Confessions Of a Philadelphia Sports Fan

A city in expectant jubilation paints its streets orange and black, a boy, not yet nine years old sits with a hopeful, still innocent grin plastered on his face. This boy is dressed from head to toe in Philadelphia Flyers garb. At the start of the 1997 Stanley Cup, he is a die-hard Philadelphia fan in training. Game after game he dresses and cheers, only to be irrevocably scarred when his team goes down in four straight contests to the Detroit Red Wings.

That boy is now a journalism student at Penn State University. That boy is now 21 years old. That boy is me. The 1997 Stanley Cup was the first time I came in contact with the syndrome, the same syndrome, which plagues almost 1.5 million people who reside in the great city of Philadelphia. That syndrome is doubt.

From the time I was seven years old, I was a Philadelphia sports fanatic. I have not missed an Eagles game in 10 years and I didn’t sit down for the entire Sixers-Los Angeles Lakers NBA finals in 2001.

We endured three straight NFC Championship Game losses followed up by a Super Bowl defeat. The Flyers make a run at the Cup almost every year and come up short - every year! The Sixers lost in five games to the Lakers in NBA finals in 2001. In 2007, the Phillies make the playoffs and lose in three games to the Colorado Rockies.  If there were a perfect slogan for the city it would be, “so close yet so far away.”

The last game at Veterans Stadium, which was the Eagles home for more than 30 years, was one Philadelphia fans would love to forget. The 2002 NFC Championship Game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers was a dark day in the City of Brotherly Love. In a key drive, with four minutes left, Donovan McNabb threw an interception to Ronde Barber. Barber ended the Eagles hopes for a Super Bowl bid by returning it 92 yards for a touchdown. I was crushed, just as I had been year after year since I was nine.

The best way to describe the mind of a Philadelphia fan was said best by Butch Buchanico, (the Eagles Director of Security) “If it’s an airplane, it’s always going to crash, it’s never going to land”(1). I have never heard a statement that rang more true. The age of nine was the last time I had truly believed in a sports team, and they let me down, just like they would continue to do up until 2008. When, at last, the Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series. I cried.

Philadelphia is a great sports town. This is the city where some people mortgaged their house for tickets to the Eagles-Patriots Super Bowl in 2004. Why would someone do that? Because we love our sports teams just slightly more than we doubt them.

1. If Football's A Religion, Why Don't We Have A Prayer? New York: HarperCollins, 2005.