PTU Old Man Rant: Why Doesn't This Generation of Kids Root for the Home Team?

Allow me to be old and crotchety for a second here (or older and crotchetyer than usual). If you have any younger cousins or siblings or if you just hang creepily around high schools in your van, you've no doubt noticed that there is an epidemic of misplaced sports allegiances among the youth of America. And I don't mean just frontrunners like we grew up with, the Bulls or 49ers fans who just got their Starter jacket or Jordans because they were the best team at the moment. That's been going on forever. I'm talking kids closely following the Chargers and Nuggets who've never left Brooklyn. Ask any 15 year old what teams they root for and you're likely to hear something like: Patriots, Thunder and Padres. What happened to civic pride anyway?

There's a couple reasons behind this phenomenon. One is the rise of fantasy sports and the focus on individual stars over the team. Even if you don't have a fantasy team you can't really avoid the emphasis that's placed on individual stats partly because of it. ESPN has shows and tickers dedicated to fantasy. The NBA was the first league to really emphasize the individual as star with Jordan, Magic and Bird and the other leagues soon followed suit. It's easy to start liking the Vikings simply because Adrian Peterson is a beast, hometown rivalries be damned. I have a nephew who lives in New Jersey and likes the Nuggets just because they had Carmelo Anthony and continues to root for them still even though Melo plays for a team much closer to home. It seems dumb to me, but it's fairly common place these days.

Individual players aren't the only reason that the kids root for whoever they feel like of course. Another huge factor is the options. Just like Chris Rock once said "A man is only as faithful as his options", a sports fan is only as faithful to his city as his choices as well (or so it seems). Even when a young Bagels was growing up in the 80s and 90s, we didn't have too many teams to choose from. You had one or two games a week on nationally in each sport and then you had your local teams on every night. Almost by default, most people become fans of their city's teams. [As Hater J points out, this is also why there are so many damn Steelers and Cowboys fans around. They were on all the friggin' time back in the day. Also, those people are idiots]. Now, it's different. With League Pass, NFL Ticket, Direct TV, a network for each major sport, twitter, live streaming games online and a million other types of media, you can follow an entire season of any team you damn well choose. Combine that with the fact that most kids don't get their sports info from their local paper or newscast like previous generations, but from a nationally distributed form of media like ESPN and there's no reason for a kid from New York to even keep up with what's happening with the Jets and Giants. Just 10 years ago, it was hard to be a Chargers fan if you lived on the East coast, but today you can rock your Philip Rivers jersey on your couch every week with pride, even if you will no doubt look like a jerkoff.

What it comes down to, really, is the world is getting smaller every day. People are connected (at least technologically if not physically and emotionally) more than ever. I wrote recently about how someone like ASAP Rocky seems like a fraud to me since he's imitating a style of a region that he's never even been to never mind grown up in, but the genesis of a Harlem rapper who sounds like Lil Flip is basically the same as a kid from the Bronx who roots for the Ravens. There's no city to be proud of when we all live in one big region. And now I'm going to get back in my rocking chair and watch the Knicks on MSG while I listen to old Biggie records. You damn kids.

The Most Hated Person In Sports: The Front Runner

George Carlin had his famous 7 dirty words you can't say on television routine back in the '70s, and while most of those have changed with the shifting morals of acceptability on tv, there are still a handful of words that could start a fight in most locker rooms and sports bars: Choker, flopper, Mets fan and maybe the worst label, frontrunner. Those other names usually reference a flaw in your game or mentality that could be fixed or reversed with the right image-changing moments (just ask Dirk). But a front-runner is the worst kind of sports person, be it a fan or player, coach, whatever. An emotionally weak person who latches on to the successes of others (at least that's how it's perceived).

We all know a few front-runners in our lives. That kid from your office who all of a sudden is a die-hard Heat fan and probably doesn't even know who Bimbo Coles is. The guy at the deli in the Cowboys Jacket who's never left Brooklyn but lives and dies for the 'Boys, or the Jordan fanatic turned Kobe lover turned LeBron supporter (I'm partly guilty of this one). These types are everywhere. In New York, we get a ton of these characters; just take a look around you on the subway when the Jets were making their recent runs. I never knew there were that many Green and white supporters during the Rich Kotite years, because there weren't. Or the bandwagon jumping Knicks fans who ran out to get their Carmelo #7 t-shirts, and then quickly remembered why they jumped ship in the first place. Those types of fans, though, are preferable to the die-hards for teams that aren't even in their city. The guy who grew up being a Braves and Cowboys fan because of their dominance in the '90s are way worse than the fan who wakes up to root for his home-town team whenever they start winning. You can witness this phenomenon any Winter Sunday at your local bar. There's no way that many people moved here from Pittsburgh (I don't even think that many people live in Pittsburgh, I've never met one person actually from there).

Why do we hate these guys so much? Because they like to take the easy way out, rooting for whatever team is on the winning side at any given time. Die-hard sports fans who stick with their team through the good, the basd and the Isiah, can't stand the preening idiot in the Stoudemire jersey who swears he's been down since day one, while the true fans bear the scars of Shandon Anderson and Jerome James starting lineups. This is also the reason so many people hate LeBron and Bosh (and to a lesser extent Wade). As many people have pointed out since last July, these two carpetbaggers couldn't handle things on their own and had to team up and form some kind of a half-assed super team. Fans can't just trade in their team allegiances (they could but deep down they still care about whatever team they ditched). We all wish we could call our agents and say, I'm done with these asshole Mets, I want to be a part of a winner, but it's not that easy and we don't want to be perceived as douche-bag frontrunners, a gene that Cowboys, Yankees and Notre Dame fan LeBron lacks.

So, next time a Heat fan asks you why you're one of the millions of people rooting for the Bulls and (if they fail) whoever makes it out of the West, tell them you just can't stand a front-runner and then get ready to fight.