Still, if my own personal feelings and those being overwhelmingly expressed on the sports talk radio stations in the Philadelphia market are anything to go by, it's been an extremely disappointing Fall. The frustrating sentiment was best expressed in a visual medium in the last game of the NLDS, in which Ryan Howard came up to bat with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and hit a sharp grounder to the right side of the infield, only to collapse on the field as he was getting himself out of the batter's box thanks to a ruptured Achilles tendon. The image captured perfectly the crumpled spirit of the Philly faithful who had been so pumped throughout the season watching the best team in baseball make mincemeat out of everyone they came across, only to completely collapse in the last month of the season as the bulk of the position players on the team simply ran out of gas. And yes, the fans in attendance and many watching at home made that sense of disappointment loud and clear.
Couple that with the Philadelphia Eagles, who made a blitzkrieg of personnel moves after the NFL lockout ended to shore up what is arguably the best offense in football and address the many holes that were present in their defense last year, leading to their first round exit from the playoffs after a year that began 10-4 and had all the promise in weight loss doctor philadelphia the world. Unfortunately, many of the new defensive pickups have been considerably less than stellar, leading to three weeks in a row in which the Eagles took leads into the 4th quarter, only to lose the game in the end. The atmosphere of disappointment in the two major sports teams among the fandom is palatable, and harkens back to an era of sports with which most of the fans are infinitely more familiar.
I was born in 1982. When I was just under a year old, the Philadelphia 76ers won the NBA Title. I had no conscious memory of it. In fact, up until 2008, when the Phillies finally won a World Series, I and anyone else who was born after me had no conscious memory of anything but disappointment in our sports teams. We had a 25-year drought in championships among the four major sports, the longest of any city that had been consistently represented by teams in all four for that amount of time. Sure, we had a lot of good sports to watch during that drought. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, along with the early 2000s, the Philadelphia Eagles were a consistently good football team. The Flyers dominated the mid-1980s and mid-1990s in the Wales (and later Eastern) Conference. The 76ers did fairly well during the Larry Brown/Allen Iverson years. But all of those teams fell short of that elusive World Title, and as a result, the Philadelphia fandom began to adopt the concept of perennially falling short into their own unique culture.
Philadelphia sports fans (and really, Philadelphia anything fans) have gotten a terrible rap from the national media for as long as I've been alive. Bring up a conversation about the culture here with anyone who isn't from here and you'll hear the same thing. We booed Santa Claus. We cheered Michael Irvin's career-ending injury. We get down on our own teams when they underperform. We're loud, vulgar, rude, demanding, unforgiving louts with incredibly high standards who don't appreciate the effort that athletes or performers make to perform for us, especially when they're our hometown people
Let me, as a lifelong resident of the Philly sports nation and fan of all things Philadelphia, call immediate B.S. on most of the above. Are we loud, vulgar, demanding, and occasionally asses? You bet! We are passionate fans of our sports and entertainment. I defy you to find anywhere in the United States (outside Texas) that has a greater love for and pride in the people and things that it identifies with as part of the cultural identity.
Yes, we boo, loudly and often, and many times directed more at our own team than the opponents. But what should that tell you about us? That we're unappreciative? Or that we care? Go to any college or pro football game where a normally good team does more poorly than expected and you'll hear boos. Go to any game where a normally bad team plays poorly and you'll hear dead silence. The faithful crowd's probably been beaten down all season and sees no reason to give voice to any kind of sensation unless something good happens. They just don't care.
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