metaphysical, rhetorical, Hasidic-like discussion on the ability of the human
heart to withstand pain and torture. For members of the aging, baby-boomer
generation, it’s a germane subject: a thousand stories for a thousand hearts.
No question, this generation is the first to deal with wide-scale divorce and
the peculiar segue into adult dating, decreased marriage rates, and unpunched
biological clocks — many stories laden with disappointment and heartache.
Keeping score, I insist on tallying my first broken heart at age 13. The
memory, replete with sounds and smells, is still as fresh as a cool morning.
Yes, it counts! Since this tender, innocent age, I count 5.5 major,
smell-the-vapors-and-take-to-the-bed broken hearts. This totally ignores the
countless, garden variety, mini-breaks. That’s one per every six years. That’s
pretty damn regular. It is not a good thing. While the cause may be, more or
less, the same, the effect intensified exponentially with each incident. From
No. 1, where my Homecoming Queen Pam unceremoniously ditched me for
car-stealing Patrick, to the last one, which I’m not even allowed to talk
about, each propelled me through stormy waters of malo shit. Denial,
running away, tears, depression and, as a last resort — when, as the song
says, they were pouring water on a drowning man — a life-buoy grab at therapy.
I’m getting to a sports point, really. It’s coming in the next verse. Our
parents, not to mention the rest of human history, did not have the time or
inclination to deal with this. They had, I’m sure, their own problems. The
heart, however, stayed intact, able to do its primary duty of beating away. So
the question remains, is there a point where the heart just shuts down and
says, “Fuck you, Jack! I’m done with this every six years deal. From now on,
I’m working on beating and getting your sorry ass to Randall’s. Keep your
so-called friends away from me!”
“If you’ve got leaving on your mind, tell me now…” Indeed. If you
don’t know by now about the city of Cleveland, with its 573,822 grieving souls
getting dumped on by its lover of 50 years, the Browns, well, this is probably
the point at which you usually stop reading anyway. Make no mistake, the hurt
of a spurned sportsfan is as filled with tumult as an icy, mid-November gale on
Lake Erie. Any Browns fan, to one degree or another, is feeling all the
feelings: anger, sadness, regret, and a soft-focus view of the good old days,
which we all experience in the flotsam of a good thing gone bad.
The ultimate effect of teams switching cities at the capricious whim of the
soiled, crumpled dollar will be, I suspect, a withholding of trust, a justified
reticence to get involved with another team again, and a casual callowness to
the new girl in town. (Ouch, doesn’t this sound familiar?) This is for the fans
of the jilted city. For the soon-to-be fans of a Baltimore or a Nashville,
well, how much would you trust a person who came to you in the polluted wake of
a deceitful and sordid marriage? As a fan of these new teams, I’d be careful
not to get overly involved with the shiny, new penny. You know the glittery
varnish is oh-so-thin.
The long-term ramifications of this new age in sports, with its nary a
pretense of decorum, open-your-mouth-and-shovel-it-in greed, is difficult to
ascertain. Speaking for myself, I’m more and more put off by everything: media
over-hype, stupid, selfish, 25-year-old millionaires; and the other by-product
of free agency, rampant player movement, resulting in incumbent fan
depersonalization. I can envision a time when I spend the day with my old man,
an old-line, disillusioned sports fanatic, at the racetrack — where horses
don’t hold press conferences, do horseshoe deals with Nike, demand better oats,
or complain about the jockey.
My kids, the only experience I have with the next generation and the people
who will support professional sports through the first half of the 21st
century, have less interest in commercial sports than in listening to me
prattle on about the Allman Brothers. Are they typical? Are athletes and team
owners killing the goose that laid the golden egg? I just shook up my
fortune-telling Magic 8-Ball. It said, typically, “Only time will tell.”
Parting shots: My back aches, hands and heels are blistered from too
much golf. Nevertheless, with a painfully spry bounce to my step, I trundled
out on Monday morning to get my Dallas-Morning News. I was anxious to
see the whining commence. The “ATOMIC BOMB DROPPED ON FT. WORTH” sized
headlines didn’t disappoint. I don’t know how or why the Cowboys lost. Not
wanting to view another Dallas slaughter, I was on the links. This loss is good
for fans, even bored Cowboy fans. It’s good for the NFL, which was losing
credibility as a one-team league. Dallas’ next two games, against Oakland and
K.C., now loom as something other than another revolting display of Dallas
mouth- and fire-power. Looks like the world’s most obnoxious team will actually
have to play its way into the Super Bowl.n
This article appears in November 17 • 1995 and November 17 • 1995 (Cover).