Leave Town

As part of the Sports Atheism post, the commenter Tracer Bullet posted this:

...I didn't realize how insufferable my fellow Eagles fans are until I moved to Philadelphia

(I'm going to leave aside the relative insufferability of the Eagles fanbase -- because, truth be told, I'm pretty sure that everyone's fan base is insufferable. We'll save the rankings for another day.)

I'm from Philadelphia originally, and moved around after getting old enough to fear death. In the moving around, I ventured far and wide from my Eagles... and started enjoying them more. How is that?

Simple. Being far away from Philadelphia means being far away from Howard Eskin, whose image befouls this post.

If you haven't had the pleasure of listening to this cyst before, this will give you the gist. Though, frankly, it's far too kind.

Now, I don't want to go into too much detail on Howie, because he's just not worth the typing. Like ESPN's Bill Simmons, he's a bad tooth, but unlike Simmons, he has no good moments or past redeeming value, so I find it pretty easy to ignore him. Friends of mine in the area, not so much. (Frankly, I'm just not enough of a sado-masochist to go there too often.)

If your favorite team has any kind of a fan base, I bet you've got someone just like Howie in your area -- or will eventually. Why? Because being a rotting tooth is a ratings grabber. Because there's always going to be people dumb enough to pay five bucks for three balls to throw at the loudmouth in the dunk tank. Because some people find this kind of thing to be entertaining, or because it's easier to parrot some douchebag's opinion than think of your own.

(For the record, parroting opinions from FTT is Nothing Like That, No Sir, because we're Tools, not Douchebags. Says so right in the header.)

It's also why being far away from your team, especially in the age of the Internet and satellite television, is such a winning play.

Many of my brethren in Eagles fandom will never, I suspect, be able to get over the team losing the Super Bowl to the Patriots. I share that pain, but probably not to the same degree... because at the time, I was halfway around the world on vacation. It was a lovely Monday afternoon, and there was no chance to wallow. My wife and daughter were sad for me, they left me alone for a while, and after an hour or so, I had gone through all five stages of grieving and went about my day. I still have the bad memories, but at least I didn't drag my family down with me. (It's also much harder to pout about your team losing in front of a small kid, at least if you are making any kind of effort as a parent.)

But a chanchre like Eskin? Without the five stages, they'd have no show. Without the questionable decision of others to poke the bad tooth, to keep on feeling bad about something that will stay the same regardless of your emotions about it, without the profitable business of selling salt for wounds, or hair-trigger and brained judgments on which individual was most responsible for the loss, and how his immediate dismissal was the only logical response to the solution...

Well, hell, they'd have to get out of town.

Somehow, we think that the town -- any town -- would be better off.