The Home Side
Many folks are born to our allegiances. Particularly for the local team. Our pops taking us to our first baseball game, the brilliantly manicured green grass and white on white of the baselines so exactly laid out before us as giants heated under the brilliant summer sun. From then to perpetuation that team was mine.
It ties us to a city a town, a time, it becomes who we are, it outlines us in methods beyond sane reason. We wear our faithfulness in game jerseys with our hero’s name displayed on the back, we paint our faces our team’s colors, we name our kids after our favorite players. We are loony, daft for our team. Monday ain’t blue if your team won on Sun. But we immediately get over it if they do not, as there’s always the week after next, next year or if you’re a Pup fan, the subsequent millennia. The better part of sport is that there always is next year, a do over of a type. komorki macierzyste
One that life does not give us, but does for our team. That’s what keeps us coming back for more. Another chance at redemption. Another opportunity to be the absolute best. To be champs. Everyone loves a winner, but the true fan, one born of the commitment of private connection, loves his team regardless of what. There is no bandwagon to leap off or on of. I come from a place and time were faithfulness was everything. At work and at play. The team was everything. Dynamics Ax
Whether it was your sandlot friends or the fellows on the line at the assembly plant or steel mill, it was your world, it was who you were, it was your identity. I have played sandlot soccer in the shade of enormous rusted steel mills burping smoke and ash that coated the snow black. Stood side by side with players from the other team as we walked the length of the field picking and throwing rocks that clanged off the empty aluminium bleachers. Then stood toe to toe and knocked the crap outta one another for hours or until it became too dark to play or we ran out of players. domy pod warszawa
I have played baseball on fields glittering with damaged glass and basketball on courts covered with hypodermic needles in the slums of Philadelphia and NY and San Juan. I sat, in a freezing vehicle, with 4 pals in Minneapolis listening to the U.S.A. Beat Russia in the ’80 Olympics, on the radio because we did not remember to pay the electrical bill. I have stood in race control at the 2,000 Daytona 5 hundred flashing hand signals to the broadcast crews who could not see why the race director had yellow flagged the race toward the end of the race as two hundred thousand fans screamed in antagonism or joy as their favourite got lifted or caught a break. I have studied Superbowls, World Series games and World Cup matches in bars from Bangkok to Bangor. I have partied with the great and not so great, the famous and the legendary. I have been lucky to have traveled the world and it is the keenness of sport that has broken down language and cultural barriers on the way.
Life long friendships born of the love of sport are formed out of those passions. The web and forums like The Sports Outlaw have given us a place to show our commitment and enthusiasm to the world and to form more life long friendships. Give me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, because I’m going to root root root for the local side.