Good morning.
I should’ve been watching the Philadelphia Phillies defeat the Texas Rangers in the World Series this week. Instead, the Phillies blew a 2-0 lead and home field advantage in the National League Championship to the freakin Arizona Diamondbacks. So I had to watch Arizona and Texas play each other. Those teams aren’t even from cities—they’re from states. But, hey, congrats to the Rangers.
Instead of watching the Phillies win their first World Series in 15 years—after coming so close to winning against the Astros last fall—I have to live with the misery of knowing that they choked. For me, there is a certain humiliation that comes with that. And feeling the misery that I feel, at this point in my life, is somehow even more embarrassing.
My parents are from Long Island and the formative years of my life were mainly spent there. But we lived just outside of Philadelphia during the formative years of my sports fandom. I learned how to throw a football with a Kelly Green Philadelphia Eagles pigskin; I learned how to scream at an opposing pitcher at Veterans Stadium; I learned what chewing tobacco was from Lenny Dykstra; I learned what a quarterback scramble was by watching Randle Cunningham.
Two of my most lasting childhood memories are crying on carpeted floors after watching the Philadelphia Eagles lose to the Dallas Cowboys in the 1992 Divisional Playoff Round and watching the Phillies lose the 1993 World Series to the Toronto Blue Jays. I was 7 years old and 8 years old, respectively, when each of those things happened.
As I got older, my fandom turned rabid. My parents would leave the house when the Eagles played because they were afraid of my temper. In September 2023, during the second weekend of my freshman year at college, my roommate watched as I ripped my landline phone out of the jack and threw it against the wall while the Eagles lost to the New England Patriots 31-10. The Eagles went 12-4 and made it to the NFC Championship that year, but to my credit they started the season 0-2.
But now I’m 38. I’ve lived with my fiance for over four years and we’ve been together for almost seven years. Over that period, I’ve learned how to control my temper and my outbursts. It also helped that the Eagles won their only Super Bowl during the time we’ve been together.
The way I’ve watched sports has changed over that time too. My weeks used to be organized around watching the NBA on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday; catching a big college football game on Saturday every now and then but knowing who was who and who was good every year; and watching (or trying to watch) the Eagles on Sunday. The Phillies I’ve always kept up with but never watched on a day to day basis as an adult.
Once my fiance and I moved in, the rhythms of my weeks obviously changed. We watched movies and TV shows together or read or I used any spare time I had to sit in one of the two bedrooms in our apartment and write fiction.
My weeks are no longer organized, meticulously, around game times. And my temper, instead of exploding outward, has collapsed inward.
The internet has, obviously, changed over the last seven years as well and that’s altered the way I watch and follow sports.
I stopped watching the Eagles as much to control my temper. But I was never a huge football fan. I know that sounds weird but I loved the Eagles. Football and football fandom, not so much.
My favorite sport has always been basketball. I’m a Sixers fan but I’ve always followed the entire league. I’ve committed so many players, rosters, and stats in NBA history to memory. When I can’t sleep, I recite the NBA championship teams in my head in chronological order.
But now I hardly watch NBA games either. Instead, like a lot of fans, I started to follow the league through podcasts, game summaries and team blogs, Subreddits, and highlights on social media. It turns out, there are a lot of people like me out there.
Part of the reason why I’ve changed the way I watch sports, though. is also because as I get older, I can’t handle the disappointment and the failure. In fact, when my team loses I feel as though that reflects on me as a person. I believe that, because this team of individuals I do not know lost a meaningful game, that I as a person have failed in some capacity simply by having believed in that team and rooted for them to win.
Now, when my team loses, I have terrible nightmares. I keep seeing them lose or disappoint over and over again. I can hardly sleep. This will happen not only during major playoff games but also during average regular season games. These nightmares and the feeling of utter humiliation I feel after a loss—the only way to describe it is a great chasm opening in my chest that then reveals an even greater gaping maw of despair—are also the reason why I sometimes can’t even bring myself to watch a game live. I’m telling you, it's embarrassing.
When I do follow games live, I do it through little “Gamecast” screens on ESPN.com or in The Athletic app. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, its like a little animated version of the game. Here’s an example of how I watched a Phillies-Diamondbacks game in this year’s National League Division Series.
I follow the game there and then check Reddit. I do this because I can’t handle the tension of actually watching the game. And when I check Reddit, it is as if I’m seeing all the negative self-talk that swirls in my head when a team I love is losing as well as all of the crazy vitriol I used to spew as a kid, teenager, and younger man laid out on screens in front of me.
Why do I say all this? Because this is another mystery of life that I can’t understand. When it comes to sports, my own feelings and behavior baffle me.
When I am in the throes of my despair, my fiance will ask me, “Why do you care so much about a game you have no control over? Why do you feel so bad?” And I, of course, have no good answer for that. Instead, I turn to her and say, “Because I need them to win.” It’s something primal and deeply embedded within me. My life is good. I really have nothing to complain about. But if my team loses, then my entire life has been a lie.
The sports writer Bob Ryan, during a memorable sporting moment, used to Tweet things like this
But I’ve had sports in my life for over 30 years at this point. People who don’t care about sports as much are free. Instead, I’m trying to untie my tethers. Or at the very least, understand why they’re even there in the first place.