FOOTBALL THREAD….Anybody want to chat about their favorite football teams? I’ll be cheering on the hated New England Patriots today.
Why? A couple of reasons, I guess. First, like any sensible resident of the Los Angeles area in the post-Rams era, I hate the NFL with a burning passion. Local LA politics might not give us much to be proud of, but it does give us at least one reason to hold our heads high: our steadfast refusal to give an inch to the smarmy blackmailers of the NFL who, to a man, are convinced that every city in the country should shower them with riches for the privilege of hosting one of their teams. The resulting cash, of course, goes to line the pockets of overpaid athletes and fat cat team owners, and if there are any less deserving recipients of public largesse in the galaxy than those two groups, I can’t think of them.
So, um, there’s that. But if I hate the whole league, why root for the Patriots? Partly because everyone else hates them, and partly because the company I worked for in the 90s bought a small business in Tyngsboro, Massachussetts, in 1996, and I spent lots of time flying back and forth to visit them for the next few years. I liked all the guys in Tyngsboro, and of course they were all Patriots fans, so I figured that I’d start rooting for the Patriots too. Thanks to Georgia Frontiere, after all, I didn’t have anyone else to root for.
So that’s that. Partly out of loyalty and partly out of spite, I’m a Patriots fan. How about you?
POSTSCRIPT: On the bright side, Georgia (with an assist from Al Davis) is reponsible for the fact that no NFL game is ever blacked out around here. So I guess every cloud has a silver lining.
