Phlegmatic Phanatical Phenomenon

Sports are something almost everyone in the entire world enjoys in one way or another.  Whether it’s through participation, spectating from home on the couch or in a crowd of 85,000, coaching the pee-wee football team, or even through officiating a high school cheerleading meet (I’ll leave that one alone for the moment).  It’s all the same.  We all have some type of competitive nature about us.  For some, including myself, a small percentage of human beings concentrated in close proximity to the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area have the misfortune to have been cursed by God with a biological trait, most likely a flaw in our DNA coding, which shortens our life-span by causing stress, depression and high blood pressure.  I’m referring to the affliction of being a Philadelphia sports phan.

No one knows what causes one to endure such pain and suffering through constant disappointment and denial.  The disorder, exhibiting symptoms similar to an extreme bi-polar-like condition, causes severe mood swings.   Suicidal to homicidal emotions cause phans to boo Santa Claus, drink heavily, throw things, verbally and sometimes physically abuse our own team players, opponent players and the fans of those opponent teams who are ignorant or naive enough to actually attend a game in Philadelphia.

Let’s review my typical year as a Philadelphia sports phan.  My sporting year begins in August with the start of NFL training camp.  Optimism and the positive thoughts that this will be the year the Eagles will not disappoint build…like the anticipation of a 40-year-old virgin picking up a hooker, the moment before he finds out she’s an undercover cop.  The implanted false memories of a semi-accomplished season, eight months earlier, feed the local rhetoric that the team will do well and this year the Eagles will be free of devastating injury.  This is the year lady luck will smile on my team.

This euphoria usually lasts until the second or third week in the season in mid- September.  By this time the Eagles have lost at least one game to a sub-par non-divisional team and a minimum of two key defensive players have been placed on injured reserve.  To make matters worse and add to my personal aggravation, my fantasy football team, Wiggy’s Wicked Warlords, is 1-2 with my first round running back pick as well as my entire receiving core all underachieving.

Moving forward a few weeks to the end of October, the Eagles are now 4-4 with half of the city of Philadelphia calling for a change in quarterback and/or head coach.  Only two games back in the NFC East Division, playoff hopes are still very much alive.  Although the NHL hockey season has started and the Flyers are 6-2-1, nobody in Philly has really begun to take notice.  Hockey season really doesn’t begin until late December.

Fast forward through the month of November…The Eagles are still in the playoff hunt and I and the rest of the crazed soon-to-be-disappointed phanatics are once again getting their hopes up and beginning to talk about a Super Bowl run.  December begins and the Eagles win three of the last four to take a wild card spot and prolong the agony another week.  The nervous expectation builds to a crescendo which finally and fatefully comes crashing in, along with the depression which accompanies the removal of Christmas decorations after the holidays and the forthcoming long gray winter days.  My only consolation…neither the Giants nor the Cowboys made it any further.  So much for another football season.

Mid-January arrives and at this point disappointed Eagles phans now begin to turn their attention to hockey.  The Flyers are already 25-18 but in sixth place in the Eastern Conference and third in the division.  Though playing well, they continually lose key games against division rivals such as the New Jersey Devils.  Spring training for the Phillies is still over a month away.  And the real Major League Baseball season, not the totally irrelevant spring training exhibition games, doesn’t begin until April.  At least the Flyers less-than-stellar play through the winter months will get them into the playoffs, but only because everyone in NHL hockey makes the playoffs unless you are the Los Angeles Kings.

As for basketball season…anyone who has attended a Division I university knows, real basketball begins and ends at the college level.  Besides, no self-respecting Eagles, Flyers and Phillies phan would be caught dead at a Sixers game.  Interspersed concurrently with the season-long rollercoaster ride of the Flyers, a long winter full of disappointing North Carolina State basketball games (not to be confused with the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill) succeeds in leaving me unfulfilled and terminates with the Wolfpack once again missing the cut to make the NCAA “March Madness” Tournament.  I now have to endure the abuse of my friends for the fact my beloved Wolfpack hasn’t even been invited to the second tier, post season tournament, The NIT, more lovingly known as the Not-Invited-Tournament.

The never-ending NHL season continues, regressing into an even more protracted playoff period.  Luckily for my stress level, the Flyers will lose in the first round dropping even their home games to their lower-seeded opponent.  Time for baseball.

Though it’s 45 degrees Fahrenheit, making it feel more like football season, the Phillies season home-opener the first week in April is the sign spring is here.  It has the feeling of a new birth, like the blooming of spring flowers and the return of retirees from Florida.  You look forward to and dread it at the same time.  It only takes two weeks to realize fate has once again stepped in.  The Phillies drop 6 of 7 to start the season, including losing two games at home to those French wanna-be’s transplanted to our nation’s capital from Montreal, the Washington Expos (actually the Nationals, although any true baseball fan still thinks they should have been renamed the Senators).  This puts them solidly three games back of Atlanta and five back of the Mets.

It then takes two more weeks and eight full games out of first place before the team realizes scoring more runs than the bullpen can give up would help, which they begin to do.  The Phillies go on a tear through the summer keeping pace and even moving to within two games of first place, remaining well within the pack of wildcard contenders.

Fatefully with only a few weeks left in the season, the bullpen once again becomes the dominant factor in deciding the outcome of games and they begin to ever-so-slowly slide away from the division leader and lose ground in the wildcard race.  These déjà vu-like eventualities motivate and rally phans at the conclusion of each heartbreaking loss.  Echoed by phans at the end of each one of the soon to be meaningless Phillies games, at the end of the season, is the rally cry of “E-A-G-L-E-S, EAGLES!!” further demoralizing an already disheartened baseball team.  And so the cycle of expectation, frustration and disappointment begins again….