Nothing apparently. I grew up a Raider’s fan in Los Angeles, going to games with my Dad when I was little. They moved back to Oakland when I was in Junior High, and I stayed a fan. My fandom dipped a little bit in the late 90s but then Gruden came on board and I became a rabid fan. Then Gruden got FUCKING TRADED to Tampa Bay and I very nearly became a Bucs fan, but it didn’t take. I have suffered through a decade of futility since then, but I am still here watching every game every week, reading the beat writers reports about training camp in the off season, and getting misty when Al Davis died.
Peter Angelos.
Then, in 2005, when the Expos moved to Washington, I was ready to get married to a new team.
When the Cleveland Browns became the Baltimore Ravens, I was certainly not a Ravens fan. I rooted for the Colts until Cleveland got another team. Does that count? I am a Browns fan again, so I don’t know how you want to score that.
What would make you abandon your team?
A racist logowould probably do it.
So is that a hypothetical you are throwing out there or were you a Cleveland fan until 33?
When the Browns moved to Baltimore I in effect filed divorce papers on the team. I still follow them by osmosis thru the media, because living in Cleveland it is impossible NOT to hear about them, but I don’t care anymore. Just to be sociable I will go to games if friends offer me tickets, but i sure don’t get worked up anymore about. It has freed up my Sundays, that is for sure.
Apparently. Must be nice to be a Yankees, I mean Red Sox, fan.
Oh my gosh, yes. If they fail to make up the overwhelming 2.5-game chasm that currently separates them from the wild card, they’ll have failed to make the playoffs for three years in a row. I can’t imagine what their long-suffering fans must be going through. I salute those who have stuck with the team through this drought of Biblical proportions.
Buccaneers fan. Hiring Nick Saban or another “weasel coach” in TMQ parlance.
Well, if the widow of the owner took the team to St. Louis, that would apparently do it.
I tried to take to the Chargers, but it was the twilight of the Air Coryell era, and it didn’t take.
I enjoy having my Sundays back.
That is my big disconnect with NASCAR. I’ll pop on some of the big races and watch. I enjoy them in a casual way. But I can not get my head around someone being a fan of a car company. Individual drivers? Sure, why not. But why would it matter that they change cars? It will never matter to me that they are driving in a car that looks like a Ford.
I can see getting behind the cars when you can tell them apart and when there’s actually some factory involvement. In NASCAR, though, all the manufacturers do is provide the hood, roof and trunk lid.
Frank McCourt owning the Dodgers was as close as I ever have come to abandoning them. If they ever let him have anything to do with the team in any fashion other than having his ashes cast into porcelain and made into urinals for the 3rd base side Gents, I’ll leave for good.
I’m down on rooting for teams at all. I was a loopy Mets fan until around 2003 when Mike Piazza’s skills were clearly atrophying, but because they’d signed him to a big-bucks that still had years to run, the Mets insisted on batting him 4th in the lineup and building the team around him. Even so, I probably would have remained a Mets fan, but for the Mets fans who vilified me for insisting that the needed to acquire more hitting stars to be competitive. After a year or more of this argument, when the team was doing a triple gainer into the cesspool, I got disgusted and just stopped rooting for them. I’m much happier despising the team–now that Wilpon’s dealings with Madoff have been revealed, I’m positively gleeful that the management’s utter cluenessless on so many levels has been shown publicly. Now I positively hate the team, even though they have good young hustling players again and I would root for them if they played for any other franchise. I live to glory in Mets’ fans’ agony.
I live within walking distance of Citifield, btw, and would have spent thousands of dollars over the past decade on tickets and such.
I’m not a fan of stick and ball sports so I understand what you’re saying. I could never get behind supporting an entire team. Individual players, sure. But not everyone. Especially if they were from a city fifty miles away.
At one time, stock cars were just that. They gradually became more specialized, but the bodies came directly from the factory up until the mid-Seventies. If you wanted to make a change to aerodynamics, you had to produce 1000 street cars with the identical modification. At that time, it was more easy to understand why a car guy would root for a specific manufacturer. There has been a feud between Ford Guys and Chevy guys since at least 1955.
I’ve always been more of a road course fan than oval, but since I like all motorsports and NASCAR is on 36 weeks a year, it gets most of my attention. I feel that auto racing has relevance and value only when it’s applied to vehicles that have close ties to what you can buy. Sports car racing has also drifted from the ability to drive your race car to the track but there is still a more meaningful connection to a specific brand than what’s present in NASCAR.
If you completely miss the reasons why someone is a fan of a specific car company, then you might not be a car guy. But you probably have similar affections for a brand of computer or athletic shoe. People enjoy being part of a tribe. I guess that’s why they continue to support a hometown team that hasn’t won anything significant for decades.
Until a couple of years ago, the engine that Ford used was close to the engine that used to be available in several Ford vehicles. The manufacturers were acting like they would pull out a couple of years ago unless the cars started to look like the street cars again. Next year should fix some of that.
I’ve been a Ford person since I’ve been driving though. My dad was a Ford person and his dad was a Ford person. My truck and my car are both Fords. I support Ford drivers. I’ll still like Kenseth, like I still like Jeff Burton, but I won’t actively pull for him anymore. I still like to see Burton do good, but at the end of the day, I want a Ford to win.
I’m not a specific car guy. It would make things easier if I was. But when I want to buy a new car I wind up visiting every single company.
This is precisely the attitude that makes the fans of the other 28 teams loathe fans of the Yankees and Red Sox.
Go try telling to someone that follows the Royals, Mariners, Padres … hell, pretty much anyone except the Yankees and maybe the Cardinals about your “perfect storm of suck” and they’ll laugh in your face.
You do understand why this statement makes it seem like you don’t know anything about baseball right? All that matters is where you are in the standings.
The Royals are 9.5 games back and in last place.
The Red Sox are 9.5 games back and in last place.
The other teams are a bit further back but the Sox are in about as good a position to make the playoffs as they are. And they have only won 7 more games than both the Twins and the Mariners. Its only half way but its not looking good for the Sox.
I think his point is that the Red Sox are good every other year, so if they have one bad one, fans should suck it up.