In 2008 I moved to Seattle. It seemed like the thing to do, and I haven't regretted it for an instant. Okay, maybe a half-instant when I think of all the hot women in Texas (where I'm from), but the superior geography, lack of humidity, better public transport, abundance of art, better food, friendlier people, and more readily accessible (and plentiful) libraries more than makes up for it. That and so many other things. Seattle has its problems, sure-- any city will-- but of the 4 metopolitan areas I have lived in, in my thirty-five years of life, Seattle is easily and hands-down the best.
And they don't hate sports.
Sports is just sort of folded in to the greater cultural experience... on game day for the Seattle Sounders (soccer), fans are seen wandering downtown in droves, all wearing their team colors and Seattle Sounders scarves. The team plays in the same venue as the local NFL team, and sells it out regularly. This in stark contrast to the Dallas soccer team, which plays in a northerly suburb and can't bring in many more people than a high school football game. Seattle-ites love their teams. And then the next day they go back to work, because it's not an OBSESSION. It's just one more option in a well-rounded daily life where Whole Foods isn't seen as odd, and no one has to explain the difference between a Vegan and a Vegetarian.
Having said all that, I haven't actually met any sports fans in this town. I SEE them, sure, but only in passing... most everyone I've met through employment or friends' employment are into video games and don't really follow sports. Even the people who AREN'T into video games don't really follow sports. ... Even the people I've SEEN PLAY VIDEO GAMES ABOUT SPORTS aren't in sports.
Could it be that I'M the geek here? Something is definitely wrong with me.
But no, I don't press. I know my friends aren't obsessed with these things, so when I see that an NFL team has made a trade, or that a college team has hired a new coach, I suffer in silence, wanting to comment on the news of the day but already knowing that nobody gives a fuck. And that's fine. I'm a relatively well-rounded person, I have other things to talk about. But on a day like today when Carmelo Anthony got traded to the perennial losers, the New York Knicks? ARGH. Dude. I don't even LIKE any teams from New York, and that's frustrating.
So I go on internet message boards to read the opinions of others, or share my own:
ESPN.com is not set up for it; you can only reply to articles individually, and if it's a popular story, there are 800 replies before you got there (not an exaggeration). Your comment gets lost in the shuffle. Even if you catch a reply to what you said, and reply back, it's now 10-30 replies further down the line, and no one else is following the exchange except you and the person you're responding to.
CBSSportsline.com has a slightly better system, but has some of the singular worst sports writing I have ever had the displeasure of slogging through. Some sections are better than others (college basketball, for example), but as a whole it's not worth my time to read; the writers are uninformed and biased about what facts they do know; calling them on it will only get you banned from the forums. I have been banned three times. The most recent was over a year ago, and I haven't been back. Compared to ESPN, the writing is laughable.
Individual teams have websites, but they're usually of the educated, entirely too intellectual realm of conversation, with such introspective thoughts as, "NEW YORK JEST RULZ!! WE R #1!!!!!!!!!111 FUCK THE HATERZ!!"
Does that make your eyes bleed? Cuz it does mine.
So, I'll just rant here in silence, and if I'm wrong, no one will know. God knows I'm not perfect; Doc Rivers had a losing record as a head coach when the Boston Celtics hired him, and once he was on board, he continued to lose, because he's not a very good coach. And then the monster trade happened... Kevin Garnett came to Boston from Minnesota. "He'll never go as far with that talent as it deserves," I told a friend of mine who actually works in sports. "I bet you a case of beer Rivers will be fired by next season."
Well, Rivers did not make the Finals that season, but for some reason the Celtics kept him anyway, probably because they didn't know who else they'd hire, or more likely because Rivers is a really nice guy, so who cares if he's not good at his job? ... Then Rivers won the NBA championship. Though, to be fair, with that line-up... it'd be pretty hard not to. Rivers kept his job. I still owe my friend a case of beer, but can't figure out how to ship it safely from Seattle to Houston.
That aside, I've been reading sports columnists and criticism for the better part of twenty years. Even before I'd ever left Houston, I recognized excuse-making and homerism when I saw it. "Oh, it's okay that the Astros are 30-87," the writers would write. "Coach (x) has a great team and is on the verge of turning the team around." Excuses. Excuses, excuses. In New York or Boston or Chicago they'd never put up with that shit. And here I was living in the supposed 4th-largest city in the country, and the media and fans were giving the local teams the kid-gloves treatment.
And then I discovered the newsweekly.
Growing up, your parents only ever read the daily. The Houston Chronicle exists to this day; the Houston Post folded sometime in the early 1990s. When I started going to see local music, I saw the two newsweeklies; I never knew such things existed before: the Houston Press, and Public News. The former was corporate owned and seemed disinterested in covering local music. The latter was in black and white and all it CARED about was local music. I wrote a letter to the editor about the show I'd seen that week, one band was good and the other one was shit. They ran it. First time I'd ever seen my name in print, beyond my junior high school newspaper. The headline they'd put on it was something like, "Amateur Music Critic."
Also in that issue was a one-page sports column, from a writer I had never met; a year or two later when I interned there, and a year or two after that was was paid for my work, that writer had already moved on. He wasn't a big-city writer, but just a friend of the editor who had something to say, and was entertaining enough to have a following. The column was called "Sports for Heretics."
And the writer loved the local sports teams, and called them on their bullshit. He wasn't friends with the owners or players, he was just a fan with a family who didn't understand why a day at the ballpark for him and his kids would cost over $200. And so every trade, every win, every loss, every business decision, every bullshit plea from the local "real" sports columnists, he was on it, fighting for the little guy, and saying so in a comedic way. Then one day his column wasn't in the paper anymore. Then one day, in 1998, the paper wasn't on the stands anymore.
Such is the way of the privately-owned newspaper. The Houston Press, Dallas Observer, and Seattle Weekly are all owned by the same company: the letterhead is the same, oftentimes they'll share stories with each other if they have national relevance, like with movie reviews or a band coming to town. Meanwhile local writers have to resort to blogs, and crude bathroom graffiti. I'd like to think I'm a Shakespeare of the latter. The former? Remains to be seen.
And so when the message boards bore me, I have this little corner, knowingly spewing it forth with the knowledge that it will not be read by anyone, and one day it, too, shall disappear from the internet, like so many deleted MySpace pages.
But it's a fitting tribute for the man I never met, who inspired me and let me know I could make a difference, by speaking truth to power... even if power was too busy to listen.
Houston, you raised me up and spit me out. It's far beyond time to go out into the world and make my fortune. I don't know if Seattle will be it, but....
Goddamn, the Mariners are fucking awful. Get it together, people.
And so it begins.................
