15th
On a rainy day in CA, sports is wildly careening out of control, in oh so many ways
God I love sports. I wake up every morning with sleep in my eye, evil thoughts of breaking my alarm clock or anyone talking loudly, and I reach for the sports section first. Never mind nuclear non-proliferation in Iran. Screw that. Who won the games last night, and did the Lakers keep ‘em under a hundred?
Sports can be maddening sometimes. Often, actually. Especially when you are an old-fashioned and diehard fan. By this I mean, you have favorite teams, usually having something to do with who you saw play when you were five years old, or near where you grew up, etc. You love your team, you have old player jerseys and sweatshirts that you probably wear a bit too often, usually really old and often pretty dirty too. This is great! This is sports fanhood! This is why I have no qualms with a knowledgable and respectful lifelong Red Sox fan that grew up in Boston hating the Yankees, or a Dallas Cowboys fan that spent his whole life in Dallas, met Tom Landry as a kid and has been devoted his team ever since. It’s those stupid jackasses that latch onto a team because they win for a few years, go see their team at someone else’s stadium or a sports bar, and get obnoxiously annihilated that I cannot stand. Some trust-fund douchebag from Arizona/Miami/San Diego has no business running around another team’s fans pissing them off, swearing they’ve been a Boston fan their whole life. And by whole life they mean since 2004. I hate these people and have zero tolerance for them.
However, this is nothing new, the bandwagon is as old as sports itself.
What is new and very irritating is the excessively flashy and wasteful turn sports has taken recently. How is this exhibited? Take a look:
1. Outrageous offseason baseball contracts—C.C. Sabathia is one rich bastard, considering that on a good week he works for less than 3 hours. Sure the average salary paid in NYC is higher than many other American locales, but this is obscenely ridculous! No human being is worth anywhere near that! He is not saving kids from drowning in swimming pools or talking people out of jumping off of tall buildings. He is not dragging flaming people from burning houses. He is not going to find Osama Bin Laden. For further reference see: Ramirez, Manny; Teixeira, Mark
2. New NBA logos—It is often exciting for fans of a particular team to hear that their team is going for a fresh approach and look when they announce that they’ve changed the visual symbol that represents them. This is usually, not always, but usually a follow-up to a bad season(s) and a way to focus forward on the optimistic outlook that a new look can bring. With a few classic, and usually successful exceptions, teams change their logos (and of course their jerseys) every decade or so, sometimes to forget the bad, other times, just to modernize a bit.
The worst at this game is without a doubt, the NBA.
It started during the Nineties with the awful idea that every logo needed to be cartoon-ish to appeal to young fans, blah blah blah. Bulls, Warriors, Hornets, Pistons, Hawks. Ugh. Raptors. Double ugh.
Then came the “brilliant” idea that changing the team’s logo would miraculously gloss over the fact that it’s still the same worthless bunch of bums running around out there playing terribly. It’s supposed to unify the fans and justify the 8-dollar beer. So teams kept sucking, except now every 2-4 years they decided to change the logo and unis so fans hopefully wouldn’t be so fed up with their team’s crappy play.
Sheesh.
Now what happened? We have hideous visual representation of the Phoenix
Suns, whose logo looks a lot like a WNBA team’s would. Get Lisa Leslie out there. Fast.
Childishly amusing, cartoonish, yet not to be outdone, the Charlotte Bobcats have a really stupid looking logo. And nickname
Have you seen the New Orleans Hornets logo lately? The bee just looks like he was hitting happy hour pretty hard before he decided to go pick up a basketball. And their alternate logo, also known informally as the “fleur de bee” just screams WNBA.
*Sigh* Orlando, Orlando, Orlando. Remind me why you have a basketball team again? The what? Magical Disney Retirees? Oh sorry. The Magic! OOOOH. Tough stuff, and a real tough logo too. What is this a dinner show in Vegas? They oughta move that stupid team to Vegas and keep the nickname intact. Correction, keep the stupid nickname intact.
Washington. You lost your Bullets….to a bunch of gay Wizards. With boners. Sorry. Sorry your Bullets got jacked by a bunch of gay Wizards. Not sorry I called your new logo gay. It is.
Clippers. You are the bastard stepchild to the Lakers. As long as you not only have to eat scraps from the Lakers table, but eat those scraps under the exact same table (the both play at Staples Center, only one team actually sells out games) then you shall suck. Forever. Lucky for you, countless millions of diehard Clippers faithful, I have a solution. Move to the Pond in Anaheim. Or the Ponda Center, or whatever they call it now. Many people in Nixon County like basketball and have the money to support a pro franchise. They do not always like the Lakers or want to drive out to downtown LA to see them play. They DEFINITELY do not want to drive out to downtown LA to see you play. Ever. So move to Anaheim, change your nickname and logo, and voila! You no longer are a crappy bastard of a team playing to an empty house with a boring 1980s ripoff of the Lakers logo.
Utah. Your logo is fine, just switch nicknames with New Orleans. Please. It just makes sense. And when you do, change that drunken bee to not look quite as drunk. That type of thing is frowned upon by all your wives in Salt Lake City.
Golden State Warriors. Many folks disparage your nickname because it is horribly vague. I like it better than Oakland Warriors, and since you play in the murder capital of the Bay Area, you cannot petition the NBA to become the Oakland Bullets. Regardless, your logo is awful. A bare-chested robot holding a lightning bolt is childish and plain old stupid. Get back to your old-school days with something similar to what you had back in the Wilt Chamberlain days. No more of those nasty orange jerseys!
Toronto F***ing Raptors. Jesus. Where to start. First of all, who the hell thought it was such a great idea to name a team after an extinct reptile anyway? Was this one of those stupid “Jurassic Park was so cool!” concepts that sounded good back in 1995 when you founded this awful franchise? Was Toronto Gila Monsters taken by a minor league baseball team or something? You were the only team that had the audacity to wear cartoon dinosaurs on the front of your jerseys. That tells you everything you need to know about this ridiculous organization. Cartoon dinosaurs on the front of your uniforms. In a professional basketball game. That people paid money to attend. Just look at the logo folks. The dinosaur is wearing basketball sneakers. Oh and let’s not forget, a mere three years ago, this team wore jerseys that had a different color on the front than on the back. The raptors had the decency to go extinct. I hope the Raptors go extinct next.
Oklahoma City has a basketball team. A women’s basketball team. They’re the proud recipients of a new WNBA team called the Thunder. Quite an intimidating moniker for a women’s team, huh? Until you see their logo. Which is the weakest, wimpiest, most worthless logo in the history of professional basketball. It’s ok, it matches not only their stupid nickname, but also their ridiculous selection of team colors, hideous jerseys, stupid relocation choice and overall ability to win a game. Way to go David Stern, turn a proud franchise with a cool name and logo (Seattle Sonics, in case you forgot) into a neutered, watered-down, pansy-ass team in the middle of….Oklahoma. Reeeeeal nice, Clark.
3. Alternate jerseys—What a ridiculous cash grab. Are our attention spans so short and our wallets so fat and our thirst for more ugly crap to wear unquenchable? Creating an alternate jersey to “change it up” because we apparently get bored seeing our favorite teams wearing something that actually looks good or says where they’re from is absolutely stupid. Never mind that half the time the alternate uniform has some completely different color or script or arrangement from the team’s primary colors or appearance, and not in a good way. For further reference see: Warriors, Golden State; Suns, Phoenix; Wizards, Washington; Rockies, Colorado
