Since I started this blog I've been sitting on the idea of spending a post ranting about how much I hate the New York Yankees. I've just been biding my time waiting for the MFY (Y stands for Yankees, MF stands for exactly what you think it stands for) to make some off-season move that would stoke my ire enough to send me into a bile-spewing rage. They made a good run at Cliff Lee, but couldn't land him. They haven't really made any other big moves. In fact, they just looked clumsy and a little ungrateful as they re-signed their highly overpaid, possibly over-the-hill shortstop, Derek Jeter, and their old (but still awesome) closer Mariano Rivera. Right now, the 2011 Yankees look like the same team that wasn't good enough to get past the Rangers in the ALCS in 2010 except that a bunch of the older marquee players (Jeter, A-Rod, Posada, and Rivera) are another year closer to dropping off the performance cliff. How am I supposed to get worked up over that? I almost feel sorry for them. Almost.
You see, I've been in this situation before, and I learned my lesson. Back in 1989 the Dallas Cowboys (another one of my least favorite teams) went 1-15 on the season, and I legitimately felt bad for them. I wanted them to do better. Three seasons later they beat my favorite NFL team, the Buffalo Bills, in the Super Bowl. Then they did it again the next year. Those bastards! They used my sympathy against me! Oooooooooo, it makes me mad just thinking about it. I changed my approach to my anti-fandom. I now have a no mercy rule. I want the Dallas Cowboys to lose every single game they play until Jerry Jones is forced to shut down the franchise. I have become a true schadenfreude sports fan. I relish seeing the teams and players I dislike fail at least as much, if not more, than I enjoy seeing my favorite teams win.
Most of us who follow sports are schadenfreude fans to some degree, I'm sure. But if you support perennial losers (the Buffalo Bills and the post-2006 Oakland A's for me), all you really have during most seasons is the pleasure of watching your enemy teams fail.
I learned in a psychology class in college that losing feels worse than winning feels good. Does that make sense? What if I said that the absolute value of the emotional content of losing is greater than the absolute value of the emotional content of winning? Is that better? Eh, I tried. So maybe being a schadenfreude sports fan is as satisfying as sports fanaticism gets. Maybe we shouldn't even bother picking teams to support. We should just focus our energy on teams to hate. In that vein, I'd like to encourage the MFY, the Cowboys, the LA Lakers, and any Notre Dame or Duke sports team to go out there and lose one for me. It makes me happy.
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