Hate the Yankees? Then Do Yourself a Favor, and Root For the Yankees!
11/06/2009
I was born in Las Vegas, Nevada, on a date that no "This Day in Sports" archive I have found has shown to be significant in any way. Oh well; at least the Brewers won that day.
My parents were, as is the case with almost all children I think, the primary determinants of which sports teams I was going to root (or, as the Euros say, barrack) for, and being that they were both raised in Milwaukee and attended Marquette University, I was pretty much destined to become a prototypical Cheesehead; a lover of all things Wisconsin from the college teams to the finally-made-it-in-2008 Brewers to the Robert-"Tractor"-Trailer-for-Dirk-Nowitski Bucks to the when I entered the world annually cellar-dwelling Green Bay Packers. Growing up in Vegas, I didn't (and we still don't) have any local pro team to back, so I backed the Wisconsin teams, in addition to UNLV, the AAA Las Vegas Stars (and their then-affiliated parent club the San Diego Padres, though both the name and the affiliate have changed since then; we're now the AAA club for the Blue Jays via the Dodgers, and are currently called the 51's), and the carousel of minor league teams that had runs in the city that varied from one to about five or six years, including the Posse (CFL), Dustdevils (CISL), Thunder (IHL, and by far the longest tenured), Outlaws (XFL), Bandits (IBL) and more recently the Gladiators (AFL) and the Wranglers (ECHL, and the only team I mentioned that is still in the city).
Sports became a big fascination of mine, particularly football, as the Packers won the first of their two Super Bowl appearances over the Patriots with my parents in attendance at the Super Dome in New Orleans. This big stage win at a very impressionable age probably assured my love of pro football over all other sports (though now I think it's a very close race between it and college basketball). The Packers weren't just my favorite team; they were my team, a fact that was put on paper when a share of Green Bay Packer stock was purchased in my name in 1998. Since then, I have been Tom, Co-owner of the Green Bay Packers.
I left Las Vegas in 2005 to attend the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania for my college education. Since then, UPenn basketball has also become my team; I was a season ticket holder and Line member for my first two years, and have since made the jump to the other side, becoming a manager for the team. This and UNLV's imminent return to prominence as a basketball power have strengthened my love of college basketball, and I assure you that in addition to covering all things Green Bay I will be giving you updates on how their respective seasons are going. Thank you very much for reading all of this, and welcome to my blog.
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MJ Kasprzak said...
DeleteWelcome aboard. I am the community leader for the Packers, so it is my job to do whatever I can to aid you in writing any articles about the greatest team in the world. That includes editing for you so you can focus on getting your point across. My edits are for punctuation, grammar, spelling, and style (paragraph breaks, sentence structure, format, clarity), but I will never edit content unless there is a misstated fact. You can see what changes were made so you know what to look out for in the future by clicking on Article History and then Show Changes. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help.
427 days ago