As my friends who will likely be joining me in contributing to Gerg!!y's blog would remember, I studied journalism at one time, but again, putting too much emphasis on that fact would be doing the field of journalism a great disservice. After that, I endeavored to teach young minds the art of writing, but, as is a theme in my life, that didn't quite work out either. I have also attempted to begin my own blog on more than one occasion, but coming to terms with the fact that I don't exactly have the discipline to sufficiently maintain my own blog nor do I assume there would be enough people interested in my thoughts to necessitate a blog, those blogs met a quick demise. So, anyway, Gerg!!y's invitation, paired with my desire to blog and the self-endulgence I get in writing, made me happy to join in.
As for what you might expect to read from me on this blog, the topics could range quite a bit. I believe that I have the most to contribute in the realm of opinions on sports, but I've always said that music is my passion, so you just might see a little bit of that too. I play fantasy sports, the vast majority of which is fantasy baseball, with a smidge of fantasy football, and even less fantasy basketball. I love movies, but I don't get to see as many as I like; still I always have an itch to review a movie as I'm driving home from seeing it for the first time. And pro wrestling, particularly WWE, is something of a hobby of mine, and you might see some of that, too.
So, I thought I might begin by describing my life as a sports fan. Many of my friends have been confounded at the array of sports teams that I tend to follow. I'd say most people, particularly Chicagoans, tend to adore their hometown teams and despise the rest. This is not me, however. My life has led me from Chicago to Peoria to Jacksonville to St. Louis to middle Missouri and back to St. Louis. And just as my city of resident has changed, my tastes in sports have changed. I never had a town that I called home for longer than 7 to 10 years at a time, so I drew influence from the local and national sports scenes wherever I lived. All of this has given me a broader appreciation of the sporting world. I love the Cardinals, I follow the Miami Dolphins and Chicago Bulls, and I slightly pay attention to the St. Louis Blues. I do not hate any team or city, though some individual athletes rub me the wrong way. Despite my ties to the Cardinals and St. Louis, I have always felt that Wrigley Field is the absolute best place to watch a baseball game and cherish any opportunity to watch the Cardinals beat on the Cubs in Chicago.
So, here's the story of how I became a fan of sports and the variety of sports teams:
This fact has always been, to me, the source of irony, potentially bitter irony to my friends who have lived in and adored Chicago along with Chicago's teams: though I was born in the Chicagoland area, from the day I was born, I have been a St. Louis Cardinals fan. I have frequently said that my parents, who were born in St. Louis (dad) and Bloomington (mom), raised me properly as a Cardinals fan, even though we were living in Streamwood, at the time. My family would even make the 5-hour trek to St. Louis from Chicago to watch the Cardinals play at Busch Stadium II. And as luck (or a magentic effect) would have it, I have fonud myself living within walking distance of Busch Stadium III, which is a virtual paradise for me. So there's that.
The football team that I follow is the Miami Dolphins, although the distance between me and south Florida and the team's mediocrity over the past decade-and-a-half makes it increasingly harder to follow the Phins with each year. The story behind this is a fun one, I think. Having been born in the Chicago area, I was a Bears fan as a child, and some of my fondest early memories are of being taken to Soldier Field to see the Bears, sometimes even in Bear weather (those are the best times, as Bears fans will attest). But in the years immediately following the Bears' success in the mid-80s, my impatient and impressional brain hungered for another team to root for. At this general time frame, when my family had moved to Peoria, my best friend Tom Olson and I would spend copious nights binging on frozen pizza, Mountain Dew, and video games. One of our favorite games was Tecmo Super Bowl, and Tom and I would be no strangers to playing through a complete NFL season during any given all-nighter. As fellow fans of the game would probably remember, all it took to run up a score of, say, 105-9 in that game was selecting with an elite quarter back paired with a pair of fast wide receivers, during every possession dropping back with the QB to the endzone and chucking the ball to the other endzone with one of the WRs waiting. Miami's Dan Marino, Mark Clayton, and Mark Duper were my chosen combo, and a Dolphins fan was born. But I readily admit that, though my ties lie with the Miami Dolphins, I enjoy NFL football in its entirety.
The college I went to didn't have a football program, so I don't have any specific allegience to any college football team, but I tend to perk up whenever the University of Illinois Fighting Illini or the University of Missouri Tigers are good.
In basketball, I must admit that I became a fan of the Chicago Bulls in the fashion of a fair weather fan, but once that was established, I was a fan for life. In NCAA basketball, much like how I follow college football, I tend to perk up when my Bradley Braves are doing well, but that seems to happen only about every eight years. As a kid and teenager (before I went to Bradley, obvisouly), I followed the Duke Blue Devils, but in the years since I have been effectively shamed out of that fandom. And to be completely honest, March Madness doesn't seem to transfix me as much as it does other sports fans. That's likely because it overlaps with Spring Training, and that usually dominates my attention.
As far as hockey goes, I've never been a true fan of the sport, short of really enjoying the NHL video games of the late 90's and early 2000s. But when I'm forced to claim allegience, the St. Louis Blues get that distinction, if for no other reason than the fact that I take my nephew to see a Blues game every year for his birthday, and that tugs at my heartstrings. As a kid, I paid attention to the Pittsburgh Penguins, mainly because of the success they had in the mid-1990s, as was the case with the Chicago Bulls and Duke Blue Devils. Other than the Cardinals, I'm a bit of a fair weather fan, aren't I? Or at least I was as a teenager.
So there you have it. For those of you who didn't tune out four paragraphs ago, I will bring this is a merciful end. It's likely that I will give the same treatment to music and movies, and maybe even wrestling, at a later date. But at least, those of you who didn't know all of that are enlightened to the nature of my fandom.
I really look forward to contributing to this blog, especially seeing the array of ideas being thrown around by other participants.
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