I've kept my mouth largely shut about Bill Simmons and all things Sports Guy, but then somebody brought the following recent quote of his to my attention:
Our favorite teams are extended families. There's no way you'd boo a family member at a Little League game, so why is it okay to boo someone on your favorite team?
Bill. BILL! Oh. Bill. This is coming straight at you from a person who has formed
an emotional attachment...
or two to professional athletes in her life, and who also, three years or so down the line, is fully prepared to
heave first base Pinella-style at any person who dares to look even slightly askance at the athletic prowess of Jim the Small Child Nephew, but these people? Are not your family. They are ridiculously wealthy athletes, grown men who receive mostly-free college educations and who now shove, throw to, or run after other ridiculously wealthy athletes.
Your family is your amazingly sexism-tolerating wife and your very young daughter, whom I dearly hope within a decade will look up at you with big eyes and pipsqueak questions about what a strip club is, and why you wrote about them so very, very much, and if she might work at one when she grows up because Daddy seems to enjoy them so immensely.
I just really, really doubt that if Tom Brady began drawing a check from, say, the Jaguars tomorrow, he would take a call from you and agree to take a few snaps for the Patriots next Sunday instead, just because
you asked him to, and hey! Bill's family!
Booing, like tazing, happens, bro. You don't do it just because your team is losing or simply matched against a far superior squad. You reserve it only for when your team, which consists of people who are extremely well compensated for any momentary lapse in self-esteem, is all-out
sucking, so that they know you expect better of them than to
suck like this and are
embarrassing you and you won't stand for it. I did it when Ron Powlus called his ninety millionth handoff at the top of a series when I was a senior, as I was a
poli sci major and could see it coming, much less the defense who'd had the opportunity to study three years of offensive game film, and I mean "offensive" in every single connotation of the word here. (Side note: Ron--or Dammit,Ron! as he was affectionately known, there in the student section--is now Notre Dame's quarterback coach and for the past two years also served as the recruitment organizer, which explains A LOT.) And I booed when the NBC Commercial Time-Out Guy on the sidelines raised his unfortunate game-halting orange glove in the air, because
he sucked also.
But I applauded the team as a whole after the game when the players came back to the student section and raised their gold helmets in the air, because, well, at least they
didn't cheat that I knew of, Bill. Booing consistently piss-poor play doesn't mean you've forfeited your fandom. You do it because you care. You do it because your team isn't cowboying up. You spank your team because you love. And it is okay.
In other news,
Central Florida carries on without me.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGARBAGE!! at: mbe@drinktothelasses