Some say love makes you do some crazy things. I think that extends to one’s love of a sports team. While there are many bizarre aspects to athletics – the now-broken Curse of the Bambino, pre-game rituals, the running of the bulls, hot-dog eating contests – some of the strangest things happen outside the lines, off the fields, and in the minds of fans everywhere.
Not much is weirder then fans rooting for their own vested intere$ts. While gambling on sports is far from legal, it’s still one of the biggest draws the NFL has; check the sports pages in the fall leading up to the weekend’s college football and NFL games and look for the betting lines. However, check out the mind games this creates in some fans: Besides Pete Rose, who’s stupid enough to bet on their team all the time? And what happens if you bet against, thinking they’ve got no chance to win, and a miracle occurs? What’s your first response: “It’s crazy that they won,” or, “Well, there goes THAT bet?”
Fantasy sports are almost worse than betting in that regard. The mind begins to twist and turn, especially when one of your top fantasy players plays against your favorite team (at least, your favorite team that doesn’t exist on a Yahoo! server). How many times have I thought of a way for A-Rod (yeah, I stretched to take him this year, boy did that pay off) to have a good game but have the Yankees still lose? How much do I shudder when Eric Gagne comes onto SportsCenter now after I took him two years in a row, hoping he’d recover?
And, importantly, have I become a Chargers fan after the ridiculous seasons Tomlinson and Rivers had last year? The jury is still out on that one. (By the way, I picked up Rivers as a 10th-round backup last year. Pick of the year for sure.).
Even sports video games have gotten in on that act. I’m expecting Vince Young to drop like a rock in fantasy drafts this year because he’s on the cover of Madden, and may suffer from the infamous “Madden Curse.” Heated debates raged on the Internet whether Chicago Bears wide receiver Devin Hester should be allowed to have a 100 rating for speed in Madden – the first perfect rating in the series’ history. Even crazier, the debates gained mention on ESPN’s “NFL Live” program in the spring.
Madden’s not the only game to have an impact on fandom, though. Sometimes you just find players in a game who are better than they actually are, or they develop into stars on your virtual field before they do so on real grass and turf. Somehow Darius Miles fits into this equation as both a shooting threat (!) and an assist leader (!!) for my NBA 2K7 Blazers, and Robert Meachem from Tennessee was terrorizing my housemates in NCAA 2006 long before his breakout final season in Knoxville. My hours of scouring through Winning Eleven’s encyclopedia of international players means I’ve found a few young soccer players who are only now being called stars of the future.
The ingenious AI in 2K7 also traded me Caron Butler straight-up for backup center Jamaal Magloire, leading to a perfect long-term solution to Portland’s shooting forward problem…at least on my Xbox 360.
And the players my friends have found to annoy me! Oh, sure, Chris Leak won the national title last season for Florida, but in NCAA 2006 two years ago one of my friends led a twenty-odd point second-half comeback against me that resulted in an Xbox controller meeting the floor. That’s the only time I’ve thrown a controller in anger, but dammit, that game was MINE with three minutes left.
Which nicely wraps up my point: Sports is much more than just what happens on gameday. Sports creates a parallel world full of news coverage and scandals, but in a multi-layered sort of way it’s spun off fantasy teams, gambling, video gaming, sports blogs – all of which take the world and make it something more. What could be crazier than a parallel world for a parallel world?