Mike Wendling, a sports addict, tries—and fails—to go cold turkey.
I admit it. I’m an addict.
It started when I was shockingly young—maybe four or five years old. At first, I learned it from my parents. Later, friends and family helped feed my habit. Over the years, it got worse and worse. Oh sure, there were ups and downs. There were big wins and awful losses. Every once in a while, I managed to rip myself away from my vice, but I would always return in the end.
I’m addicted to sports, and now I want to quit.
Like most addicts, I hide it well. When I mentioned to my wife that I was thinking of writing this article, she said, “You’re not that obsessed with sport.” She’s English, you see, and we live in London, where games aren’t pluralized. In the newspapers, they are monolithically upper-case and singular: SPORT.
But the thing is, my wife is usually asleep when I get back from the pub, which shows NFL games on Sundays. She doesn’t know about those afternoons spent idly watching some soccer game between two teams I couldn’t name, just because it happened to be on the TV above the bar. Or that trip back to the US during which, despite a very busy schedule, I managed to cut back on sleep and imbibe prodigious quantities of NFL, NBA, and that drug more dangerous than crystal meth, Sportscenter.
(I suspect the CIA invented Sportscenter. You know you’re hooked when you’ve already seen it a couple of hours earlier, you know all the scores and all the games coming up—and yet you still watch the whole show.)
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At times, sports have served me well. Like pretty much any kid growing up in western New York, I was a huge Buffalo Bills fan. As a teenager, I played almost every game going, and the exercise habit keeps me in pretty good health to this day.
For a summer job, my uncle got me a cushy number in the accounting department of Buffalo’s minor league baseball team. The job came with decent wages for work that wasn’t too taxing, cut-price hot dogs, and most importantly, free admission to every home game.
Throughout my career, I’ve never worked exclusively as a sports journalist, but games have always been a part of the job. As a reporter, I covered Cleveland’s sports teams and compiled college football box scores for a wire service. Later, when I moved to England, I ended up working on Radio 5 live, the BBC’s rolling news/sport radio network, during a World Cup and a couple of English Premiership seasons. More recently, I’ve been digging into the opaque world of online poker. OK, so maybe poker’s not a sport. But on the other hand, it involves players, strategy, luck, and you can bet on the outcome—so actually, yes, it is a sport.
But now the bad is starting to outweigh the good. Perhaps it’s my age, but I’m getting sick of pampered millionaires, sex scandals and hissy fits—and that’s just among the owners. I’m ready to quit sports because of the money—the cash spent on tickets, online-viewing subscriptions, losing ten-dollar bets against the spread on Monday night. Not to mention the time that could be spent pursuing other, more fruitful, and less frustrating hobbies.
But most of all I’m ready to quit sports because of the pain involved in watching a bunch of mostly losing teams reach inevitable conclusions. I’m tired of having hopes raised every year, only to be dashed, kicked, burned and beaten—and then for some reason, in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, rising again the following season.
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This would be an ideal time to duck out of the stadium to avoid the traffic. The Bills are, well, the Bills: halfway through a rebuilding phase that is scheduled to last until 2018 or debating a traitorous move to Canada, whatever comes first. The Buffalo Sabres have been sold by one billionaire and bought by another—how this changes anything, I haven’t a clue.
Here in London, our local soccer team Queen’s Park Rangers has just moved up to the one of world’s best leagues, the English Premiership. This may sound like a good thing, but as QPR are preparing for comprehensive drubbings by the likes of Manchester United and Chelsea, it could really be very bad.
To top it all off, a couple months ago, my first son was born. I know I could spare him a lifetime of sorrow if I only I steer him clear of dad’s favorite (or “favourite”) teams.
In a pub recently, I was talking to a friend who is a die-hard fan of legendary soccer club Liverpool. If he had the choice from birth, he told me, he’d never have chosen to get interested in Liverpool or any other team. Despite their fairly impressive trophy cabinet, he explained, there’s just too much hurt involved in losing to make the winning worthwhile.
I tried to argue with him, recalling the Bills’ glory days, strings of early-90s playoff wins, and games like The Comeback. But now my heart’s just not in it.
I’m ready to quit, even if the NFL season is just around the corner. I’ve had enough. I’m ready to go cold turkey. Although, come to think of it—one last game wouldn’t hurt, would it?
—Photo woodleywonderworks/Flickr
The pain of seeing your team come up short year in and year out takes its toll. In most big sports… NFL, NBA and College Football for example, you have a ton of teams that can win it all. That means only one team will, though. The odds that it will be your team even once is slim.. the odds that it will be your team over and over are not good. In short, you will experience more heartbreak than joy. I’m setting the sports pipe down. I’m trying to 12 step it and watch other movies, exercise more, surf… Read more »
If one could rationally decide not to be a fan of a team then anyone would do it, but where’s the fun in that? Same awful thought process displayed by anyone who chooses a team to support. There’s no choice, you just are a fan, you forgot why…
As a fan of my hapless Bills and a Futbol addict.thanks for such a refreshing article!
the difference between golisano and pegula? night and day. golisano operated the team as a business, not permitting it to lose money in any given year. pegula came in and said, “if i want to make money, i’ll go drill another gas well.” and then: “From this point forward, the Buffalo Sabres’ reason for existence will be to win the Stanley Cup,” said the billionaire and lifelong Sabres fan. http://bleacherreport.com/articles/634011-new-buffalo-sabres-owner-terry-pegula-making-immediate-impact now is NOT the time to jump THAT ship! as for the Bills, they’ve been irrelevant for a decade. easy enough to give them up. at least the team is… Read more »
Haha, good stuff. You can’t give it up. Even if makes you miserable, one day it will make you so unbelievably happy that you’ll forget the decades of misery. Unless you’re a Cubs fan. 2001 was a transcendent sports period for me as my beloved Patriots won their first ever Super Bowl in grand fashion. But that day in Oct. of 2004 when the Red Sox finally won a World Series was among the top 5 moments of my life. I shared it with my dad, my brother and my future wife. You can’t just give that stuff up. It… Read more »
I get by on baseball methadone during the summer, I’m heading back to the finest China white next Saturday afternoon. I’m lucky my employer doesn’t check between my toes…