Sport Fans

Sport fans are crazy people.

We grew up watching sports with our fathers and friends. We played them outside with other kids from the neighborhood. As we tossed the baseball to each other we would imagine we were Wade Boggs or Kirk Gibson. When we'd shoot hoops we'd pretend to be Magic Johnson or Karl Malone. When we'd play football we'd claim to be Lawrence Taylor or Joe Montana. We looked up to these men. We wanted to be like these men. They were our hero's!

Then we grew up. Well, I say grew up in its loosest sense. All of us "grown up" fans are just a little bit crazy. You'd have to be a little bit crazy when cheering for a team (that plays 2,000 miles away) and when they lose a playoff game you slap a bowl of Doritos up in the air, spilling them everywhere, while dropping curse words that would make George Carlin blush. Yeah, that was me. Damn Met's.

You have to be a little crazy to be almost 30 years old and you still wear jerseys of famous players around outside anywhere that is not the arena. It is also a bit crazy to be so emotionally involved in a team that you get sad or angry when they lose and you are brought to tears when they win a Championship. It's crazy to care more if a team wins or loses then the multimillionaire player does of said team. I am guilty of all of this craziness.

But there are a few things sport fans do that are absolutely crazy, that I even find too crazy to take part in. Here are just a few of them:

First off there is "Conspiracy Theory Fan". He's the guy that thinks that the "League" wants HIS team to lose because they want another team to win. This fan also thinks that the refs only make bad calls on his team and that they are out to get him. He thinks his team gets the short end of the stick every time and that the opponent never gets a bad call.

There is "Drunk in Public Fan". He's the guy who shows up to the game early, pounds the booze, and then ends up arrested before or during this game. I see this yahoo almost every game I go to, especially football games. Nothing like paying $75 on a ticket, only to spend the night in jail.

Let us not forget "Wanna Fight? Fan". Sometimes he is also "Drunk in Public Fan", but surprisingly he is also known to be sober. This fun fellow wants to throw down with any other guy that doesn't support his team. You probably know this guy. He could be your brother, or a coworker. You get along with him well. But if you were ever at a sporting event and, God forbid, you cheered for the Red Sox instead of the Yankees, dude is freaking out and now wants to challenge your manhood with fists. Quite the pleasant fellow.

One of my least favorite has to be "Bandwagon Fan". Ugh, this guy really drives me crazy. This guy grew up wearing Cowboys stuff. Then he started wearing Green Bay. Next Broncos, then Patriots, and now he wears Colts stuff. He lives in every single town across the country. He has never left his home town, but is somehow a Yankees and Lakers fan. Salt Lake is full of these dolts. He has never ventured outside of his "ward" but he hates the local teams with a passion, all the while claiming to have always loved the Lakers and all of their Championships. He can't tell you the staring rotation of the Yankees, let alone the difference between the Bronx and Brooklyn, but he knows he bleeds Yankee blue. Local college football programs are a joke to him, and even though in Utah this guy is usually Mormon, he rocks his Notre Dame shirt with pride. These fans are the reason All-Star games are filled with big name, under-performing guys, and it bores the hell out of the rest of us.

These are just a few of the different crazy fans out there. There are so many types, and many guys cross over into a few types. As for me, I'd be "Always wears Jerseys" and "Too Emotionally Invested Fan". It's funny that all this nonsense started because when we played the game with our friends, we wanted to be just like our hero's. I guess the next generations won't have the same problem as mine. They are too busy playing Madden on the Xbox, then playing football in the streets...