this rings somewhat true for me

[dave mcbride]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/nyregion...ity/08jets.html

 

 

THE NEW YORK TIMES

 

ANGUISH IN GREEN

By GEORGE SARRINIKOLAOU

Published: January 8, 2006

 

FOR nearly a quarter-century, I have played a secret and obsessive game with the New York Jets. Instead of renewing it, as I have done at the end of every other N.F.L. regular season, I am divulging its secret workings in the hope that doing so might rid me of the obsession.

 

The game has gone like this. The Jets perennially personify the dejection that follows defeat, finding ever more fantastic ways to fail, usually missing the playoffs, as they did this year, while I never lose faith in the team's ability to transform, succeed, win the Super Bowl.

 

On most Sunday afternoons after the game, when a colorless gloom has washed over me, I have resolved only to wait until the following Sunday, the expectation of the next kickoff sustaining me through the vagaries of my life in New York: Monday mornings at bad jobs, doomed relationships, long stretches of depression. Even on those Sundays in the months after I walked out of the World Trade Center on 9/11, I savored the games, although the confluence of sports and nationalism sickened me.

 

I have also told myself that no matter the outcome of these games, watching the Jets play is a weekly respite, three hours to myself, apart from the world's problems and my own. The time alone, though, comes at a price, especially after a loss. This season there were 12 of them, against 4 victories. Sunday evenings are difficult anyway as I ponder returning to work the next day. After a defeat, the days before the next game can seem interminable. This is all to say that I haven't missed a Jets game, whether a meaningful one or not, in 23 years.

 

My favorite way to watch the Jets has been alone, in front of the television. Only once did I attend a game at the stadium, and I never wanted to go back because, from the stands, I couldn't see the players' faces. Without those images, much of the drama I craved was gone. The drama is essential because I don't simply watch the games, I live their highs and their countless lows. It is for this familiar tumult that I wait all week.

 

The waiting becomes more difficult right about now, when Jets Sundays have run out. A bleak eight months then stretch before me, with only the N.F.L. draft in April, and sparse news of player signings, and the next training camp to keep me going until the preseason. As the summer heats up in the city, I mark that first exhibition game on my calendar. Then the excruciating waiting begins to ease as the expectation of a more successful season mounts.

 

Now as I look back over all these years - the numerous games, the rare playoff appearances, the dashed hopes - the thing that figures most prominently is the waiting. It began on Jan. 23, 1983, when I was 13. My father, convinced that riches awaited us in New York, had brought my mother, my sister and me from Athens three years before. But just weeks after our arrival, he declared the whole venture a mistake and returned to Greece. My mother never joined him, seeing the separation as an opportunity to escape a bad marriage.

 

What she had managed of the American dream by that January comprised a two-bedroom, rent-subsidized apartment in a bleak corner of Astoria, Queens, and some threadbare furniture. A hand-me-down Zenith television with a coat hanger for an antenna sat on the living-room floor. A broken tube rendered the picture green, but we didn't mind because green was better than the black-and-white we had before. Turning the TV's rotary dial, I came across two mud-soaked football teams.

 

I was too newly arrived an immigrant to know anything about football, and yet I was drawn in. Over the next hour, I watched the Jets get bogged down in the mud, losing 14-0 to the Miami Dolphins in the American Football Conference championship game. That this New York team was one victory away from the Super Bowl, which it hadn't won since 1969, meant little to me. Still, I experienced the team's collapse on that muddy field as if it were my own.

 

Afterward, I remember looking out our second-floor window at the white smoke spewing from a Con Edison power plant nearby. Another week of school was about to begin; another year in this vast, unfamiliar city lay ahead; it was now more than three years since I had seen or heard from my father. My mother was there, but she was on a seven-day work-at-home schedule, sewing dresses at 5 cents a seam in my bedroom. She had two children to feed.

 

I didn't linger on any of these aspects of my life. Nothing could be done about them, just as nothing could be done about the mud in Miami or the game's final score. But there was something else, too, not hope exactly, more like a childish belief in happiness: The Jets would triumph next time. I somehow held onto this belief, despite my parents' broken marriage, the pressure from my mother to be for her all that my father wasn't. Or perhaps I believed in happiness because of those experiences.

 

THE Jets would be back next season, and I would, too. From then on, if they lost, as they so often did, the feeling was hurtful but never alien. Indeed, I have watched almost expectedly as my beloved Jets gave away games they were supposed to win, lost players to catastrophic injuries, were abandoned by coaches.

 

Even in the glorious 1998 season, when after 16 years the Jets again came within one game of the Super Bowl, I could sense that they weren't mentally strong enough to overcome their history. Indeed, the more agonizing the defeat, the deeper it cut into me, the more connected I felt to the team. Like people who live their lives making the same mistakes, I delved into my own darkness each time the Jets lost.

 

It's a new year. A disastrous season for the Jets is over. Today I turn 36. That vast, unfamiliar city has long been my home. Happiness, too, of a sort tempered by experience, has come to me in my baby daughter smiling up at me, my wife holding my hand. But what of this game between the Jets and me? I will stop watching. Or I will watch differently, without replaying the past. Perhaps when they win the Super Bowl.

 

 

George Sarrinikolaou is the author of "Facing Athens: Encounters With the Modern City."

[BuckeyeBill]

HAHA... Jets SUCK!

[Ned Flanders]

My heart bleeds purple pi$$ for him...

 

I'm sorry, but there is no other feeling in American sport that rivals losing four Super Bowls in a row...no Red Sox (until recently), Cubs, Browns, Jets, or Philly fan can match it, no matter what the national media portrays.

[TheMadCap]

At least they won a Super Bowl. And his memories begin with the 14-0 defeat at the hands of A.J Dewey (sic)? We should be so lucky...

[dave mcbride]

At least they won a Super Bowl. And his memories begin with the 14-0 defeat at the hands of A.J Dewey (sic)? We should be so lucky...

560185[/snapback]

well, he did live in greece before that ...

[Ralonzo]

"although the confluence of sports and nationalism sickened me."

560088[/snapback]

 

Made it to this sentence, then quit. Even the lilting schadenfreude received from watching the bug-on-it's-back struggles of a pathetic loser Jets fan would be consumed by the overwhelming urge to punch the nose off this traitorous commie pinko.

[Tcali]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/nyregion...ity/08jets.html

THE NEW YORK TIMES

 

ANGUISH IN GREEN

By GEORGE SARRINIKOLAOU

Published: January 8, 2006

 

FOR nearly a quarter-century, I have played a secret and obsessive game with the New York Jets. Instead of renewing it, as I have done at the end of every other N.F.L. regular season, I am divulging its secret workings in the hope that doing so might rid me of the obsession.

 

The game has gone like this. The Jets perennially personify the dejection that follows defeat, finding ever more fantastic ways to fail, usually missing the playoffs, as they did this year, while I never lose faith in the team's ability to transform, succeed, win the Super Bowl.

 

On most Sunday afternoons after the game, when a colorless gloom has washed over me, I have resolved only to wait until the following Sunday, the expectation of the next kickoff sustaining me through the vagaries of my life in New York: Monday mornings at bad jobs, doomed relationships, long stretches of depression. Even on those Sundays in the months after I walked out of the World Trade Center on 9/11, I savored the games, although the confluence of sports and nationalism sickened me.

 

I have also told myself that no matter the outcome of these games, watching the Jets play is a weekly respite, three hours to myself, apart from the world's problems and my own. The time alone, though, comes at a price, especially after a loss. This season there were 12 of them, against 4 victories. Sunday evenings are difficult anyway as I ponder returning to work the next day. After a defeat, the days before the next game can seem interminable. This is all to say that I haven't missed a Jets game, whether a meaningful one or not, in 23 years.

 

My favorite way to watch the Jets has been alone, in front of the television. Only once did I attend a game at the stadium, and I never wanted to go back because, from the stands, I couldn't see the players' faces. Without those images, much of the drama I craved was gone. The drama is essential because I don't simply watch the games, I live their highs and their countless lows. It is for this familiar tumult that I wait all week.

 

The waiting becomes more difficult right about now, when Jets Sundays have run out. A bleak eight months then stretch before me, with only the N.F.L. draft in April, and sparse news of player signings, and the next training camp to keep me going until the preseason. As the summer heats up in the city, I mark that first exhibition game on my calendar. Then the excruciating waiting begins to ease as the expectation of a more successful season mounts.

 

Now as I look back over all these years - the numerous games, the rare playoff appearances, the dashed hopes - the thing that figures most prominently is the waiting. It began on Jan. 23, 1983, when I was 13. My father, convinced that riches awaited us in New York, had brought my mother, my sister and me from Athens three years before. But just weeks after our arrival, he declared the whole venture a mistake and returned to Greece. My mother never joined him, seeing the separation as an opportunity to escape a bad marriage.

 

What she had managed of the American dream by that January comprised a two-bedroom, rent-subsidized apartment in a bleak corner of Astoria, Queens, and some threadbare furniture. A hand-me-down Zenith television with a coat hanger for an antenna sat on the living-room floor. A broken tube rendered the picture green, but we didn't mind because green was better than the black-and-white we had before. Turning the TV's rotary dial, I came across two mud-soaked football teams.

 

I was too newly arrived an immigrant to know anything about football, and yet I was drawn in. Over the next hour, I watched the Jets get bogged down in the mud, losing 14-0 to the Miami Dolphins in the American Football Conference championship game. That this New York team was one victory away from the Super Bowl, which it hadn't won since 1969, meant little to me. Still, I experienced the team's collapse on that muddy field as if it were my own.

 

Afterward, I remember looking out our second-floor window at the white smoke spewing from a Con Edison power plant nearby. Another week of school was about to begin; another year in this vast, unfamiliar city lay ahead; it was now more than three years since I had seen or heard from my father. My mother was there, but she was on a seven-day work-at-home schedule, sewing dresses at 5 cents a seam in my bedroom. She had two children to feed.

 

I didn't linger on any of these aspects of my life. Nothing could be done about them, just as nothing could be done about the mud in Miami or the game's final score. But there was something else, too, not hope exactly, more like a childish belief in happiness: The Jets would triumph next time. I somehow held onto this belief, despite my parents' broken marriage, the pressure from my mother to be for her all that my father wasn't. Or perhaps I believed in happiness because of those experiences.

 

THE Jets would be back next season, and I would, too. From then on, if they lost, as they so often did, the feeling was hurtful but never alien. Indeed, I have watched almost expectedly as my beloved Jets gave away games they were supposed to win, lost players to catastrophic injuries, were abandoned by coaches.

 

Even in the glorious 1998 season, when after 16 years the Jets again came within one game of the Super Bowl, I could sense that they weren't mentally strong enough to overcome their history. Indeed, the more agonizing the defeat, the deeper it cut into me, the more connected I felt to the team. Like people who live their lives making the same mistakes, I delved into my own darkness each time the Jets lost.

 

It's a new year. A disastrous season for the Jets is over. Today I turn 36. That vast, unfamiliar city has long been my home. Happiness, too, of a sort tempered by experience, has come to me in my baby daughter smiling up at me, my wife holding my hand. But what of this game between the Jets and me? I will stop watching. Or I will watch differently, without replaying the past. Perhaps when they win the Super Bowl.

George Sarrinikolaou is the author of "Facing Athens: Encounters With the Modern City."

560088[/snapback]

With all due respect......---what a whiney little creep...yikes...scary.

[dave mcbride]

Made it to this sentence, then quit. Even the lilting schadenfreude received from watching the bug-on-it's-back struggles of a pathetic loser Jets fan would be consumed by the overwhelming urge to punch the nose off this traitorous commie pinko.

560467[/snapback]

geez - i had some problems with the piece, but that quote is one of the reasons i liked it. i guess that means i'm a communist ...