Sports Fan

Last year I had a student who is a major Angels fan. I have been a mild Yankee's "fan" for some time. I cannot stress to you enough the mild part. I mean, we're talking "I root for them because I like the city of New York and the color blue" fan. Well, this student (for privacy we'll call him Student) was not a great student. He hated English and, consequently, my class and probably me. But I let it slip once that I liked the Yankees, and it was ON. At first it was joking banter. It was the beginning of the season, and he'd come in and say things like, "Did you see the game? Manning's dunk was totally a foul" (okay...so I don't really know the names of the players or the terminology...well, not then I didn't). And then I'd be all, "totally," because I wanted him to like me. This went on for a while. I started looking at the Yankee website so I could learn some names and terms, and so I could shame him back when "my" team won. Student started loving coming to my class. I was his favorite teacher. My whole class got in on it. I started making grammar quizzes with sentences about the teams and about Student. There was a Red Sox fan in my class as well, and so we had a connection too. One day, the day of the first Angels/Yankees game of the season, I came back to my classroom after recess to find it completely covered in Angels gear and pictures of Ben (printed off a computer) saying "Yankees Suck." So I filled up his locker with golf, tennis, and ping pong balls and stuck a picture of Ben in a Yankees cap in the back. Most of the teachers in my school are Angels fans, so the fun and games spread. I felt good about my decision to pretend I was a real fan because I was contributing to a positive and fun school climate. I had the world fooled.

Apparently I did too good of a job.

The Angels and the Yankees are currently vying for a spot in the World Series (that's the Big Game--I know that now because I looked it up on Wikipedia). I'm finding it harder to maintain my Fan image because clearly people expect me to actually watch a game, which I hitherto haven't done since I was a kid and got pissed that my regular TV shows weren't on because of stupid, boring baseball. So watched the last 30 minutes or so of Saturday's crazy game, and the last 30 minutes or so of yesterday's game just so I could adequately respond to the imminent trash talk. In case you aren't a huge fan like me and you don't know about those two games, they were each about 5 hours long. Which means I tuned in long after the games should have been over and I felt like I really should try it. Apparently there's some kind of strategy in professional baseball wherein a pitcher purposefully walks a batter that will probably slam dunk hit a home run. I think this practice is chicken. I think they do it because they're afraid if they actually play fairly they will lose. Both teams were doing it, I thought it was stupid, so I made a clever and witty comment on facebook to that effect. Bad plan. All of these real fans started cyber-shouting at me about how the Yankees buy their wins and steal real wins from better teams and that the Yankees should die and they can't believe I'm actually a Yankees fan, how appalling, and so on ad infinitum.

Whoa. Let's all slow down and remember that I don't actually care about the Yankees. It's a new school year, that student isn't even in my class anymore, and I'm only doing this still because I'm very competitive and the science teacher made a bet with me that the losing team will get pied.

I liked sports until everyone got mean and vicious. You crazy fans need to get a life. I don't want to play anymore.