Tell me that the Acid Queen is the first sports fan to ever have to resort to this sort of extreme action:
See, my strategy worked--I completely ignore the game, and the Canes win.
As insane as it might sound, I've done this before too. How can it be that you can love a sport and a team so much, that one could actually be driven to not watch the game at all?
On the one hand, you could consider behavior like this to be evidence of borderline mental illness. It's almost like there's some cosmic force in the sky that's ready to punish you at a moment's notice for loving something too much. But the second you let it go, the cruel cosmic force rewards (or punishes you again, depending on how you look at it) your team with a victory.
On the other hand, it can be seen as a rational response. After all, somebody has to lose, and in sports, the odds are always 50/50 that your heart is going to get broken. So why invest all that emotion when you're liable to get crushed in the end anyway?
I'm sure that from the outside looking in, this sort of behavior has to be incomprehensible to folks who don't care about the games we devote so much time and energy to. But it's also the reason many of us rejoiced with fans of the Boston Red Sox in 2004 or the New York Rangers ten years earlier. Although the odds will always be against us, it's nice to know there's always a chance the longshot will pull through and our loyalty will be rewarded.
I admit to having done this. The frustration of watching your team play poorly can at times become too much to bear, not unlike averting one’s eyes at a particularly gruesome scene in a movie.
“… in sports, the odds are always 50/50 that your heart is going to get broken.”
I’m a Cubs/Blackhawks/Vikings fan. I would kill for those odds.
or consider this: most of the Mighty Ducks playoff games started around 9 PM EST, which translates into 5 AM in Moscow, Russia. to catch the game on one of the few locations in the city which receive Sweden’s CANAL+ or UK’s NASN (they carry NHL games), one had to get up at 4:15, drive to the sportsbar downtown, then watch the game until, say, 8 AM, and from there head off happily to work! and manage to not only stay awake for 9 hours straight, but actually to work and meet deadlines! all of my colleagues thought it was beyond crazy. that’s right. it’s Cup Crazy.
As a WhiteSox fan, I felt the exact same way during last year’s WS. There were moments (like when the WhiteSox were in any trouble) where I’d be very tempted to turn the channel or walk into the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to watch it.
Still, you can’t enjoy the euphoria quite the same if you don’t live through the anguish. The highs and lows of sports can be a drug, so let it ride
I went through all the stress and everything in 2002, and almost wound up in divorce court because of it.
I thought about listening to the Canes radiocasts (which I did during the season–since every time I watched the game, the Canes lost), but when the ‘Canes went down 2-0 to the Habs in the first round while I was listening (and dropped Game 1 of the ECF while I was in the house) that was pretty much it for me.
So there you go.