With all of these near-record icy-cold days and nights we've been experiencing lately, there sure is a lot of talk going around about the weather. It always seems that when it gets too hot we want it to be cooler and when it gets too cool we want it to be warmer.
Then, when it doesn't snow for a while, we want it to snow, and when the fluffy stuff does finally come fluttering down from the heavens, we don't want it to snow any more. The same can be said for sunny days, rainy days and just any slew of days in general. Oh, how we long for fair weather— and even that gets old after awhile.
But at this time of the year, no matter what's happening outside, there are plenty of people who definitely soak in the fair weather— the fair-weather sports fans. Many of you out there know exactly what I'm talking about. These are the fans who suddenly throw their allegiance behind, say, a sports team that is basking in victory of late. They're also known as "bandwagon fans" in other circles or disloyal SOBs in others.
Usually, you never hear a peep out of these people about sports all year until the playoffs roll around, then, out of nowhere, they're for the one team that's been winning and is the current darling of the media.
I saw a friend the other day that I've known for quite a few years, and he declares to another guy, who's already proven himself to bleed green and yellow, that he's also been a Green Bay Packers fan all of his life. Now I could have sworn that this friend told me on numerous previous occasions that he was an Oakland Raiders fan, at least that's what he'd been saying around me to probably make me feel better. You know, misery loves company.
But just a couple of weeks ago, the Packers won in dramatic fashion, in a snowstorm to be exact, and all of the sudden all of these Green Bay fans started coming out of the woodwork, including my friend. I never saw them around last year when that Methuselah-of-a-quarterback Brett Favre was having himself the season from hell.
"Hey, I thought you told me you were for the Raiders?" I scoffed at him. "You're just for the Packers because they won last Saturday."
"Heh, heh, heh," he laughed back at me. "I've been for the Packers ever since I was a little kid and I did a report on them for school." Really? In all these years of our sports banter, these were the first details out of his mouth that I had heard about his team rearing, and I had no idea that the Packers were any part of it.
"Besides," he added, no doubt rubbing it in, "who are you rooting for in the playoffs since the Raiders are at home in their Bermudas?"
"Well," I replied matter-of-factly, "usually at this stage of the playoffs it's not who I root for, it's more of who I root against. Kind of like the way people vote for politicians at election time."
I told him that I gave up on this football season a long time ago, mid-season to be exact, just like nearly every other Raiders' season of most of my adult life. When this time of year rolls around, I actually turn into the blustery-weather fan, quite the opposite of the fair-weather sort.
You know, the kind of guy who enjoys seeing the disappointment in the faces of the other devoted fans whose teams make it to the playoffs only to have their Super Bowl hopes unceremoniously crushed. Just like the infamous "Tuck Rule" that rained on our blizzard of a playoff game a handful of years ago and sent what few fair-weather fans we had just gained rushing inside to get warm by the fire nice next to their new best friends— New England Patriots fans.
Schadenfreude, I believe it's called in German, a succinct word that means "pleasure derived from someone else's misfortune." That kind of gloating happens a lot amongst sports fans and no other time is it more obvious than during the playoffs, or perhaps, ugly elections or divorces.
Fair-weather fans never experience the kind of let-down a die-hard experiences in loss because they only bandwagon for the current teams on top, and once that ship starts sinking they jump to the next one. That's right, they change teams about as often as most men change their shorts— just in time before they really start to stink.
They don't cry in their beer like the rest of us. After the game they hit the hard sauce usually in the form of warm apple pie topped with a brandy glaze that's washed down with a fancy cosmopolitan and you don't hear a word about sports from them until the next year's playoffs or, maybe, their latest baseball team in the World Series in between.
In politics, you can tell the fair-weather supporters just by reading the campaign-contributor lists. Usually, these are the names you see as contributing money to all of the leading candidates in a race, and on both sides of the aisle, too. They claim victory no matter what the outcome and in the wee hours of the morning, after the election results, they're usually out slapping the winner's campaign bumper stickers on their cars (or scraping off the loser's).
I wrote this column before the weekend's final-four AFC and NFC championship games determined the final two that go to the Super Bowl. So I really don't know yet if my friend is still a Packers fan or not.
I'll just assume he'll be able to produce grade-school reports from his childhood on the Giants, Chargers and Patriots when he finds out the winners as well. I hear you can get these kinds of reports on the Internet at fair-weather.com, which sometimes re-directs to its sister site, sportweasel.net.
Oh well, at least the baseball cap you see me wearing at the top of this column can also double for my football team— NY, for Next Year! And by the way, there isn't a trace of Velcro on it at all.
