I need help. I admit it. Somewhere out there, there is an anger management meeting for sports fans that I should be attending. I should be in a church basement or a town hall, sitting in a fold-out aluminum chair with a cup of coffee in my hand. Bobby Knight would be there, I think, next to Ron Artest and George Steinbrenner and a brooding Latrell Sprewell, with Carl Everett slouching in the corner. We'd each stand and give the typical AA speech.
"Hi. My name is Andrew. I'm an angry sports fan."
Admission is the first step to success. I used to think I was just like every passionate fan, yelling and cheering, kicking chairs and punching walls with my team's successes and failures. Being a sports fan (especially a Boston sports fan) and being angry just seemed to be as natural as Nomar's at-bat rituals. It was part of the game. For years I convinced myself that I was fine. I could control it if I wanted to. I never killed or maimed anyone in a fit of Red Sox-induced rage, so what was the problem? But then I entered college, and the monkey on my back finally got a name. It called itself Fifa.
It was a fateful Autumnal day. I was walking through the video-game department of Wal-Mart, filling up on back-to-school supplies when I saw it: Fifa 2004. Now, I love sports, but soccer for me ranks right up there with curling and professional ping pong, excuse me, table tennis. But my friends had all told me how great the game was, and its $19.99 price tag seduced me like a harpy. That X-Box logo was a disguise, however, and as my buddies and I would learn, Pandora's Box would have been more suitable.
It started innocently enough: two or three games each night, nothing we couldn't handle. But soon a few friendly games turned into massive tournaments, hours slipped into days, grades began to plummet, and tensions rose. Curses that would have made George Carlin blush poured out of my room. Trash cans, desks, walls, and doors all took the brunt of our anger after a loss. Yet we played on. Finally, after three broken controllers and $90 later, we had to put a stop to it. Oh, we tried to regulate games second semester, but we were addicted (don't let anyone tell you it's not a disease). So with traffic cone in hand (don't ask), we smashed that game that Satan himself must have devised in half.
I've been Fifa-free for almost a year now, except for three short games I played with a friend over the summer, resulting in a hole in my bedroom wall. I guess you're never really cured.
Now, I know some will say it's just natural competition, but it was something more. I don't put holes in my wall when I lose in Halo, but I go crazy after a failed third down conversion in Madden, or a called third strike in MVP baseball. Why is it that sports bring out the worst in people? And this technically isn't even a sport: it's a video-game! Can you imagine what would happen in real life? Well I can, because I'm not only a recovering Fifa-junkie. My original sin will forever be on the tennis court.
Tennis-great John McEnroe once lamented, "I want to be remembered as a great player, but I guess it will be as a player who got angry on a tennis court." Besides McEnroe, there have been other great racquet maulers like Goran Ivanisevic, Marat Safin and Ilie Nastase. I can relate to them all.
Something happens to me when I hit a tennis court, literally. I've played almost my entire life, worked for hours on my serve and my volleys and every other physical aspect of the game, but I never could get the mental edge down. A forehand that sailed wide, a backhand into the net, a double fault - it didn't take long before I lost my composure and the match. Six perfectly good racquets have all met the same fate because of it. Three Princes, a Wilson and another pair of Dunlops are all up in that big green tennis court in the sky. The last hangs on my wall, its frame bent at an almost perfect 90-degree angle. It's a testament, but most certainly not the last.
Outbursts in sports are far from uncommon. From Knight's infamous chair toss to Sprewell choking his coach, anger is a natural emotion in athletes and coaches, but over the years it has gotten more and more outrageous. Culminating in the "Fracas at the Palace," which highlighted Ron Artest taking on, well, just about everyone, sports and their fans just don't seem to play well with others. Some propose banning alcohol from sporting events. Others call for harsher fines for violent outbursts.
Clearly, however, there is a greater force at play here. And whatever it is - call it passion, call it intensity, call it insanity - it produces the same effect in all those who love sports. The power that made Trot Nixon go postal on a water cooler after losing the ALCS two years back is the same that makes me kick a trash barrel in after shanking a virtual free-kick. Forget about money and endorsements. What it comes down to is that no one likes to lose and everyone likes to win. It's a sentiment we all can share.
So yeah, maybe I do have some anger issues when it comes to sports, but like my tennis coach used to say, sometimes you have to know when to use that anger in a positive way.
I guess I'm still in the denial stage.
