I Will Never Rip Their Hearts Out, But I Guess I'M OK

Just a little bit about me as a sports fan. As a kid, probably from age seven until thirteen or fourteen, I was fanatic about sports. I collected every kind of baseball card - and assured my father that my acumen at acquiring memorabilia would pay for college. I watched as much sports as possible, and obsessed over box scores in the next day's papers - all to the bewilderment of my parents, who neither liked or understood much of any sport (I recall my mom returning from a meeting and asking me what it meant that a colleague said that she was "batting .400." I explained that it was an incredible batting average in baseball and was a compliment, to which my mom replied that succeeding only 4 out of every 10 times didn't seem like much of a compliment). My first distinct sports memory is listening to game 6 of the 1986 Celtics-Rockets NBA finals on the radio, sitting on the front bench seat of a family friend's American-made sedan as our two families rode back from some wooded corner of New England where Indians had gathered to sing and eat.

As a sports fan, and to this day, I haven't been as obsessive about specific franchises so much as specific teams. I generally support the Red Sox, bu as a member of Red Sox nation, I am pretty much a disappointment. Beyond that, the U.S. men's soccer team and the URI men's basketball team are probably the only two other teams that I actually root for. However, Elway-era Broncos, Tom Brady's Patriots, Kaka's AC Milan, Thierry Henry's Arsenal, Ryne Sandberg's Cubs, Chris Mullin's Warriors - these were all my teams, at one point or another - and so are Tim Duncan's Spurs. The methodical, un-glamorous, "fundamentally-sound" - generally aligned to the philosophy of anti-showmanship.
My current relationship with sports involves the occasional ball game on TV, the occasional game in person, more for atmosphere than anything else, and a little more attention paid to the playoffs. Bill Simmons, who writes so well from the perspective of the true fanatic, summed up my continued interest in sports perfectly:

Like so many other diehard fans, I watch thousands and thousands of hours of sports every year hoping something special will happen, whether it's a 60-point game in basketball, a no-hitter during a Red Sox game, a seven-run comeback in the ninth, a back-and-forth NFL game, a boxing pay-per-view or whatever else. Occasionally, it pays off.

All of this, a lengthy prelude to the fact that, after watching a couple games in the the Spurs-Jazz series and flipping through a couple of games of the Cavs-Pistons series, I chose to skip Thursday's Game 5 in Detroit. Mistake by me, I guess.

So, Saturday, after waking up at 6.30 AM to pack my sister's assorted things into a van, and driving up to Cambridge and back, followed by an hour out at the Narragansett High School fields in my Quixotic quest to "get back into playing shape," I settled in for a day of sports on television: a dull Spain-Latvia Euro 2008 qualifier (Spain, for all of your talent, why can't you play beautiful? And, Sr. Aragones, why don't you play Cesc?), one of those preposterous but somehow dramatic minnow-versus-giant games in San Marino-Germany, the occasionally-delayed Sox-Yankees game, the exciting prospect of technical footie from a young US team in San Jose's US-China friendly, the Cavs closing out the Pistons with a wonderful performance from Daniel Gibson, and finally, a dull DC United-LA Galaxy game.
After seven hours alternating between TV and napping, part of me says, What a waste of a day! But another part of me remembers why I love sports: the emergence of a new superstar in LeBron and the jubilation of the fans in Cleveland "who've suffered for so many years;" the passion, desperation, and art of European soccer; and the potential emergence of a new generation of US Soccer players -- not at the level of the world's greats yet, but getting better. So, here are some excellent soccer blogs, part of a growing enthusiasm for the sport in the country:

SideLine Views out of LA
Ives Galercep out of New Jersey
Climbing the Ladder

In case you are fanatic about that sort of thing. By the way, anyone interested in a trip to Barcelona for a US-Catalan friendly in October?