by J. Brown
My favorite sports team is the New York Knicks. The Knicks, for the lack of a better phrase, are not good. Over the past 10 years, they’ve made the NBA playoffs three times, twice losing in the first round. They’ve finished with a record above .500 only three times in the past 14 seasons. And Knicks fans older than me haven’t fared much better; their last championship was in 1973. As a fan, rooting for the Knicks has been a mixture of frustration, despair, apathy, false hopes and disappointment.
It would be easy for an outsider to wonder why I cheer for a team that has given me so little to cheer for. The easy thing for me to do would be to drop them for a perennial winner (like the Spurs) or an exciting young team with newfound success (like the Warriors). To be honest, there have been seasons when the team was so bad that I flat out refused to watch them – I touched on that idea in a previous post. But I’ve been rooting for the Knicks since 1998. Over the past 18 seasons, they’ve become my team. At this point, it wouldn’t even feel right cheering for another team. I’m in too deep now.
Moreover, I doubt that I would really be able to enjoy rooting for a team that was significantly better than the rest. One of the biggest reason we watch sports is for the mystery of the unknown. We’re intrigued by the idea that anything could happen. It becomes a lot less fulfilling to watch a team win when you already expected them to do so.
