My love of sports is somewhere between average fan and fanatic. I read a lot about the sports I like, I watch games when I can, I play some sort of fantasy sport for each of the three big sports in America. I even watched the World Cup and thought about making soccer a regular part of my sports diet.

However, since 2003, my unquenchable fire for the Cubs has come dangerously close to being quenched, to the point where I think I watched a sum total of about 12 innings of regular season baseball this summer. Granted that I was also planning a wedding and getting married for the bulk of that time, but that is a significant drop from watching close to every game in 2003. I assume I'll follow the Cubs more closely next season, but I wonder if I'll ever follow baseball with the fervor of my college and immediate post-college days.

My misery with the Cubs opened the way to spending more time learning about another sport, and to my surprise, basketball slowly but surely became my sport to obsess over. The only problem is, I don't have a team. I grew up in Iowa but my mom is a Chicago-native so I was at least a casual Bulls fan growing up, but I was borderline fanatic about Sir Charles Barkley. I enjoyed watching this (relatively) short, small, stocky dude get the best of all the massive centers playing the game. He was a jerk but it was fun to watch him go out there and show everyone that he was king. My interest in basketball wained after the Suns-Bulls finals where the Bulls pulled off a miracle finish to end the Charles Barkley MVP season with a whimper (and I still maintain that they fouled KJ on the last play, and maybe he would've missed the free throws, but it would've been nice to have had the chance). However, in the last two years I've watched more and more basketball and it's been refreshing to watch the team play, solid fundamentals and exciting young talent after the thug-era of me-first play and egos bigger than the stadiums they played in. After following every piece of news during the off-season and having enough information to have an opinion on almost every major player and team in the NBA, I'm safely calling myself a basketball fan again.

However, I don't have a favorite team, which is going to be necesary to actually care about what happens every season. There's only so far head-knowledge can carry you in competitive sports. It's fun enough to watch games and guys playing their hearts out during the smallest of games, but at the end of the day I need a team to follow and cheer for. I was at least a casual Bulls fan, but it was mostly residue from being a rabid Cubs fan and from spending lots of time in Chicago growing up. There was a period where B.J. Armstrong was playing with Jordan and Pippen, and everyone from Iowa (happily) became a Bulls fan to watch the Iowa grad share that stage. But since I actively rooted against the Bulls in the aforementioned Suns series, I feel like I'm a fraud if I start calling them 'My Team', especially given that they are a bandwagon favorite this season. But, since I live in Chicago now and I didn't growing up, I'm just going for it and hoping I can both celebrate a Bulls win and acknowledge that I didn't fully appreciate what happened in the 90's in Chicago basketball until recently. I have some level of regret from not getting swept away by the million-peat Bulls (my brother did, and his championship Bulls posters always made me jealous) and I still think KJ was fouled and deserved his free throws, but I'm ready to be sworn in as a card-carrying Bulls fan.

And then there's football. I hate football, but until tonight I couldn't figure out why. I love playing fantasy football, I like the talent, I'm even known to mark out the occasional evening to take in a football game. That doesn't sound like someone who hates football. So I've tried to figure out why I hate football. I originally thought it was because I didn't have a team. We were a baseball household growing up, and it was the Jordan era so our house naturally watched basketball, but no one showed much more than a passing interest in Bears football. But that didn't stop me from loving basketball, and since I just claimed the Bulls, I assumed I could do the same with the Bears.

Then I watched the second half of the Patriots-Colts game tonight and I realized why I hate football. It's not a new revelation for me, but it is different than what I would've guessed. I hate the announcers. I get annoyed with their obvious statements, I get fed up up when they take sides with one team depending on who is winning at the moment and then contradict what they said later on in same game (the best recent example of this was the Bears-Cardinals game) and I really can't stand that they never shut up. These guys talk for hours on end, sometimes about nothing. On radio that's helpful, necessary and even entertaining. On TV it's infuriating.

I'm sure few people agree with me, but I really think football would be a bigger part of my life if there was a channel where I could keep the sounds of the game, the crowd, even the players mic'd up for NBC's benefit, and mute the play-by-play team. I feel like they're trying to compete with the players in the game for who the people at home are tuning in to see. And I guess they should earn their (unreal) paychecks, but I wish they'd give it a break, at least when something was going on worth focusing on. The announcers may even be just as bad in other sports, but I don't notice it for one reason or another.

And it seems like the camera shows the announcers far more than they used to. I don't see this happening a lot in other sports. Show me the coaches, or the players or even the fans, but why do I need to see the faces of the voices that are ruining my enjoyment of America's new pastime?

It has nothing to do with football, yet because of it I can't enjoy a game. So that's why I hate football.

/rant

Labels: Other