The Rookies

That's right, two of these are about Buffalo. Deal with it.

I hate fan rules. Fan rules, in general, make me angrier than apartheid and Triple H combined. Don’t say ‘no-hitter’ or ‘perfect game’! You can only have one team you root for in a specific sport! If your team moves, you should still root for them! Are people fucking serious? It’s sports. No, it’s not even sports – it’s watching sports. You know what making rules about watching sports is like? No, you don’t, and neither do I because IT IS REMARKABLY INCONSEQUENTIAL. It reminds me of all the inane conversations that happened at keggers in college about how drunk someone needs to be to actually be ‘drunk’, or what constituted a muscle shirt. (Also, to anyone who went to college with me, or talked to me about college, or has ever seen Animal House: FUCK YOU)

The one that bothers me the most comes from the mouth of our most tenuously-loved blog figurehead, Bill Simmons.

18. If you live in a city that has fielded a professional team since your formative years, you have to root for that team.

Setting aside this unconstitutional hemming of my personal freedom, this rule is incredibly outdated. Yes, back in the ‘60s, when everyone had three channels and only local broadcast stations showed sports games and you thanked your deity of choice for the privilege of watching your local teams battle any and all comers, this makes sense. But now, when satellite packages allow us to watch every moment of football to ever bless the airwaves? When you can watch all MLB games on your computer? Please. If the technological revolution we’ve gone through in the last twenty years has given us anything to embrace, it’s that we can choose what we like with a greater amount of knowledge and fervor than ever before. Your favorite TV show can be British. Your favorite band can be Kenyan. You can watch any of these chosen entertainments with a couple clicks and taps on a keyboard. Same goes for sports – not wanting to watch your local team has become not having to either. If Simmons is too busy typing smarmy Tweets and masturbating to what he imagines the inside of an NBA GM’s office looks like, well I’m sorry.

But let’s take a step back from all that jazz: away from the internet, from cable television, from even (technically) real teams. I’m talking about Tecmo Super Bowl for the Sega Genesis.

I had, of course, played its predecessor on the NES. Hunching close to the screen in my parents’ bedroom, I played the hell out of that first five-day rental period from Blockbuster. When next Christmas came and my parents wonderfully updated me to a Sega, my first goal was to find the next installment. Found it, rented it, held it tight in my grasp until we got home, at which point I raced upstairs.

Now, a bit of exposition. As a kid, I was pretty smart. I read a bit, knew a ton of words and understood the basic plot elements of Full House much faster than my fellow elementary school pupils. However, I had (have) a lack of common sense that often got me into adorably naive trouble. I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to pet strange dogs, so they would try to bite me. I didn’t know that some people who asked for my parents on the phone were trying to sell them something, so I brought them the phone every time. So, when at the ripe age of five when I got my first copy of Super Bowl in my Sega, I found myself in a bit of a pickle: the first two teams you could select were the Buffalo Bills and the Indianapolis Colts. Somehow (by accident, I believe) I selected myself to play the Bills against the Colts. Utilizing the best representation of the K-Gun that 16-bits could render, I defeated the lowly Colts 70-10.

Now, remember: five year olds like doing the same thing over and over. There is nothing that makes someone that young happier than seeing something they like, except for seeing that exact same thing ten minutes later. Following this logic, rather than figure out how to play the more subtle nuances of the game, I just…didn’t. I kept playing the Bills versus the Colts over and over for the entirety for my rental window, destroying Indy with more and more schadenfreude-drenched joy with every single game. It wasn’t even fair: the five-wide shotgun formation that led to a score with Andre Reed from Jim Kelly almost every time. The play-action to Don Beebe. King of them all was, of course, the shotgun direct snap to Thurman Thomas, who would bust right up the middle for thirty yards a clip. Unlike in real life, things weren’t much worse on defense, with Bruce Smith and Phil Hansen trading sacks like hot potatoes and Mark Kelso and Nate Odomes catching anything near them. When I finally bought the game about a year later, I discovered Season Mode, blowing through the whole of the NFL now (although, yes – I did lose to the Cowboys in the Super Bowl every now and then).

And this, this continuation of using the Bills once I had grown up enough to understand what menus are, was when my allegiances changed. Of course, I had always been a Vikings fan – people talked about them, my dad loved them, there wasn’t much of a choice. But when I figured out how to chose them on Tecmo, it was…well, it sucked. They had this weird reverse play that never worked. They were led by QB Vikings, a man that (as far as I could tell) did not actually play in the NFL. So I started to care more about the Bills than my beloved hometown Vikes. Just my luck, then, was that this was coupled with the Bills glory years, meaning they were on CBS’ AFC broadcasts all the time, and whenever my dad went to watch the Vikings with his friends, I stayed home and watched the Bills. I read about them in Sports Illustrated for Kids. Also, due to my awkwardness as a youth, I talked about them. Incessantly. (I still get crap from my family about my constant extolling of “Furman Thomas”)

What bugs me the most about Simmons’ rule is that, in its full version, it insinuates the only reason anyone could like a non-hometown team is because of how good they were. Simmons follows the previous quote with: “None of this, “The Bengals weren’t very good when I was growing up in Cincy, so I became a Cowboys fan” crap.” It’s like this branch of fandom comes as a way to avoid tragedy. Au Contrare, Sports Guy: The Bills taught me tragedy. You don’t watch your favorite team lose in three straight Super Bowls without learning pain. I cried when they lost the third one, barely able to choke down my ring bologna and fried potatoes. I cried when Jim Kelly got the concussion that ended his career (against the fucking Jaguars). I had a fling with the ’98 Vikings, but quickly ran back when I realized that it still hurts, no matter where you go. The lesson was clear: Enjoy every win, because there’s just as many losses (or, at least, it feels that way).

Nowadays, I don’t really like football as much as I used to. The jerseys all look stupid, the television broadcasts have become so ad-saturated that even things like the Red Zone get sponsored. But when I do care, I care about the Bills. I watched their heartbreaker against the Cowboys on Monday Night two years ago, and against Cleveland last year. I hope JP Losman dies. I say “BEEF MOE” with exuberance every once in a while. The terms “Wide Right” and “Music City Miracle” make my fists clench and my teeth hurt.

No one tells me who I can root for. Circle those wagons, baby.