Attention Span of the Sports Fan

A Line in the Dirt - Eels (mp3)

fanatic - marked by excessive enthusiasm and often intense uncritical devotion

That's what "fan" means. If you're a True Fan of Bruce Springsteen, your enthusiasm for The Boss is excessive and often lacks proper perception. And, in fact, if you're a fan of his, you know this and are even quite proud of it (see: troutking). True fans take pride in their semi-osmotic and impermeable devotion.

College sports fans, however, are slightly mutated breed. Their devotion to the general notion of a school and/or a specific athletic team is strong, but this love does not prevent you from bad-mouthing any and all cogs in the machine that makes up said school or said team. It's very much like being devoted to Jesus yet comfortable talking complete shit about church and all those pesky Christians.

"We are an embarrassment."

A friend and former UNC classmate of mine texted these words to me as our beloved Tar Heels fell in a blowout to the University of Texas in December. The loss put UNC at 8-3 for the year, with all three losses going to what are all currently Top 5 teams. The Tar Heels' fate has since dipped lower, having lost four of their last five games, including an eyebrow-raising overtime loss to the College of Charleston. Needless to say, the end of the world is near.

The unbiased and passionless observer would point out that UNC has been named by ESPN and others as the "Basketball Team of the Decade," that we just came off our second National Championship in four years, and that we lost our top four scorers -- three of them with a year of eligibility remaining -- to the first round of the NBA draft.

And oh yeah, did I mention that only just last April we won the whole damn National Championship by dominating every team we played, winning every game by double-digits, something that's only happened two or three times since the field went to 64 teams?

So I'm at a bar with two particularly possessed Tar Heels fans in late December, and they're lamenting how awful and sucky and pathetic we are, and I casually try to make these very observations. Particularly that whole "National Championship last year" part.

Both of these guys, men whose opinions I respect, looked at me like I'd just suggested they wear chaps and knee-high Go-Go boots to a gay bar.

"That was last year."
"That's the past."
"We're in the now."
"The motto is 'What have you done for me lately!'"
("Oooh oo-ooh yeah!")

And they're kinda kidding? But really they're kinda not.

The endangered species known as the Reasonable Fan can be sated with a National Championship for quite a while. Some NC State fans I know would happily trade two years' of watching sports altogether if either their basketball or football team made a BCS game or a Final Four (although that makes them Desperate Fans, not Reasonable Fans).

But I guess what I'm wondering is: how much patience and understanding is appropriate for a true fan?

Urban Meyer, in the span of a month, went from leaving football completely, to cutting back his involvement, to a full return in the summer, to participating in spring practices. A month ago, he was on the verge of death and had to leave the sport in order to keep himself alive and available to his family, and his kid was excited to get her daddy back. Now? He's either happier chopping years off his life to coach, or he's determined he's healthy enough to continue neglecting his family.

He and Brett Favre, a.k.a. The Man Who Retired More Times Than He Took Painkillers, are the living embodiment of what every Insane Fan wants to be, which is so obsessed and driven to root for their teams that they would risk limb and life to get back out there just one more time. Except for the whole "get back out there" part. The Insane Fan is pretty much OK with their view from the stands. Or their favorite lucky living room love seat.

I guess I understand these people, but I'm not sure why we applaud them, or glorify them.

I don't want Roy Williams to be satisfied with last year's National Championship. I want him and Urban and successful coaches everywhere to want the next ring and never be satisfied until they retire. But fans? They're supposed to appreciate history. They're supposed to know just how damn hard it is to get to the top in sports. And when they get that rare chance to share in the glory of their school's success, it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask them to be happy, and content, for a little while longer than it takes Bret Favre to unretire.

Eels are creators of an odd, post-pop Peter Gabriel-esque sonic experience. End Times is their newest release. It ain't gonna top the pop charts, and you won't see any duets between E (the creative force and lead vocalist) and Taylor Swift, but if you like carefully-crafted albums drenched in melancholy and loneliness, turn on the blacklight and emerge from your drug-induced stupor long enough to order this album!

Thanksgiving: "Too Big To Fail"

Everyday I Think of Money - Stereophonics (mp3)
Bright Future in Sales - Fountains of Wayne (mp3)

Would someone please explain to me what the hell the phrase "too big to fail" actually means? Is "too big to fail" something akin to calling a huge ocean liner "unsinkable"? If so, then America seems to have sailed right into one hellacious iceberg.

If CitiGroup is "too big to fail," then why the hell is it failing? If Detroit's carmakers aren't "too big to fail," why does it feel like losing those companies would be pretty darn catastrophic? More importantly, why are we allowing companies to get so large that they can be declared "too big to fail"? Isn't this a problem we should chew on going forward?

To me, a mere serf who couldn't even manage his Columbia House membership, I honestly don't get it. To me, it seems like our government is picking -- somewhat arbitrarily -- which companies are really important, which ones are only kinda important, and which ones are "too big to fail." Am I s'posed to just trust them that they know what the hell they're doing? Like I trusted 'em that there were WMDs? (OK, so I didn't trust 'em then, either.)

I don't mean to sound like an ignorant conservative, but it really feels like our government is handing out welfare checks with NINE ZEROES on them to a bunch of idiots who just proved they can't manage their own affairs. Conservatives get upset that we hand out teensy tiny checks to poor mothers who are "too lazy" to find employment, but this one bailout could probably put our entire country's welfare roll into houses for a year or two.

If people get pissed off that our government creates an entitlement mentality in the hearts and minds of the extremely poor by giving them a teensy pittance of cash and food stamps, what are we telling corporations by handing them the equivalent of a bajillion welfare checks?

Hey, I've got a plan! Why not kill two birds with one stone? The government can buy up a whole bunch of houses (thus helping the housing market) at reduced cost and place homeless welfare recipients in them for a year. [Yes, this is mere random conjecture, but it's no more idiotic-seeming that trusting the greedy Wall Street bastards who captained these Titanics to make the right decisions going forward.]

Here's what I'm thankful for in this holiday season:

1. That I'm too poor to be all that terribly affected by this collective stupidity... so far, anyway.
2. That all I've lost so far is half of my retirement.
3. That I never promised anyone a rose garden, or even much of a weed garden.
4. That I can criticize and mock our elected leaders no matter which decisions they make, because either way we're probably screwed for a while as a nation.
5. That even if Obama does a lot of stupid things, he'll seriously deliberate them first, try his hardest to ingest the opinions of the highly-educated experts around him, and sound intelligent about it when he explains it all to the American public. (And he'll probably say the phrase "Now look..." about a million times in four years.)
   

I raise a big ol' chunk of cranberry sauce and a big ol' glass o' chardonnay to you on this severely recessed Thanksgiving! Here's to being sincerely grateful that, no matter how crappy it is, it's all still pretty damn good.

The Stereophonics song is off their least-impressive album of all time, Just Enough Education to Perform. The Fountains of Wayne song is from Welcome Interstate Managers, their best album. Both can be purchased on iTunes and Amazon.com's mp3 site.

Maples' Law & the Wal-Mart Condition

The Queen and the Soldier - Suzanne Vega (mp3)
Money, Success, Fame, Glamour - Felix da Housecat (mp3)

(NOTE: Our filesharing nightmares continue. I hope these work, but if they don't, please accept our apologies and please please be more patient with us than we want to be with these #*#%&@ file sharing sites.)

One of my oldest friends has devised what he called Maples' Law. Roughly, it is this:

No matter how unattractive a person you encounter while in a Wal-Mart, there is someone more unattractive somewhere else in that same Wal-Mart.

This works for all angles of unattractiveness, apparently, not just someone who fell out of the Ugly Tree. (At right, an example... except apparently without the sweatpants and wifebeater he'd wear into Wal-Mart.)

In his defense, Maples did not devise this law because he's an uppity rich snot who would never dare to dirty his soles with the scum of a Wal-Mart floor. In fact, when you hear him say Maples Law aloud, no matter how conscientious you may be to the plight of ugly Wal-Mart patrons, you can't help but laugh.

Most folks I know, myself included, simultaneously bad-mouth Sam Walton's creation while frequently if begrudgingly walking in to buy shit from them. To me, the story of Wal-Mart is proof that sometimes the road to hell really is paved with good intentions.

STOOPID TRIVIA -- Did you know Wal-Mart, Target and K-Mart all started up in the same year? 1962. Seriously. Check it out. Says something about 1962 that three different companies launched the same general idea at the same time. Kind of like when Armageddon and Deep Impact come out at the same time, or when they make two biopics about Steve friggin' Prefontaine in the same year.

Further, although today it seems like stores are created to be chains, in 1962 these three companies all started out as modestly small potatoes. They also realized that one way to achieve massive growth is to carry more shit, charge less for the shit, and live off lower per-item profit levels by pulling in a higher number of customers. They were just one more mom 'n' pop shop that grew up and ate all the other mom 'n' pop shops. Darwinian Business.

Not to sound like Andy Rooney here, but didja ever notice how companies seem to earn our disgust from the rules, ethics and backs they callously break only after they've achieved greatness? Something about the nature of climbing to the top of the heap turns almost all of us into monsters. From Bill Bellichick to Enron to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the more successful we become, the more willing we seem to break rules and ignore ethics to become more successful.

Or maybe we just don't care about the rulebreakers until they make something of themselves.

Much of the animosity towards the Dubya Administration is for similar reasons. Pre-Dubya, we were on top of the world. Post-Dubya, the rest of the world is catching up with us at record pace economically while simultaneously resenting our cowboy foreign policy and short attention spans. Not to mention that whole "we made up or exaggerated a lot of shit so we could start a good war."


But to most Americans, Wal-Mart is the king of the rulebreakers and ethics oversteppers. Folks who go there all the time and folks who never go at all both manage to see Wal-Mart as either just awful or as a necessary evil.

Walking into Wal-Mart is to witness one of the most fascinating and continuing social experiments of our lifetimes. If you really want to get a good idea of the average income, education and sophistication level of your city or town, Wal-Mart provides the most accurate rendering of any single store I can think of. That is to say, there's a shitload of poor people in Wal-Mart.

Here's a dose of hypocrisy for you. Liberals like me hate Wal-Mart because they lowball their employees, they lowball their distributors, they blackball the small businesses. But really we hate them because we think they hurt the poor. Yet... the poor go to Wal-Mart first. That's their first stop! They go to Wal-Mart to get voluntarily taken advantage of, and then stop off at the gas station for a lottery ticket so the state government can take advantage of them, and then they go down the street and buy illegal narcotics so the underground can take advantage of them.

Yet, oddly, very few people get stark raving mad about all three. Most of the folks who hate Wal-Mart tend to think that drugs should be legal, because people should be relied upon to make their own decisions when it comes to what they put in their bodies.

Isn't it kinda strange that the same state known for its medicinal marijuana also just passed a law banning fast food from certain areas? People should be more free to do drugs, but less free to buy fast food, apparently.

Wal-Mart isn't evil. It's merely the biggest expression of the spoils of capitalism, the best of a lot of bad -isms. Success only makes the hungry hungrier, creates an ever-increasing distance emotionally and physically between them and those underneath them, and increasingly numbs the successful from the plights of those they must step on or over.

Wal-Mart is U.S. Wal-Mart is us.

"The Queen and the Soldier" is from Suzanne Vega's first and eponymous album but is also available on the more-than-a-bargain Retrospective. "Money, Success, Fame, Glamour" is on the soundtrack to the disturbing film "Party Monster." This song is easily the best part of the film. Which isn't saying much. The aforementioned albums are available on Amazon.com's mp3 site and at iTunes.

Jealousy Rears Its Ugly Head

Yesterday's Lunch - Lemuria (mp3)

Now - Mates of State (mp3)

Lord, I'm Discouraged - The Hold Steady (mp3)

One of the very few side benefits of being marginally ambitious is that I rarely find myself envious of another person. Do not mistake my lack of envy as a lack of covetousness -- sometimes I covet what others possess without wishing I could be more like them -- and do not mistake it for smugness, as I'm not nearly satisfied enough with myself.

If life were, well, The Game of Life, I rolled low numbers and got the shitty teacher salary while all of my friends went straight for the high-paying stuff. Lawyer. Pharmacist. Engineer. Then my little Life car filled up with two additional pink sticks and one surprise blue stick. My car hasn't hit any Promisory Notes, and it's not piling up with catastrophic debts or anything, but I haven't exactly hit any of the lucky lottery spaces or any of those other cool ways to stumble into cash.

So basically I'm puttering down the highway of Life like James Cromwell in "Revenge of the Nerds" ("Got the ol' cruise control set to 35!"), paying my monthly bills, earning my monthly salary, accepting my fate to pull into the retirement home at the end of the game rather than the mansion.

Totally cool with that. The friends who are on that Life board with me, well, I'm rooting for them. I'm proud when they succeed. I relish in their success as I putter my own way down the road. They're gonna vie for that mansion, and my only sadness comes from having to comfort some of them for not winning the big prize.But then this sumbitch comes screaming down the highway in his Lambourghini, these two supermodels draped all over him, practically running my damn minivan off the road because he's too busy counting his money.

Normally I'd have my little spat of semi-comedic road rage, like Clark Griswold in the family truckster on his way to get a Christmas tree. But then I start replaying this guy's picture in my head, over, and over. He looks familiar. Holy shit, I think I know him. He's not a friend, but I went to school with him. He was a good guy. Partied a lot while I studied.

He's become modestly successful professionally and worked his butt off to do it. However, I found out from none other than the man on the other side of this Glass Bottom that this guy had one of his screenplays picked up by DreamWorks.

He teams up with this guy out West, and they collaborate on Skype, and they write screenplays. And they didn't just sell the options to one. Or two. Or three. This former classmate of mine has SIX SCREENPLAYS currently in some stage of development with Hollywood. Finding out he'd sold one screenplay made me proud of him. I was, like, Duuuuuude! Someone who graduated with me sold a screenplay! How freakin' awesome! Hard work really does pay off!! But six? SIX?? That's not awesome. That's disgusting.

That much unbridled success serves only to remind me how much creative energy I've let fester in the corner of a Humane Society cage, unadopted, doomed to be gassed by the careworkers because its owner never showed up to rescue it.

To rub salt in the hacked-off limb, this guy shows up in the weekend newspaper. He's part of this new-wave fitness group that engages in all these really cool team fitness competitions. This he squeezes in between his very time-consuming full-time job and his never-ending development of screenplays Hollywood drools over.

Sure, the comforting rational side of me says I get my children, my marital bliss, two things he definitely has sacrificed in order to focus on his fitness, his screenplays, his profession. And even the jealous side of me admires the guy. He must be busting his ever-lovin' ass to achieve all this, and I don't care whose butt he had to kiss -- if he had to kiss any at all -- to get there. If he kissed butts, then he did a damn fine job of it, and it just shows he played one helluva game.

And then there's the other thing.

His success has reminded me why I really can't relax too much, be too content. Not because I need to match him, but because there are unwritten accomplishments with my name on them. First I've gotta go rescue them from the pound. And I'd have to feed them, and nurture them, and groom and love them. They'd take a ton of my time, and maybe it's time I couldn't sacrifice with the life I've built for myself, but I should at least find out, so that I'm not haunted by what could have been.

As long as I don't have to sacrifice this fun little blog...

"Now" is from the Mates of State's latest album, The Re-Arranger. "Lord, I'm Discouraged" is from The Hold Steady's latest, Stay Positive. "Yesterday's Lunch" is from Lemuria's latest, Get Better. All three songs are available on both iTunes and Amazon.com's mp3 site.