T-post Tom
01-07-2011, 02:05 AM
by Reeves Wiedeman
One Sunday in early November—Week 9 of the N.F.L. season—I sat in an East Village bar watching my Kansas City Chiefs tussle with their archrival, the Oakland Raiders. The Chiefs had started the season with three straight wins, and were now leading the division. By halftime, they were already up by ten. The Chiefs fans in attendance, myself included, were ecstatic. Then, with alarming swiftness, the team crumbled and lost. I turned to the woman seated next to me, also a Chiefs fan, and shook my head. One seat over, her husband looked ill. The couple had dinner plans after the game, but the woman turned to me, sighed, and said, “Dinner will not be pleasant.”
Witness: the schizophrenic nature of the sports fan. With the Chiefs in the playoffs for the first time since the 2006 season, I should be thrilled. And, as recently as Sunday morning, I was. One friend—in response to an e-mail of mine explaining why his team, the Jets, should fear playing the Chiefs—noted my “giddiness.” Then, Sunday afternoon happened. The Chiefs lost—to the Raiders, again—in horridly droopy fashion, downgrading themselves from third to fourth in the playoff standings. All of Chiefdom was suddenly in a fit, searching for answers to a question that, just a week ago, was near no one’s mind: “So, are we kind of bad?”
The problem for sports fans is that winning begets expectations, which, for all but one team per year, begets disappointment. In the past three seasons combined, the Chiefs won just ten games, the same number they won this season alone. During those years in the sporting wilderness, I was able to comfortably ignore them. The losses, close or lopsided, were never devastating—they simply happened, and not here on New York’s Fox or CBS affiliates. Now, for Chiefs fans, each failed third down is freighted with meaning and consequence. The absence of two Pro Bowl players from practice this week due to “illness” seemed like the result of a biblical pestilence, fated to doom our team. We asked whether our offensive coordinator, Charlie Weis, who announced he would be leaving the team for a new job after the season, had thrown in the towel, or, worse, was somehow conspiring against us. None of this is rational, let alone healthy, and then the front page of Wednesday’s Kansas City Star—the news section, mind you—went so far as to wonder if it was actually us, the fans, whose relatively meager attendance had been responsible for the team’s lackluster performance in the final game.
Make it stop! I fear it will, this Sunday, when Ray Lewis and Ed Reed and the rest of the Mongol horde also known as the Baltimore Ravens defense maraud through Kansas City. Perhaps it would be best to simply put a stop to this stress. But I suspect that, in the end, I’d prefer another week of it.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2011/01/kansas-city-chiefs-the-agony-of-success.html#ixzz1AKp4SaRF
One Sunday in early November—Week 9 of the N.F.L. season—I sat in an East Village bar watching my Kansas City Chiefs tussle with their archrival, the Oakland Raiders. The Chiefs had started the season with three straight wins, and were now leading the division. By halftime, they were already up by ten. The Chiefs fans in attendance, myself included, were ecstatic. Then, with alarming swiftness, the team crumbled and lost. I turned to the woman seated next to me, also a Chiefs fan, and shook my head. One seat over, her husband looked ill. The couple had dinner plans after the game, but the woman turned to me, sighed, and said, “Dinner will not be pleasant.”
Witness: the schizophrenic nature of the sports fan. With the Chiefs in the playoffs for the first time since the 2006 season, I should be thrilled. And, as recently as Sunday morning, I was. One friend—in response to an e-mail of mine explaining why his team, the Jets, should fear playing the Chiefs—noted my “giddiness.” Then, Sunday afternoon happened. The Chiefs lost—to the Raiders, again—in horridly droopy fashion, downgrading themselves from third to fourth in the playoff standings. All of Chiefdom was suddenly in a fit, searching for answers to a question that, just a week ago, was near no one’s mind: “So, are we kind of bad?”
The problem for sports fans is that winning begets expectations, which, for all but one team per year, begets disappointment. In the past three seasons combined, the Chiefs won just ten games, the same number they won this season alone. During those years in the sporting wilderness, I was able to comfortably ignore them. The losses, close or lopsided, were never devastating—they simply happened, and not here on New York’s Fox or CBS affiliates. Now, for Chiefs fans, each failed third down is freighted with meaning and consequence. The absence of two Pro Bowl players from practice this week due to “illness” seemed like the result of a biblical pestilence, fated to doom our team. We asked whether our offensive coordinator, Charlie Weis, who announced he would be leaving the team for a new job after the season, had thrown in the towel, or, worse, was somehow conspiring against us. None of this is rational, let alone healthy, and then the front page of Wednesday’s Kansas City Star—the news section, mind you—went so far as to wonder if it was actually us, the fans, whose relatively meager attendance had been responsible for the team’s lackluster performance in the final game.
Make it stop! I fear it will, this Sunday, when Ray Lewis and Ed Reed and the rest of the Mongol horde also known as the Baltimore Ravens defense maraud through Kansas City. Perhaps it would be best to simply put a stop to this stress. But I suspect that, in the end, I’d prefer another week of it.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2011/01/kansas-city-chiefs-the-agony-of-success.html#ixzz1AKp4SaRF