My Own Sports Hates

Dear Chuck,

Just like you did in your Eagles essay, I'd like to offer my own list of sports hates.

If I told you my favorites teams were the Yankees, football Giants, Knicks and Rangers, you'd guess that I've spent my life hating the Red Sox, Cowboys, Lakers, and Flyers. Well, sorry to say, you'd be slightly off. I can't ever say I've had a personal hatred of any pro team. I want to see the latter teams get their asses whupped, but I see them as nemeses, not as archenemies.

I booed Roger Clemens from 1984 to 1998, then cheered for him until 2003 (his last Yankee stop in 2007, I don't count.) First he was a head-hunting, philandering, steroid-gobbling jerk. Then he was all that in pinstripes, so I stopped caring as long as he struck out batters. As Jerry Seinfeld put it, I root for laundry. The Cowboys? Well, Tom Landry and Roger Staubach were too nice to hate, but by the 1990's the organization became insufferable (more on that later.) The Lakers? Too cool to hate. The Flyers? Once the Broad Street Bully era ended, they just became the team on the other end of the state.

The only teams I've ever had personal enmity for are college teams that cheat. Here are the incidents that ground my gears:

* The 1985 Tulane basketball point-shaving scandal. Reading that Hot Rod Williams, who couldn't even read the SAT he claimed to have taken, was given $10,000 in a shoebox to play for the Green Wave. As a middle schooler starting to hear about how tough it was to get into college (and seeing my older sister go through the process,) that burned me up.

* Pretty much any Big 8 or Southwest Conference team in the late 1980's. To me, they were a bunch of crooks and menaces to society. I'll admit, when Southern Methodist got the "death penalty", I felt schadenfreude. But my least favorite were 1) Oklahoma, coached by Barry Switzer, a man who would've recruited Jeffrey Dahmer if he could run a power sweep, and 2) Colorado, coached by Bill McCartney, who had practically half his roster on the police blotter at some point, and then saw his daughter get pregnant by not one, but two of his players within a five-year span, while he was founding the Promise Keepers.

* The 1990's Cowboys. Once Jimmy Jones bought the team, they went from "worthy NFC East rivals" to "overexposed a-holes." Sports Illustrated started covering the team the way Tiger Beat covered New Kids on the Block, and Switzer was in the center of it.

As for this millennium, I finally found my true sports villian: Allan "Bud" Selig.

Where was his caring for the game he claims to love when the 1994 World Series got cancelled? Why didn't he make heads roll over it? Where was his caring when, in 2003, names of several MLB players were found on steroid labels from BALCO? Why didn't he hand out "conduct detrimental to game" suspensions right then and there?

Now whenever a baseball player does well, he'll automatically be the target of suspicion. It's just too sad for me to write anymore about.

Best,

Dan