Only recently have I come to realize something that is probably all too apparent to the rest of the world: I pursue and maintain destructive relationships (with sports teams) because, somewhere in my heart, I must enjoy suffering more than I enjoy happiness. Oh God.
This feeling came washing over me yesterday as I watched first the New England Patriots and then the New York Giants turn in solid, decent, but not overpowering performances in conference championship games, with both of them winning nonetheless. And then I started thinking about the Philadelphia Eagles, my chosen National Football League team. Famously, they lost four NFC Championship games when Donovan McNabb was still a quality quarterback and Andy Reid had not yet proven himself to be incapable of finding the high gears come playoff time. Two of those losses were dead-bang stinkbombs (home to Tampa Bay shutting Veterans’ Stadium down, home again to Carolina the next year and christening Lincoln Financial Field by scoring three points in an elimination game.) But the other two, well, you could definitely qualify their efforts in those games (at St. Louis, at Arizona) as solid, decent, but not overpowering performances…and both times, instead of surviving as the Patriots and the Giants did yesterday, the Eagles lost.
This is not to suggest that this year’s Eagles team could have/might have/should have been in the spot the Giants are in now. Suggesting that the Eagles, who would have taken the Giants’ playoff spot with one more win, could have done what the Giants have done is ignorant. So far in this playoff run the Giants have won at Atlanta, at Green Bay, and at San Francisco. They get the Patriots next. The Eagles went 0-3 against those four teams this season, and they missed playing 15-1 Green Bay. Their game against the Patriots – in Philadelphia – was so lopsided that Tom Brady was removed from the game…which, if you watch the Patriots at all, just does not happen. Brady wants the ball all the time. He wants to continue honing his craft and piling up points and being responsible for his team’s success, all the time. He is a lot like Michael Jordan in that way. (Many ways, actually.) So, no, I do not pretend to equate the Eagles with the Giants in any way. What I am saying here is that through decades of rooting for the Eagles I have felt terrifically confident about them one time and one time only – the year they had Terrell Owens, the year they lost to the Patriots in the Super Bowl. That was a team without glaring weaknesses. When I meet God, if He gives me only one question that He will answer, I will not ask him the meaning of life, or what my biggest success or failure was, or even if He actually exists. I will ask him whether the Eagles would have won that Super Bowl if Owens had been 100% healthy. That question will follow me to my grave.
So then I turned the channel to watch some of the Flyers game against the Boston Bruins. You may already have heard something about this, but the Flyers have had sort of a difficult time finding anyone any good to play goaltender for them. They have gone to the Stanley Cup Finals twice in the past fifteen years. In 1997, they played the Stanley Cup Finals with The Artist Formerly Known As Ron Hextall and Garth Snow. They, uh, got swept. In 2010 they played the Stanley Cup Finals with Brian Boucher (another “second time around” guy) and Michael Leighton. I have to tell you, watching your team try to win a Stanley Cup with these guys in the net is not that like experiencing that happy feeling that, say, New Jersey Devils fans had when Martin Brodeur was winning all those Cups, or Montreal Canadiens fans had when Patrick Roy was minding the store. No, I have thrown my lot in with a franchise that gets everything more or less right except, well, for the part where the last guy between the other team and the net never seems ready for prime time.
The $50M contract for Ilya Bryzgalov seemed extreme and maybe even panicky when it was announced, but given everything I just observed above, and given that the Flyers were swept out of the playoffs last season by the Bruins with Boucher and Sergei Bobrovsky both seeing time, maybe panic was finally the rational thing. Finally, we’re going to fix the hole in the bucket, right? Right? Smash-cut to yesterday, watching Bryzgalov give up not one but two dreadful, soft, bad-angle goals to let the Bruins back into yesterday’s game, followed by the Bruins abusing him in the ensuing post-overtime shootout. The Flyers are well-past the halfway point of the season and if the playoffs started today, which of these two goaltenders would you choose to start Game 1 against the Ottawa Senators:
Goalie A: 18 games, 10-4-1, 2.46 goals against average, .919 save percentage
Goalie B: 33 games, 18-10-4, 2.99 goals against average, .895 save percentage
Well, if you are the Flyers, you are probably going to choose Goalie B, because he is the one you gave the $50M contract to. So once again, I have voluntarily, willingly, and without any sense of self-preservation given myself to a team that cannot get out of its own way.
I know you want to tell me that it is not all my fault, and that not all my choices are so terrible. “Look at your Sixers,” you say. “For years they tortured you, until you could not watch. But they came back to you! They are 12-5 now!” I guess. But every time you say “they routinely pound bad teams and win games they should win,” I am going to tell you that you saw all you needed to see last weekend, when the 11-4 Sixers went to Miami and got their scrappy, young, hungry rear ends handed to them by a Heat team that did not even have Dwyane Wade in uniform. Yes, they will win a lot of games. Yes, they will probably get a top-four seed in the conference and host a playoff series, which they will likely win. But eventually, Round Two will come, and Round Two will mean a series on the road at Miami, Chicago or Orlando. I don’t want to talk about this any more.
My son asked me in the car on the way to getting his hair cut tonight when the Phillies will be playing again. “Pitchers and catchers start in three weeks, everyone starts up by early March, and the season will begin a month after that,” I said, the words coming out of me like a memorized stage line. But even as I recited what used to be a way to comfort myself in the bleak, cold, gray winter days – pretty soon it will be baseball season again! – I could feel my heart sink. Do I really have it in me to spend another six months with this team just for the likely privilege of watching them hit .211 in another playoff series and lose another deciding game where Roy Halladay gives up one run and that is all the other team needs? Can I possibly survive a fourth consecutive season of watching another team celebrating on the field while the Phillies trudge out of the dugout, back into the clubhouse, resigned to another offseason of “wait ‘til next year?” I just don’t know.
Even my adopted foreign squad, Manchester City Football Club, is making me question my own sanity. They won again yesterday, and they remain three points clear of second-place (hated) Manchester United in the Barclays Premier League. But they won, really, in spite of themselves. Two separate City players should have been thrown out of the game for violent play (one guy elbowed an opponent in the jaw, the other cleated a fallen opponent’s head.) They blew a two-goal lead at home, which great teams rarely if ever do. Their goaltender, the purportedly all-England/all-world Joe Hart, made a mistake that most good college goaltenders would never make to give up the first goal that put opposing Tottenham Hotspur back in the game. They only won because the striker – the aforementioned cleater – was fouled in the penalty area with a minute left in stoppage time and converted the penalty shot. Many have said and I will agree that he should not have been in the game at that point at all. And all that was just yesterday. This season has also seen City fail in its defense of the FA Cup, losing to United after City’s best defensive player was thrown out of that game. That they came back from down 3-0 to score twice with ten men and “only” lose 3-2 was cold comfort at best. They lost a league game at Sunderland on the last play of the game when an offside player scored on a breakaway a la Bobby Nystrom in 1980. They are embroiled in a contract dispute with one of their best players, who after refusing to enter a game early this season was banned from the team’s games. And I will not even attempt to describe here City’s failure to survive the knockout stage of the Champions League. For a team that is presently the favorite to win the Premier League title, City sure makes it interesting, and loses a lot.
Did I mention that my favorite sport to actually play is golf?
I need help.
