This time last year I was glued to the start of another season for the Pittsburgh Penguins. The Steelers were a presence in my weekly sports life and Penn State football was a Saturday afternoon mainstay. A lot can happen in a year. I now dedicate at least 80% of my sports fandom to Arsenal Football Club of the English Premier League. How did I get here?
Well lets go sport by sport. I’ve always had a quiet caring for Arsenal, ever since I was introduced to what EPL was by my Uncle Steve many many many years ago (circa 1994?). He told me who Manchester United was and tried to get me to root for them. I instead chose Arsenal because it sounded cool, and that’s where they stored the guns. Living overseas exposed me to football (yes the NFL = American Football now). I never really got addicted but I paid a little attention. Moving home this past spring post-divorce changed all of that, and I’ll get into how.
Moving away from the Steelers was probably the most natural thing I ever did, and it has more to do with the NFL and Roger Goodell than anything. The NFL has become unwatchable as a sport. I started pulling away from it two years ago when I stopped playing Fantasy Football. There are too many commercials, the game moves too slow, and there are simply too many inconsistencies in the governance of the game both at the executive and officiating levels. I’m just not interested. Add to the mix the obnoxious nature of most Steelers fans now. Seriously, when I left home in 1998 Steeler Nation was not 80% comprised entitled, know it all, loud mouth pricks. Whatever happened to winning with humility? My grandfather would be appalled with the current state of affairs in the Steelers core fanbase. Too many bridgejumpers that wear the term yinzer like a badge of honor when it is the rest of the world’s way of saying you are an uneducated redneck from Pittsburgh that no one else likes. Steelers fans act way too much like Oklahoma Sooners fans. Meaning they treat you like shit when you aren’t one of these people that foams Steelers at the mouth. You get treated like you don’t belong. When I traveled I used to tell people it wasn’t like that here. Boy I was wrong.
Now I love Penn State to my core. I attended Penn State. I am a Nittany Lion. However I cannot consume the NCAA product. I have previously gotten into my reasons why but in short they revolve around the way in which the NCAA tore down their statue of JoePa much like President Erickson did in the wake of public pressure over the Sandusky Scandal. I refuse to consume the NCAA because of their disregard for the truth. I am disgusted on many of levels over what happened at PSU and how different bodies have handled it, but as a sports fan I care about the integrity of what it means to be a Penn Stater more than I ever will about the outcome of a football game. I have so much respect for the players who stayed. Win or lose they are champions, I just can’t give another dime to the NCAA.
The Penguins are probably the toughest thing for me to deal with right now. I love hockey. It is still without a doubt my favorite sport. However the current lockout has burned my passion for NHL hockey away in alarmingly quick fashion (and with it has diminished my care for the AHL and ECHL). This is not like the last lockout, which was about saving the sport. This current lockout is about greed. A small core of greedy big revenue owners (I suspect the Penguins are among them) are working to stop the player’s proposal of revenue sharing with small market teams while trying to lower the players percentage cut of league revenue. I was one of those fans they thanked in 2005 for staying with it and understanding. I did understand then. I don’t now. The players were willing to play and the owners locked them out. There could be hockey right now. Owner greed was more important. I honestly cannot bring myself to wear an article of Penguins’ apparel while I suspect they are a part of the problem and at the same time still very happy to take my tax dollars to pay for Consol Energy Center. I’m just too mad at the Penguins and the NHL right now to be passionate. I am apathetic about the NHL returning. I won’t run right back to it like I did 7 years ago.
The Pirates, man I’ve tried to care. 20 seasons. I mean I care, but I just can’t watch them implode in any kind of dedicated manner. I like going to games, but you can only take a team shitting in your lap every August so many times.
So back around to Arsenal. I am in love with football in a way I never thought possible and there are a few reasons that are easy to identify. First the noise level is lower, meaning that fewer people around here talk about it so there are less dumbasses who haven’t taken the time to get educated on it with an opinion. Nothing is worse than a moron who listens to Mark Madden or 93.t The Fan and takes the idiocy spewed on those airwaves and walks out the door thinking they are an expert. That in part has caused the problem I see in the Steelers/Penguins/Pirates fanbases. I like the fact that there are maybe a dozen people I carry on intelligent conversations about football with. Second is environment. I’ve found a great place on the Southside to watch matches every week. The owner, bar tenders, waitstaff, cooks, and regulars and I are all on a first name basis at this point. They’ve been doing football weekend breakfasts for 11 years and within 4 hours on my first day there I felt like family. You don’t take that kind of feeling lightly. Additionally the club itself has made me feel more welcome as a supporter than the Penguins or Steelers ever did. Within weeks of communicating with the club, I really can’t even put into words the genuine sense of brotherhood they conveyed to someone thousands of miles and an ocean away. Finally football is something I never shared with my ex-wife. There are no painful memories tied to her thru my support of Arsenal. I watched the Penguins win a Stanley Cup with her. I watched the Steelers win a Superbowl with her. It all hurts way to much given the events of the past year not to associate memories of sports with her and all of the betrayal that occurred. My support of Arsenal is clean of pain. That may sound dumb, but it is the truth. It is almost therapeutic.
Maybe in time I will come back around to supporting the Penguins like I have in the past, but that will depend a lot on how the lockout goes and how the Penguins conduct themselves. The Steelers I won’t really pay attention to until the playoffs and that is more the my father and the memory of my grandfather than anything. Penn State I will quietly watch on the stat sheets. I doubt I will ever consume another game unless it is live. So that’s how I got here. Arsenal til I die. By far the greatest team the world has ever seen. Play like Thierry Henry today.
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