The Collapse of the Eagles

John Smallwood, a writer for the Philadelphia Daily News, hits the nail on the head here for Philly sports fans...

I was speaking to a Villanova journalism class the other night and the conversation drifted to Philadelphia fans and their infamous national reputation.

I was asked if they're really that bad.

My response was the same I give to reporters from other cities when they berate Philly fans:

Philadelphia fans aren't the worst fans. They are some of the two or three best group of fans because they are passionate and care so much about their teams.

I continued by saying what you have to understand is that Philadelphia hasn't won a major professional sports championship since the Sixers' NBA title in 1983. That means there is an entire generation of Philadelphia fans who weren't even alive the last time the city celebrated a pro championship with a parade down Broad Street.

That's when several heads started nodding in the affirmative.

That's when the light bulb went off in my head, and the incredible realization came to me that I was talking to a class of college juniors and sophomores.

I asked, "How many of you were born before 1983?" I calculated that these students were likely 20- and 21 year-olds who weren't born until 1984 and '85.

My mental math was confirmed when only two in the class of about 20 raised their hands. Neither was from the Philadelphia area.

I was dumbfounded for a moment.

Although I had used that generational line several times, I never had a grasp on the sheer enormity of it.

Whenever I said that, I was always picturing kids who were 15 and under.

It hadn't occurred to me that in reality I was also talking about young adults, people old enough to vote, pay taxes, and legally sit in a bar and have a beer while watching another Philadelphia team come up short for a championship.

Right now, there are a lot of vicious recriminations taking place in Philly. Ensconced in the land of Redskin Passivity ("Cool! We only lost by two touchdowns -- this is a definite improvement!"), I'm far away from the Negadelphia chatter, but I know it's there. Being a sports fan in Philly reminds me of C3PO's line in Star Wars: "We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life."

I'm more sad than anything else.

This Eagles team has given me more sporting highs and lows than any other team I've ever followed. My heart's been broken so many times by them that it's almost expected at this point. We need something good and unexpected to happen, to break the floodgates and create an atmosphere for winning.

Personally, I can give a mulligan to this year's team... its coaches... its players... all of them. The injuries are no excuse, but how many teams are so snakebit they lose both the starting kicker and starting punter at some point in the same season? The silver lining is that we have a solid core in place, with a lot of youth from the last draft, with at least three players (Patterson, Brown and Cole) who are solid contributors already, and others (Considine, Moats, Hermanns) who will likely emerge in their second season. In the season for Thanksgiving, let's be thankful for the things we do have, and recall the times when things were worse in Philadelphia sports. There was a time in the mid to late '90's, where none of our teams could pretend to be title contenders. Today, even the Phillies are making an effort.

I know, it's small solace right now. But maybe this team's just exhausted by coming close so often and needs a year to recharge its batteries anyway. Last year was too perfect -- the rest of the division stunk, the schedule worked in our favor, even the injuries weren't particularly earth-shattering. We need to cut these guys a break and be patient.

Of course, patience is pretty difficult when you never see the reward.

Smallwood's just reaching a conclusion I reached a few years ago. Back in the day, following the NFC Title Game loss to Tampa, I wrote...

The city of Philadelphia hasn't celebrated a professional sports title since 1983. 1983!!!! Two decades, people. I mean John Travolta's revived his career at least three times in that span. Back in 1983, MTV still played videos, Bill Clinton was an oversexed country rube with pretensions of greatness, and the Berlin Wall still stood. I mean, we've witnessed the collapse of Communism in the last 20 years, but we haven't seen a Philly sports team win diddly squat. My little brother is now eighteen, has grown up in the Philadelphia suburbs, and has never seen the local sports teams bring home a championship. It's periods like that which lead young people down the path to New York Yankee fandom, or worse yet, Dallas Cowboy fandom, each of which guarantee everlasting torment in hell (fine, don't believe it, but I think it's a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the Bible).

...You know, I don't think about that day often... more than all freaking offseason. The wonderful tailgates, filled with holiday-like revelers, planning trips to San Diego, the game-opening monster kick return by Brian Mitchell followed by the Staley TD... some guy in the newspaper the next day said when Akers kicked the extra point after the TD, it was the happiest moment of his life, and he's got four children. And dammit, I understood. All of us did. This was our moment, our team, our redemption.

And then, it vanished. Taken away by Tampa Bay, a city which must have been named by a retard (seriously, the city shares the name with the body of damn water?) and is populated by rich geezers and complete morons who think football's cool because they get to take Chucky dolls to games. They won our Super Bowl, the one that had our name written on it. We believed, and all we got was a kick in the crotch, with a steel-toed boot propelled by a rocket. We wanted to cry, but most of us were too old and too cold. We cried as kids, but now we just accept it as it numbs our soul one more time. The pain hurts too much to cry. It needs to sink in and become a part of us, linking us to our sportsfan forefathers, the ones who watched the Sixers blow Game 7 in 1981, or the Phillies collapse in 1964 or the Eagles-Browns in 1950 and then bequeathed this curse to us -- the curse who makes us who we are and what we are -- Philadelphia sports fans, the ultimate losers, the ones who make all the other cities feel better about whatever piddling little problem their team faces.

Even better than Smallwood, a more poignant reminder appeared in the Philly papers this weekend. One of the deans of Philly sportwriting, the estimable Bill Lyon, was writing his final officila column on Sunday, and in his honor, the Inquirer made available some of Lyon's favorite older columns. They include this gem, from June 11, 1983, the day after the Sixers won the last professional sports title for Philadelphia in the four major sports leagues...

And so the 76ers have arrived, finally, at the rainbow's end.

It is no mirage.

Their quest, which had lasted for so many long and frustrating seasons, is over. It ends in sweet retribution and glorious triumph.

Their deliverance from seven tortured years of pursuit arrived at precisely 11:46, Eastern Daylight Time, last night. On a California evening thick with smog and laden with drizzles, the Team of Torment became basketball champions of the world.

The Sixers are free at last.

Free from the galling mockery of "We Owe You One" promissory slogans.

Free from the purgatory of three recent trips to the finals, all of which had ended in defeat.

Free from the mocking cruelty of the critics. Free from the accusations that there was not enough starch in their spines.

This is no longer a team for derision but one for the book. The record book.

As of today, it's been 8,202 days since one of my teams won a title. And it looks like we'll be waiting a while longer.