrisies and absurdities.

But deep down it’s still there. I was absolutely stunned at myself during last year’s baseball playoffs. I became a Houston Astros fan at the age of 13, and it was in large part because of my rational nature and my disdain for blind partisan rooting. By the crude standards of the day, I was a little junior sabermetrician, and I was also THAT kid. The one who would be sitting in Fenway Park and turn around and correct the loudmouth behind me who was getting his facts all wrong.

I had been a Red Sox fan as a boy, naturally, but I came to like the speedier, more athletic nature of National League baseball (there wasn’t even the DH yet, so there wasn’t even that difference), personified for me by the Astros scintillating, barely 20-year-old Cesar Cedeno. Since mere loyalty to the home town team was silliness in my arrogance, I followed my contrarian nature and became an Astros fan.

It hardly has been a rewarding ride. The Astros have had small stretches of decent baseball, but not many, and those were peppered with hideous post season heartbreak. That of course imcudes the Royals glorious rally in game four of the division series in 2015 in Houston right in front of my face as I covered the game.

But maybe 2017 would be the year. I wasn’t working, I was just watching. I just couldn’t believe how into it I was. I thought I had long since left behind the gripping nervous tension, the silly good luck artifacts, and the irrational feeling that your fandom could make a tangible difference.

But I hadn’t. The games were that joyful torture that a lifetime of support of your squad could bring. For the seventh game of the World Series I dutifully put on my rainbow 80’s vintage ‘Stros jersey, and lined up five helmets and caps of different vintages. Surely that would help carry the day against the Dodgers.

The vagaries of being a fan could be seen on both sides here. The Astros had never won in their history, which began in 1962. The Dodgers are tied for fifth with five titles, but even this storied franchise only had that few, and none in thirty years.

The game was really kind of dull to most. The Astros grabbed a big early lead and the Dodgers didn’t mount a comeback, but you wouldn’t have known it by my behavior. The lead was nice, but all it really meant was Houston had to not blow it, or add another miserable chapter to their sordid postseason history. Every Dodger baserunner caused nausea, but in the end there wasn’t much drama in a 5–1 Astros win.

But the final outs had to be gained, and when the final one was registered I dropped to the floor on my back like a Wimbledon champion, and acted like a fool. You can find that image courtesy of my wife on my Facebook page. Soon I would be soaking in all the postgame activities and swilling champagne by myself in the basement at midnight from a bottle I am looking at right now in my office as I write this.

Most of you know this feeling, unless you have, say, the misfortune of being an Indians (last title in 1948) and Browns (1964) fan. Thank goodness for the Cavaliers for you. Actually 13 teams have never won the Super Bowl, and four haven’t even made it, but in most of those places there has been something else to celebrate.

The Chiefs got their title in 1970 in the second AFC-NFC title game, which if you were going to be REALLY mean, could lead you to snark that the Chiefs still haven’t won the actual Super Bowl. That monicker wasn’t on the official program until year three and wasn’t on the tickets until the following year. I’m not going to pick that lint, the Chiefs are on any official list you see.

But the Kansas City NFL drought in not even getting to Super Sunday is now at a quarter century, and this year brings two things that make a fan get giddy. New hope and a new star. The Chiefs have mostly been good since 1993, but never great. They have been quite good under Andy Reid, but still haven’t even reached that elusive AFC title game.

There definitely would be a “here we go again” feeling for fans this season if the Chiefs hadn’t drafted last year, and placed as starter this season, one Patrick Mahomes III. He has played one real game, but he also hasn’t failed and he clearly has an it factor. We get the best of feelings for a fan, new beginnings.

Hitching your wagon to a person is a big part of being a fan, and it is clearly one thing you lose when you cover sports. There is no bigger sports star than Tiger Woods, and there were few more beloved characters here during Royalmania than Mike Moustakus. But if you spent a lot of time around either one of them, you probably wouldn’t be shouting “go in the hole” on a tee shot on a par five, or wearing Moose ears.

The beautiful suspension of reality that fuels being a fan allows for this. I get it, and is many ways I envy it. Because joy is fleeting. The Royals are less than 1,000 days removed from a parade, and they are awful, and Moose is gone, sort of twice. I don’t blame someone for remembering the dugout rail catch more than “Vargy pitched great today”.

Taking your child to their first games, high fiving your fraternity brother after a great play, or pounding the carpet in frustration or joy. Rituals from touching a rock, to waving wheat, to sticking four fingers in the air just like your players are at the start of the fourth quarter, to every soccer stadium chant, are all part of it. “Jump Around”, “Sandstorm”, “Sirius”, and any favorite arena or stadium tune are part of it.

It is a crazy, inexplicable aspect of our, and much of the world’s culture. This year Peru made the World Cup for the first time in thirty five years. Eighty thousand people traveled all the way to Russia to see their squad, many of them selling their cars, or quitting their jobs to do it.

You can’t explain that, but there is my no doubt failed attempt to try and do so. You can talk being a fan, but mostly you just feel it. And somehow, some way, it never really leaves.