ere's a little Zach Drucker history lesson for you: I was born on July 11, 1990, the first child and only son of Mara and Jon. As the first-born son, I was granted passage into the world of sports fandom by my father, starting with a rattling Jets football, a beaten-up Knicks cap and a Mets teddy bear cluttering my crib. My manhood was judged, not on how I performed in youth basketball leagues, USTA tennis tournaments or travel baseball games — after all, I'm an awkward, white, Jewish kid from New York suburbia, who never quite lived up to his "professional athlete" hype — but in how much I knew about Patrick Ewing's wingspan and Mike Piazza's stat line from the previous night. My dad weaned me on the Knicks, Mets and Jets, and my mom simply made sure I distinguished between being a fan and a fanatic.
For the record, a "fan" goes to his second-cousin's birthday party, tracking the score of the big game on a smartphone throughout the night. A "fanatic" attends his best friend's bar mitzvah with a portable television bought specifically for the occasion. OK, so my dad and I have flirted with fanaticism a couple of times. The remainder of my columns for the semester will document my woes as a diehard fan for hard-dying teams, and — like that cacaphonousEverclear song, "Father of Mine" (1997) — will double as an indirect cheap shot at my father for raising me this way.
Needless to say, it's not the easiest thing ever to be a college student in Boston while cheering on the Mets, Jets and Knicks. It seems like every year, the smug fans in Boston get another title to celebrate, another championship parade to attend and another false sense of personal accomplishment. (Note to Bostonians: the Red Sox will never win 27 World Series, the Big Three is washed up, Tom Brady has stupid hair and the Bruins play hockey, so they don't matter.)
Though I despise the Pats and the Celtics for their respective rivalries with the Jets and Knicks, I do support the Red Sox and the Bruins. Yet, watching any secondary team succeed can never compare to watching your primary team succeed — though I wouldn't actually know about that. I could never feel the emotional pull of a Red Sox-Yankees series equal to that of a Mets-Phillies series, just like I could never love my adopted sister as much as my real sister. The only satisfaction I get is hanging around my friends who root for teams like the Oakland Raiders, the Portland Trailblazers or the Baltimore fill-in-the-blanks.
When I make eye contact with other hapless fans, there's a sort of innate, mutual understanding: We both recognize the troubles in life, but we take some slight solace in knowing that there is someone else out there who shares the burden of our hardship. (I in no way mean to hyperbolize the sorrow of fans sans championships because it's not as bad as, say, getting your car stolen. But it's pretty close.)
Before I go any further, let me say this: My mother frequently asks me to dump my allegiances and follow a different, more successful team. To my mom and others who echo this sentiment, I say, "You just don't get it, do you?" I don't go around telling you to stop watching "Glee" just because the cast did a racy GQ photo shoot. You can't drop a team after 21 years for the same reason an ugly person wouldn't cut off his own head: It's a part of who you are and you just have to live with it, for better or worse. And, in my case, it's been for worse.
