two messages coming at you.
first is a must read----this guy Will Bunch is a first rate sports writer with a solid sense of humor.
This article is a good laugh(written with humor)
and is dedicated to all who have had their team "let you down"
<There's pain here in Notitletown
By WILLIAM BUNCH
bunchw@phillynews.com
I'M FROM Philadelphia.
Will somebody please kill me?
With the third loss in the NFC title game in as many years, hope for the Eagles has now gone way past the agony of defeat to existential despair.
Any city can win a championship. Heck, tiny little Green Bay's won a dozen of 'em - if you don't believe me, I'll forward you some of the 1,200 or so e-mails I've received in the past week from ice-fishing country.
San Antonio did it in 2003, and so did the borough of East Rutherford, N.J. Maybe the Queen City of Charlotte will in two weeks. But it takes a special talent for a city as large as Philadelphia to go more than two decades without a parade.
We prefer to find new and creative ways to lose. Last night, it was becoming the first home team to lose an NFL championship game in back-to-back years. Last year, it was Tampa Bay's first meaningful win in under-40-degree cold.
God knows what it's going to be next year.
Here in Notitletown, USA, our trophy drought will turn old enough to legally get drunk on May 31 of this year, its 21st birthday.
Join the club.
And to come so close to the Super Bowl that we could taste it makes it even more painful. How many times in the next year will people replay the turning points of yesterday's game - the first interception by Ricky Manning Jr., or the second, or the third - that prevented us from strolling that last mile to Houston.
There - we've ranted a little. Do you feel better now?
Because that's what the experts say you need to do today, if you want to get yesterday's debacle out of your bloodstream as quickly as possible.
Vent - as often and as loudly as you can. At the water cooler. On sports talk radio. To your kids. To your dog. Let it out.
Joel Fish, who heads the Center for Sports Psychology here in Philadelphia, said yesterday that "for 90 percent of fans, this will be the first thing that they talk about with their friends. It's beneficial to get it out of your system."
How long will it take to start feeling like your old self again? Fish estimates that maybe half of all Philly fans should be thinking by tomorrow of something else, even if it's how lousy the Sixers and Flyers have been playing lately.
Indeed, most fans - 75 percent, Fish estimates - will have moved on by midweek.
Actually, another fan psychology expert, Daniel Wann of Murray State University in Kentucky, suggests that many of you were subconsciously preparing for yesterday's 14-3 loss to Carolina, possibly days ahead of time.
Wann calls it "pro-active pessimism," one of the six or seven coping mechanisms used to deal with the inevitable - especially, it seems, in Philadelphia - defeat.
"That's pessimism prior to the event," Wann explained. "For Eagles fans, as the game got closer and closer, many grew more and more pessimistic." While most fans were expecting victory after the Eagles clinched the No. 1 seed, that number likely dropped as kickoff time approached.
"The more confident you are, the more likely your hopes will be dashed," Wann said. "Already in the back of your mind, you've prepared yourself for the loss."
Then there's something that Wann called "retroactive pessimism" - an art that we've already mastered here in Philadelphia. "That's when fans say after the fact that we never really had a chance anyway."
In this case, you could say - in fact, you probably already have - that the Eagles lost because the upstart Panthers were a team of destiny who played with nothing to lose because nobody expected them to be here in the first place. Or you can say it was all because budding superstar Brian Westbrook went down with injury - the last and most serious of a string of ailments that hampered the team.
Despite all the hype, most Philadelphians aren't really as obsessed with football as our reputation. That's why most of us are going to bounce back quickly.
But not all of us.
Fish says he worries about the 10 percent or so of fans who'll still be obsessing about yesterday's loss at this time next week.
"What the real issue here is, more often than not, that the fan has started to identify with the players to the point that he's lost the boundaries between 'us' and 'them,' " Fish said. He said he hears fans like this calling into WIP-AM (610) sports-talk radio - talking about "we" winning or losing instead of "the team."
Fish said in cases such as this, the person "needs to look at what is going on in his own life and the meaning of all this, so they can try to get back some perspective."
However, he also noted that losing such a close game is especially painful - that it will cause a lot of second guessing about plays that could have swung the outcome. He predicted it will cause people to say "it's something about Philadelphia, that we're cursed, all of those feelings that it's our destiny to get close but never get to the promised land."
It's probably best to end this with the words of an expert recently quoted in the Press-Gazette newspaper.
"Individuals that tend to over-identify with the team are going to probably be the ones that get into trouble," Theodore La Vaque said. "You have to be able to regard it as entertainment.
"Sports is basically an entertainment venue, and people that become overly identified with it, the ones that get angry and react as though they've been personally insulted in some way when the team loses are the ones that will get into trouble for the most part."
La Vaque is a psychologist who sees a lot of people like this. He works in Green Bay.> |
