Two-thirds of the way through the Peanuts baseball reviews, and I come across this.
Smart-ass response: Look, I know the Nats suck, but it's not like they don't have double digit victories. They're not even the worst team in all of baseball!
Sober-ass response: This goes beyond a game; beyond a location (already I am seeing Internet opinion along the lines of, "New York fans are too crazy"); beyond sense. Was he intoxicated? Have a history of mental illness? Just plain prone to violent outbursts? Does any proclivity or condition excuse this even one iota?
The Minnesota Vikings of 1998 became only the third team in NFL history to rack up 15 regular season wins. Their 556 points scored was at the time a new league record. With four Super Bowl humiliations in the past, the mighty Purple rolled into their home dome to face the Atlanta Falcons for the right to represent the NFC in the Big 'Un. With 2:07 remaining in regulation and the Vikings leading 27-20 (after at one point leading 20-7, mind you), kicker Gary Anderson missed barely wide left from 38 yards. It was his first miss of the season, having gone 35 of 35 up till that point. Atlanta won in overtime, and the Vikes notched another mark in the futility belt, as the first team to go 15-1 and miss the goddamn Super Bowl.
In my life as a sports fan, there has been no greater pain. (I wish I could claim it as the most excruciating moment of my life, 'cause that would mean I've lived an especially charmed one.) To dream about an overdue championship for your favorite team, to feel premature pride, to close your eyes and see yellow and purple confetti, to revel in your persistence as a supporter and to take especial glee in the fact that it's not the Redskins hoisting that silver football...it can get to a person. Self-worth becomes entangled in an event that you are not a direct participant in, a series of causes and effects that you cannot alter or control. I could, on that pathetic January day in 1999, take a few minutes...call Gary Anderson 17 different strains of putz...curse Denny Green to the skies for choosing to ease into overtime instead of acting like the coach of a team with possibly the most powerful offense in NFL history...and of course shake my head at the fact that a team quarterbacked by Chris fucking Chandler was going to the Super Bowl. But then I put on my big girl panties and changed the channel. My mother was around; we played Yahtzee. The only further pigskin talk was her wish that John Elway would get his second championship and retire on top. Which he in fact did.
I'll end this post on a favorite saying of my nephews: "It ain't that serious."
New York Mets
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