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SPORTS
Conditioning for football
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Photos by TIM MANDELL
Maurice Bowling Middle School began football practice Monday night
on the grass behind the school, by working on conditioning drills.
The first game is at 6 p.m. Aug. 17 at home against Walton-Verona.
Athlete
fifth in nation
Golf
Camp
Sports
Briefs
On
the sidelines
Being a sports fan is strange
TIM
MANDELL
I
know a guy who thinks the Notre Dame football team wins or loses
based on whether or not he’s wearing his lucky Irish shorts.
He’s not alone.
It’s common to find people who believe what they wear, where
they are, how they’re positioned, or some other strange
superstition, can determine the outcome of a sporting event that
they’re not even participating in.
I don’t know why we live and die with teams, or players,
but we feel this strange connection to teams, even if they’re
based a thousand miles away in a state we’ll never visit,
and are made up of athletes that shouldn’t mean anything
to us.
As a kid, Reggie Jackson was my favorite baseball player, but
I don’t really know why.
For some reason, I used to get really nervous when he came to
the plate, as if his every at bat had some bearing on my life.
When his team wasn’t on television, and since the Internet
was years from being invented, I would wake up every morning and
quickly check the newspaper box scores, specifically to see how
Reggie had done the night before.
I even kept track of his stats in a notebook.
People like to find a connection to the game, even if it’s
not a good one.
When I was in high school, two good friends, Steve Cocking —
our school’s quarterback — and Chris England, were
trading barbs in school when Chris jokingly told Steve he would
get hurt in that night’s game.
When Steve went down with an injury, stopping the game for a good
10 minutes, Chris lost it, and started crying in the stands, convinced
that it was his fault.
It turned out to be a minor hand injury.
We want to take credit for someone else’s success, or place
blame on their failures.
We want some connection to it all.
I remember when Arkansas won the national championship in basketball
during the 1993-94 season.
Even though Arkansas was highly ranked all year, and most people’s
favorite to win the championship, when they did win, one of my
friends went around bragging that he had picked them to win it
all.
Picking the No. 1 team to win the national title doesn’t
make you a genius.
Not even close.
And everyone jumps on the bandwagon.
I never met a Detroit Pistons fan until they won the title in
1989.
Suddenly Pistons fans were everywhere, but then, they disappeared
just as fast when the Bulls became the kings of the court.
Then the Rockets.
And the Spurs.
And the Lakers.
And the Pistons once again.
Now, everyone will be wearing Miami Heat clothes, and every single
one of them will claim to have been a lifelong fan.
I remember when I went to college as a freshman in 1989, and there
was this kid that wore an Atlanta Braves hat every single day.
Back then, the Braves were terrible, and no one rooted for them,
even though the Braves and the Cubs were the only two teams we
could watch every day, since our cable provider offered their
local stations on our package.
Two years later, the Braves won their first of a gazillion straight
division titles.
And it seemed that the Braves suddenly became a popular team.
Sometimes, I wonder about that guy.
I wonder if he’s still a Braves fan.
I wonder if he hates all the people who jumped on the bandwagon.
And I wonder if maybe he’s happy this season, since the
Braves are back to their losing ways and at long last he finally
has the team all to himself.
At least until the Braves become good again. |
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