['Hamas' Jenkins]

I'm going to keep this to one team/person per sport, because in all honesty, there's nothing worse than being a Mizzou fan.

Honorable Mentions:

Chiefs v. Broncos, 1997; Chiefs v. Colts 2003; Missouri Football v. South Carolina 2013; Missouri Football v. Kansas 2008; Missouri Football v. Auburn 2013; Missouri Football v. Oklahoma 2007; Missouri Football v. Oklahoma State 2008; Missouri Basketball v. Kansas 2012; Missouri Basketball v. Norfolk State 2012; Missouri Basketball v. UConn 2009; Missouri Basketball v. Arizona 1994; Missouri Basketball v. Oklahoma 2002; Phil Mickelson v. Henrik Stenson, 2016; Phil Mickelson v. Justin Rose 2013; Phil Mickelson v. Retief Goosen 2004; Phil Mickelson v. David Toms 2002; Phil Mickelson v. Payne Stewart 1999; St. Louis Cardinals v. Boston Red Sox, 2004, 2013; St. Louis Cardinals v. Atlanta Braves 1996; St. Louis Cardinals v. San Francisco Giants 2012

*Missouri Football v. Nebraska 1997. Few games epitomize what being a Missouri fan is like quite as thoroughly as this one. If you were going to show one game to your child to understand what being a Mizzou fan is like, this is the game. Beaten down program? Check. Powerhouse coming in to play? Check. Plucky play from physically outmatched players? Check. Vicious throat rip to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory as time expired? Check Blatant rules violations wholly ignored by the officiating crew? Check.

Mizzou led by 7 when a run-only offense from Nebraska got the ball with 62 seconds left, needing to go 67 yards. On the final play of the game, that vituperous one who sucks the penis Shelvin Wiggins kicked a ball he dropped up in the air (a penalty), allowing it to hang in the air for enough time (unbeknownst to Wiggins, because God is a ****) for a rat bastard named Matt Davison to dive down and make the catch. The fans storm the field thinking the game is over. They're wrong. Missouri is deflated and folds in OT. The North Endzone must have been built upon an Indian pedophile's pet cemetary.

Did I call my grandparents when Mizzou last held the ball to celebrate, thinking they could get one first down to run out the clock? Yes. Did I destroy a five gallon bucket with an aluminum bat after the game? Also yes. Is this game why I've never trusted an MU football team late in the game since? Absolutely.

*UCLA v. Missouri 1994. If you could condense a coach into an essential oil, this game was Norm Stewart. A team filled with scrappy, marginally-talented farm boys and a few hard-as-nails transfers (Paul O'Liney, much love) battled the clear #1 team in the nation to the very end of the game. Eighth-seeded Missouri, led by an awesome performance from O'Liney (5-6 from three, 9/13 overall) pulled ahead by one point with just over four seconds left after Julian Winfield made the two most pressure-filled free throws I've ever seen a Tiger attempt. What happens next has been replayed in NCAA Tournament packages for a quarter century. Norm inexplicably doesn't have Jason Sutherland check Tyus Edney until half court, at which point he has so much speed and momentum that he whizzes right by him, drives to the lane, and lofts a floater over the outstretched arms of Buck Grimm. Good. Season over. UCLA rolls to an NCAA title, and Norm never wins another tournament game. Every basketball team from junior high on sets up a defense after a timeout. Norm decides not to get the hands out of UCLA's best playmaker and best ball handler when they need to go the length of the court. Other teams got closer to the Final Four ('09, '02, '94), but none ever had their hearts ripped out quite like this.

*Phil Mickelson 2006 US Open. Phil won the Bell South by a dozen strokes earlier in the year, then cruised to his second title at Augusta. After winning at Baltusrol the prior August, he came to Winged Foot with the opportunity to do something only Tiger Woods and Ben Hogan had ever done: win three straight professional majors. Jack Nicklaus never did it, nor did Sam Snead, Palmer, or Watson. This was supposed to be a different kind of Mickelson. After coming under the tutelage of Dave Pelz, he began trying to improve the quality of his misses to increase his ability to get up and down. Unfortunately, Phil's swing has a tendency to get too long, which causes significant issues with timing on the downswing, and can lead to big misses, like hitting it in a ****ing trash can on 17 (where he saved par), followed by the inexplicable decision to hit driver on 18. His caddie said Phil couldn't get the ball far enough down with a 4 wood to give him a clean approach to the green. That's horseshit. That hole played 450 yards that day and Phil averaged 301 off the tee. He could have easily hit his 4 wood 240-250 yards and given himself no more than a five iron into that green. Compounding the mistake was trying to hit a banana cut with a three iron around the tree. It smacked solid. He tried to flight his third shot high above the trees, but it over cut and splattered into a downhill, fried egg lie. With greens running 12-13 on the stimpmeter and away from him, he had no shot. Over the green. Chip shot to tie ran eight feet past. Open gone. Making it worse was Geoff Ogilvy winning his only major after a miracle chip in on the 17th hole (he probably makes triple more often than he pars that hole). It was a complete collapse, a mixture of horrible course management, a bad swing, and bad luck. It was Phil.

*St. Louis Cardinals v. Houston Astros 2005. This doesn't seem as devastating now as it was at the time. If you're in your mid-thirties, you aren't quite old enough to remember the great Cardinal teams of the 80s, but just old enough to remember the awful Joe Torre teams of the early 90s. The year before the Cardinals were indisputably the best team in baseball. They're the only team I can think of that had three eight win players on it. But a bunch of idiots from Boston got hot at the right time and swept them out of the first World Series I'd ever seen them play in. The next year the Cardinals were arguably the best team in the game again, and their rotation was bolstered by the health of Chris Carpenter and the addition of Mark Mulder. After Mulder pissed down his leg in Game 2 and the Astros took Games 3 and 4 in Houston (including the only time I've ever seen a player get ejected mid AB in the post-season, **** you Phil Cuzzi), the Cardinals were down two runs in the 9th inning (after a bullshit three run homer that just snuck over the Crawford Boxes) with two outs in an elimination game, Eckstein and Edmonds reached, and Pujols hit an 0-1 slider from Brad Lidge on an intercept trajectory for Voyager 1. Bill Simmons called this result a "Dead Man Walking Game" noting that no team can recover from a loss like that, and that the Cardinals losing the series would cause him to have to create a new level of losing. I was a first-year graduate student making $7800 a year. I was pumped. I bought will-call tickets on eBay, drove 500 miles, met my best friend, and we went to Game 6, expecting a triumph. Instead, we got the last game ever played at Busch II. Roy Oswalt was dominant and Mark Mulder was the disloyal, fool-ass bitchmade punk every Cardinal fan feared he would be in a big game. Dan Haren turned into one of the better starters in the latter half of the 2000s. Mulder worked on his short game. I drove back 500 miles whose only playoff fan experiences were blowing a 3-1 lead against the Braves in '96, the spectacular meltdown of a generational lefty in 2000, and the meltdowns of '01, '02, and '04. After '05, the Cardinals felt every bit as cursed as any of the other teams I rooted for.

*Chiefs v. Colts 1996. This was not the best Chiefs team of my life, but it is the one that broke me. For Christmas 1993 I got a magnetic dry-erase board with helmets and placards for all NFL teams. I would make predictions for each game each week, then track my W-L records over the course of the season. This Chiefs team should have been different. Tim Brown ran into a ref on a slant route in OT, allowing a pass to float to James Hasty for a game-winning pick six. They beat the dog piss out of Denver in Denver, lost in Miami because they are the Chiefs, but were what I thought was a legitimate contender. After all, I was a homer. This game disabused me of any such optimism. Bono was so incompetent, Marty so shellshocked, and Elliot so shitiful that I literally could not believe what I was watching. It didn't seem real. It didn't seem fair. It didn't seem...deserved. What I learned that day was what William Munny already knew: deserve's got nothing to do with it. I destroyed the board that day. Since then, my Chiefs fandom shifted from faith and optimism to rage and ultimately...apathy. Some fights change fighters. Ali and Frazier were never the same after Manila. Meldrick Taylor was never the same after the premature stoppage against Chavez, nor Mugabe after Hagler. This game ruined me as a Chiefs fan.