Let’s talk NFL and health care

LOL. Ugh. I recognize that lots of people like that stuff but I am not one of them.

I’m just as home at an art museum, ballet, sports game, or rock concert. I’m weird like that.

Obnoxious fans do suck, as do bad seats. I feel in a really weird place on this. I was one of those creative types whom eschewed sports altogether (the whole explicit conformity thing never bode well with me). One guy I worked with right after high school said, oh wait until you’re older. I said, “yeah right”.

Now, I don’t live for any team, if I miss a game I miss it – in fact I rarely sit down and watch one unless there’s nothing else on. Can’t sit through baseball at all (it’s like water torture to me), will only watch “my teams” if it’s basketball (or to watch Kobe and the Lakers lose), don’t much care for NFL, except the Superbowl or if one of my teams is doing well, and going to the local university games (there’s not a whole lot to do in downtown Tucson). Quite frankly I know too many people that still can’t stand football, and I feel torn, because before bonding with my dad and learning more about it, I felt the same way. So to women, the thing about sports with guys is twofold. One, it’s father-son bonding, and on another, like when I visited a sort of brother-in-law, part of whose family (not him though) was totally for McCain and Palin, we got off to a really rocky start – at which someone changed the subject to sports – smoothed everything out. Now, I totally got lost, ’cause I don’t really keep up on all the ins and outs and new players and such, but it proved to me once and for all that sports serves a real social purpose for male dynamics (it also has ugly sectarian qualities, too, of course).

Needless to say our type of sports interest is indeed very cynical, and nowhere can criticism of jocks and special treatment be more pronounced than from us (and several sports columnists). And on jocks? Part of the reason I’ve learned to love football is to watch jocks getting battered on the field! I’ve an evil schadenfreude streak in me that dates back to when the HS Football team wanted to kick my ass for being “queer” — there again though, it was my best friend and a few others who were on the team that helped defend me.

On paying taxes for stadiums, I dunno. I get it, but I’m of another mind, clouded still by my anger over the Seattle Sonics being no more… what can I say, it’s a nostalgic guy thing and a display of regional pride – however silly that might sound. Needless to say though, they should come up with their own money. Don’t tell me with all the corporate sponsorship and tacky stadium names you can’t do it. I know purists will have a hissy fit, but do what team jerseys in European club soccer do.

And with stadiums, Quest Field and the old Kingdome were in a industrial port part on the way to Boeing, so it’s not like they were taking away people’s homes (I dunno, maybe the original did, too long ago for me to know – I know the University of Phoenix one is in a residential/farm area though). The businesses that spring up around a stadium sort of speak for themselves, to me. Alice Cooper’s restaurant, similarly, is right behind US Airways Center – and quite frankly, there is NOTHING else in downtown PHX than around the stadiums.

In the end, be thankful for sports though. The delinquent players get away with a lot, but the majority are off the streets and being kept busy. That’s how I look at it – it’s a diversion program of sorts, albeit with ridiculously inflated salaries which can cause “mo’ problems”.

Yup, you’re right, and they should allow community ownership.
Technically, not a charter team, though, but that’s splitting hairs. The Packers are the third-oldest franchise in the league. They joined the NFL in 1920, the year after it was formed. The only two charter teams are the Chicago Bears, who started out as the “Decatur Staleys,” and, ironically, since is what the article is about, the Arizona Cardinals.