Buckeye of the storm

Why sports are ruining my life

I hate sports (I don’t mean that).

I hate sports so, so much. As if I don’t have enough stresses in my life, what with being a college graduate who delivers pizzas for a living and still wets the bed with stunning regularity. No, I have to add sports teams to my life—teams I love and care for more than any member of my immediate family (Mom, Dad, I didn’t mean that; please don’t change the locks).

Thus I have these “teams” which I must “root for” and who—when they lose—give me “erectile dysfunction” for months. I invest my heart and soul into these silly clubs of silly grown men playing silly games, and face devastation equal to watching a cherished pet microwaved on “popcorn” whenever they lose (that’s ridiculous; I hate pets).

It all began during my youth in Portland, Oregon. In 1992 the Portland Trail Blazers were steamrolling through the NBA’s western conference, well on their way, I believed, to an NBA championship and immortal glory. The day of every playoff game, the principal would stand in front of my entire school during lunch and orchestrate a chant where one side of the cafeteria yelled, “Go!” and the other half yelled “Blazers!” I always screwed it up by jumping the gun on the “Blazers” part. Sixteen years later, my tendency to be premature still rears its ugly head (ladies, don’t listen! I’m widely known as a “partially adequate” lover!).

What I didn’t see coming was the Ocean’s Eleven of basketball known as Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. When the Bulls put the final nail in the Blazers coffin in game six of the 1992 NBA finals, I bawled my little seven-year-old eyes out. I knew pain for the first time in my life, and its name was “a fourth quarter meltdown on par with the Barbarian destruction of the Roman Empire.” Ever since, I’ve watched the Blazers in agony as they moved from the mythic heroics of the Clyde Drexler era to the mythic rage of the Rasheed Wallace era to the mythic incoherence of the Darius Miles era, all the while growing more despondent as my team fell to the bottom dregs of the league (I don’t mean to be so harsh, Portland; I’m sorry).

Then I moved to Ohio where I was forced to become a Cleveland Cavaliers fan, which in the years before LeBron James, was like rooting for the comatose kid at the Special Olympics—the one whose gurney they just set at the starting line in hopes that the wind might take him home (but now LeBron James is the best argument for giving up on heterosexuality, so go Cavs!).

Then there is the Ohio State Buckeyes—the mighty, the powerful, the divine Ohio State Buckeyes, armed with a university athletic program with more money behind it than God. In my years living in the greatest state in the country between Illinois and Pennsylvania (suck it, Indiana), I learned that Ohio State sports is not just a group of over-developed man-boy athletes taking classes that function on a fourth-grade reading level. No, sir. On Ohio State ride the hopes and dreams of a passionately dedicated nation of fans. In my travels across the country, I could walk into any bar in any city with my Buckeyes T-shirt on and instantly find myself at least one new friend, if not an entire booth-full. And now as everyone knows, we fans have lived through and personally witnessed some of the darkest, most heartbreaking times of this great program.

Therefore, I must waste this week’s column discussing my complete and utter paralysis after OSU’s second-straight National Championship loss to the Gators of (vomit) Florida rather than writing about an on-going war or U.S. job loss or global warming. If Americans cared half as much about the issues and debates that effect their lives as they do about their favorite sports teams, maybe we wouldn’t find ourselves drenched in all the problems facing us these days (Don’t listen! I’m not in my right mind right now! I love you, Buckeyes!).

Yes, this past Monday Ohio State basketball, led by mutant man-child Greg Oden, fell to Florida, just as they did in football three months ago, and now for the rest of college sports history I have to listen to every jackass sportscaster slurp Florida for winning both championships in the same year. After watching OSU lose, I walked to a bar to try to drink my troubles away only to be confronted by a slew of idiots singling me out for my Buckeyes jersey and saying such incalculably genius things as, “Huh. Guess it turns out a gator can eat a buckeye.”

Yeah, asshole, physiologically speaking the same would be true if Florida’s mascot was Your Mother’s Loose Vagina, but you don’t see me harping on that point (that was inappropriate; I swear, I’m just upset).

What’s worse is that I hated Florida to begin with, most of all coach Billy Donovan, who I once read is a strong admirer of George W. Bush, which is like saying you admire a brain-dead monkey that a scientist sat in front of a typewriter with the instructions to reproduce the complete works of William Shakespeare and so far the only coherent word the monkey has typed in a sea of gobbledygook is “apricot.” Secondly, who doesn’t hate Florida frontman Joakim Noah? He reminds me of that guy in high school who thought it was the height of hilarity to stick a carrot into his rectum and try to make a smaller, nerdy kid eat it (unfortunately, that example is completely autobiographical).

At least the Buckeye nation can take solace in the fact that Ohio State will produce Oden, one of the great centers of a generation, while Florida’s Joakim Noah, who can’t hit a jump shot outside of 3.2 feet, will likely produce only embarrassing dancing and paternity cases (man, I’m being such a bitch about this!).

Furthermore, all those Florida fans will have to forever live with the disturbing, disquieting knowledge burning deeply, profoundly, and achingly within their troubled souls that they are from Florida (seriously though, if the United States was a scrotum, Florida would be a herpe).

Yes, devotion to your favorite athletic teams is a truly awful endeavor. Your devotion will only leaves you too sapped of strength to face any of the problems in the real world. Also it will someday fracture your marriage, alienate you from your friends, and put you in the grave ten years early—likely mere months from your team’s first championship in 92,000 years. Yet we will all plug onward. I’ll be there for the Cavs in the playoffs. I’ll be there for the Blazers on draft day. And I’ll be there for opening kickoff of Ohio State football season next year, proud that while we may have lost twice to Florida, at least our mascot is not a piece of your mother’s anatomy (seriously, I’m so sorry).