As anyone who has ever followed sports at all knows, we St. Louisians are big baseball fans. Like, almost sick in our loyalty to the game. It’s been written about by actual sportswriters before, but I would – as many of them have - argue that the Cardinals fanbase has higher levels of emotional devotion and greater knowledge of the game in general than any other fanbase in the country, with the possible exception of Cubs fans (as much as it pains me to admit this) and pre-Curse Red Sox Nation.
And the smattering of really old dudes who follow the Dodgers because they remember when they played in Brooklyn.
Anyway, if you grow up in a sports-mad city, one of two things happens: either you become completely, impossibly obsessed with sports, or you hate them for life. There’s rarely an in-between. It’s one or the other.
I chose obsession.
And I didn’t limit it to baseball. I love hockey, following both my own St. Louis Blues and my family’s Vancouver Canucks – so you can imagine how totally awesome this last season was. I also adore college basketball. However, coming of age in the early 90s meant that I became a Duke fan, a situation I’m in no condition to change today barring some serious therapy. But if it makes you like me any better, I am slightly embarrassed by this.
I’m not big on football or the NBA (apart from Friday Night Lights, the Suns, and Sir Charles), but I will happily watch it. I will also watch soccer, tennis, boxing, golf, NASCAR, and anything Olympic. I even got into cricket one summer before BBC America realized that cricket is just about the dumbest fucking thing to show in an American market.
(Though I will point out that if, in New York, you ever go to the Target near Jamaica Bay on the weekends, you might find a pick-up cricket match on the stretch of grass between the shopping center and the Belt Parkway. BBC programmers, take note!)
Then I moved to Boston, where I lived for four and a half years. And, as you might expect, I fell a little bit in love with Red Sox Nation. Given that they’re an AL team, I saw little conflict of interest when it came to my Cards. Particularly because at that point, the Curse was still in full force. And, really, I have a serious weakness for lifelong losers.
Also, I’ve read The Stand. I didn’t want to be on Stephen King’s bad side, no matter how many metal pins hold his body together.
So I cheered like crazy in an Upper West Side bar when the Red Sox beat the Yankees in the seventh game of the 2004 ALCS. I even managed to get excited when they beat my beloved Cardinals in the World Series that year (a series I compared at the time to a cage match between my father and my mother - no matter who won, I would lose). Of course, had the Sox not swept the Cards, I might have been a bit less blasé about the whole thing. But it felt like nothing less than destiny, and I couldn’t help but get swept up in the moment.
I jumped around, I called all my friends in Boston, I got so unbelievably hammered that I spent the next day at work running to the bathroom every twenty minutes to either puke out the remainder of my guts or try desperately not to puke out the remainder of my guts out when it became clear that one of my bosses was in the stall next to me.
(I also choose to believe that the karmic payback for being gracious in defeat had something to do with the Cards’ World Series win in 2006. Which was, it should be said, one of the – if not the - greatest days of my life. I wept. In public. In a hotel bar in Bethesda. I say this even though I'm now a married woman, which means that I had a wedding day that should, according to women’s magazines, have been the greatest day of my life. I mean, yes, in a way it was, but along with the World Series win. Not instead of. And god bless my husband – he understands and accepts this. Why? Keep reading.)
Then I radically changed my life strategy and fell in love with a man instead of a sports team.
A man who had gone to high school in Boston and hated the town so much that when he moved to New York in the late 80s, he became a Yankees fan out of pure spite.
This proved to be a problem. I had too many Boston friends and had absorbed too much Boston mojo. I actually once sneered at a five-year-old in a Jeter jersey. And then chastised his mother for letting him wear it in Boston. (“Seriously: you should know better.”) My single favorite Boston memory is of the night after the Patriots won the 2002 Super Bowl, when the drunken, blessed-out fans in the street chanted not “Go Pats,” but “Yankees suck.”
(Football fans may be confused by this. Didn’t the Pats beat the Rams that year? As in the St. Louis Rams? As in Elizabeth’s hometown team? Yes. They did. And despite the fact that I don’t consider the Rams to be particularly St. Louisian, I was not hugely pleased by this result. I was only pleased by the Boston fans’ reaction. All this being said: I fucking hate the Patriots with an intensity that comes close to killing my liver, so overwhelmed is it with the amount of blood-level hate it has to filter out.)
But when you’re in love and all that, you want your partner to be happy. And I happened to choose a guy whose own happiness happened to be hugely dependent on the Yankees’ winning percentage. Because his sports-nuttiness puts my own sports-nuttiness to complete and utter shame. One of my favorite games is asking him to provide World Series stats at random and vaguely inappropriate moments. Like, at a large dinner party where he’s managing to come off as normal: “So, uh, say: who was the MVP of the ’53 Series?” Or, at the grocery-store check-out line while he’s counting out change: “How many games did the Series last in ’73?” Or, while he’s in the bathroom: “Hey! When’s the last time the Series was best-of-nine?”
(This is extra mean, because the Yankees lost the series in question in eight games.)
This is a man who actually owns books not just about Larry Bowa, but by Larry Bowa. As in: Larry Bowa: I Still Hate to Lose. No joke: he has a google news alert set up for the guy. We have his baseball card on our refrigerator. If Larry Bowa were a chick, I might be a little jealous.
Hell, I’m still a little jealous.
But he loves the Yankees, and I love him, and so ... I love the Yankees. If the Yanks were an NL team, it would be another matter, but they aren’t, and so, slowly but surely, I have switched to the dark side. I got to know the players, the history. YES suddenly became my most-watched TV network. I stopped hating Derek Jeter. I started hating Kyle Farnsworth. And now I am, undeniably, a Yankees fan.
Even so, I hid it for as long as I could. Because let’s be honest: rooting for the Yankees is roughly equivalent to lobbying for higher gas prices.
When I finally revealed my change of heart to my Boston friends, I was hoping for the best but expecting the worst. I got the latter. One representative and not at all tongue-in-cheek email:
“YOU'RE A FUCKING YANKEES FAN?!
“Seriously, are you going to be wearing Crocs at dinner? What about short shorts that say ‘Bootylicious’ on the back? Is your cellphone set to play the Hamster Dance music? Going shopping later for a pink NYPD sweatshirt?
“I don't even know who you are any more.”
So there was that.
Then I told my friend Annie. Annie’s a Marblehead native who once nearly started a fight with a pair of Yankees fans. In a very nice restaurant. In Italy. Three thousand miles from home, and she still found Yankees fans to hate.
I came out to Annie while we were in Vegas because I figured that the promise of booze and gambling might help dull the pain of my revelation. I was wrong. She just stared into her Jack Daniels like a six-year-old fifteen minutes into Bambi.
“Please stop,” she said. “I might start crying.”
My own father wasn’t even sympathetic. And he even used to follow the Yankees back when he was a kid, when Yankees radio broadcasts were, inexplicably, the only baseball broadcasts available in British Columbia. Still: “What’s next,” he asked. “You’re gonna be a Lakers fan?”
(Aside: if I can have a nickname based on Lakers legend Elgin Baylor and STILL hate the Lakers, I think that’s a hate that can withstand anything.)
It even gets me into trouble with my St. Louis friends. The weekend before last, while I was watching the Cards play at Busch Stadium with my friend Ellen, we were wondering whether Chris Duncan would be better suited for the AL, where he could be a DH. (First base for the Cards being unavailable, of course, as it’s the position of franchise player Albert Pujols.)
Suddenly I found myself chattering on about Chris’s brother Shelley, who plays for the Yankees, and why it pains me to see Jason Giambi’s shrunken head out at first when he can barely even catch the ball, and how Shelley’s forearms could crush a fully grown man, and did you know he had to dress up as the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz last year?
Ellen just looked at me as if I’d grown a second head.
In any case, here’s my point. I have plenty of friends who wouldn’t be caught dead in a stadium, who think baseball is boring and ice hockey boorish. They wonder how I can simultaneously love musical theater and the baseball post-season. They know not to try to talk to me during the first weekend of the NCAA tournament about anything other than the NCAA tournament - but that doesn’t mean they like it.
On a basic level, they think sports are stupid.
Usually I respond with long-winded speeches about fandom-as-community, about the intense human drama of an extra-innings pitching duel, about learning the limits of the mind and body in the seventh game of a Stanley Cup final.
But what I really mean is this: being a sports fan is, at heart, about fierce, unadulterated feeling. Take away the commentary and the merchandising and that jerk-off high school quarterback you hated, and it’s all right there. With sports, you get family. You get hope. And you get love. Even if your everyday personal life lacks all of the above.
It’s one of the many reasons I knew I wasn’t ever going to let go of my then-boyfriend: if I loved him so much I had come to love the Yankees, I knew I had stumbled upon something truly special.
And so, Reader, I married him.
And yes, Reader, I married his team as well. Even though Jorge Posada totally pees on his hands, even though Hideki Matsui brings his porn collection on road-trips, even though A-Rod routinely makes me want to throw things at my television. Because when the Yankees win, my husband throws his arms in the air in raw, animalistic joy.
And my own heart makes like the Grinch in the face of a hand-holding chorus of Whos.
Sport fans aren’t necessarily stupid. But they are necessarily loudly and passionately human. And by thoughtlessly excluding sports from your cultural field of vision, you can miss out on the latter and focus unduly on the former.
Which, I hate to say it, means that you think most people in this country are idiots. Which in turn means that you’re an over-generalizing, unsympathetic snob. From which then follows an even more unpleasant conclusion: you’re the one who’s stupid.
You don’t have to like sports – I’m not asking everyone to tune into Sportscenter each night. You like what you like. Fine by me. But if you meet a girl or guy who’s into sports, don’t dismiss them off-hand. After all, somewhere along the line they’ve learned to love.
And if you’re lucky enough, they might end up loving you just as well.
Even if that means you have to hear about Larry Bowa every single goddamned day.
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love is a battlefield
well, hello there
So, as you can see, I've been on a bit of a hiatus. There were a few things I needed to accomplish this late winter and early spring, including but not limited to: writing the proposal for my second book, getting married, and five-starring Cult of Personality on Guitar Hero.
There is, however, news to be relayed. First of all, for those of you who might have missed out on the hardcover print run of Biting the Wax Tadpole (I think there are a few copies left, but it'll take Amazon a while to get them to you), there will be a paperback version published this fall by the totally awesome Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House. I'll put the Amazon info in the sidebar eventually, but for now, you can pre-order here.
Second, Penguin is publishing their own be-Britished paperback in the UK this June, so if you're totally offended by the use of "color" instead of "colour," this may be the book for you. Again, you can pre-order here. (It has a new cover! In which I have hot skinny legs! And a totally James Van der Beek fivehead!)
Other less directly relevant information after the jump. (I cannot tell you, by the way how long it took me to figure out how to code these goddamned expandable posts. I am actually an html/css moron.)
So if you're a fan of my writing (the funny part, not necessarily the language part) but not of my lazy-ass posting schedule, then I direct you to Jennsylvania, the far-more-frequently updated blog of newly anointed NYT bestselling author Jen Lancaster. Full disclosure: we share an agent. But that's not why I'm pimping her. Jen gets at in her work what I try to get at every day in mine: hard truths. And she's the total antithesis of all those moderately evil chick-memoirs running around these days. (Stephanie Klein, I am looking at you.) Plus: she's hilarious. Which is a word I don't just throw around for the heck of it.
Like, lolcats? Sure, funny. But lolcats combined with social theory? Hilarious.
Jen is more hilarious than a lolcat-Foucault mash-up, and if that isn't the highest praise a geek like me can give, I don't know what is. So go, read. If you're offended by the pink and green covers of her books, then you're just being an asshole and missing out.
Fourth, I was recently home in St. Louis, where I was lucky enough to get a chance to see the Cards game on Stan Musial Day. If you don't know who he is, don't worry, because that probably means that you're not a baseball fan. If you do know who he is, however, all I can say is this: at eighty-seven he is still a total bad-ass. Best line of the day? In reference to needing help to stand at the podium, he said "The reason I have a bad knee: I hit too many triples." Then he took a swing. I honest-to-god teared up a little. Cards fans around the world: be proud.
I also now have a fake bronze statue of The Man, which is currently sitting in a place of honor next to my husband's Larry Bowa autograph.
(What - you think I'd marry someone who wasn't also a complete nerd?)
In any case, I'm out of the weeds for the moment, and I hope to begin posting regularly again soon, particularly if I'm lucky enough to be given a chance to write the next book I've been working on. Because that will mean that I won't have to get a job working the counter at our local video store and can instead focus on composing the irrelevant and self-indulgent bons mots that make this blog the irrelevant and self-indulgent marvel it is today.
Thanks for sticking with me - and I hope you all enjoyed your holiday weekend!
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