A completely Justified Rant About Sports...

Hi- I just want to borrow a minute of your time to get something off my chest.

Now, I used to be a giant sports fans.  Baseball, Basketball, Football, you name it.  I can quote Berman, Patrick and Olbermann the way a music lover can quote Dylan, Lennon, and Page.  I have shelves full of books from the 1985 Chicago Bears to analyzing the baseball season of 1991 to the history of the ABA, which folded three years after I was born.  For all of the money I spent on clothes, tickets, books, and cheap tchotchkes that broke three days later, I should be driving a brand new Ferrari.

Before I moved to Cleveland I was a Cubs fan, and after I moved here became a fan of the Indians, Browns, and Cavs.  If you’re not a sports fan, consider yourself lucky.  If you are, then you know that my entire psyche is made up of emotional scar tissue from heart-breaking defeats, betrayals, and losses.  I have more emotional trauma from sports than anything my ex-girlfriends delivered, and there’s a long story why I don’t talk to people named ‘Beverly’.

I can handle losing.  I have 30 years of experience on that.  I can even tolerate a team run by a bunch of idiots who don’t know what they are doing.  Again, 30 years of experience.   But I finally realized was that I was investing time and money into an industry that goes out of my way to spit in my face, and I’ve gotten sick and tired of being their personal piss bucket.

If it’s not the player leaving his hometown to go check out the bikini-clad models on South Beach, it’s the coach gets upset that you point out that he’s really bad at his job.  And even once I stop buying the stuff myself, my money still goes to them because the owner cries poverty unless we spend our tax dollars buying them a state-of-the-art stadium with ticket prices far more than anyone I know can afford.

You know what I enjoy watching?  Pro Wrestling.  Now, people always cry that it’s fake.  My response used to be that so is the TV show ‘Homeland’, but people don’t seem to mind that.

But you know something?  Yes, Pro Wrestling is fake.

That’s.  The.  Damn.  Point.

You see in so-called ‘real’ sports, people can act like complete jackasses to the fans, because they have their contract.  They know that, because of fate or genetics or whatever, they can shoot or throw or run better than 99.99% of the world.  And that, apparently, gives them a license to make obscene amounts of money and lord it over the rest of us without suffering any consequences.

But in wrestling?  Sure, there are good guys and bad guys.  The bad guys want people to boo them, which is different that treating the fans like dirt.  The fans know wrestling is ‘fake’, and the wrestlers know the fans know.  So even when the heels are acting like bad guys, there’s always this wink that the wrestlers give than lets everyone’s in on the act.  But if you are a complete jerk, the fans will tune you out.  And there, it doesn’t matter if you’re the biggest, the strongest, the fastest, the greatest pro-wrestler ever- if the fans don’t like you, you won’t succeed.  

So Professional Wrestlers HAVE to treat the fans with respect.  They understand that, without the fans, they don't have a career.

Which is more than more sports stars know.