Growing Up Green

Ever since I first grasped the concept of professional sports leagues somewhere around age four or five, I’ve only ever loved one sport and one team. Sure, I watched baseball and was even a Yankee fan for a time, but I eventually lost a lot of interest in the game, to the point where I felt like calling myself a fan was a misnomer. (More on that later.) I follow the NBA, but I never really liked a particular team. And I would be extremely hard-pressed to name twenty active NHL players. For me, the New York Jets were it for my entire childhood. Hell, they still are. They were the only team that ever made me think and act irrationally. They’re the only thing that has made me, a fairly level-headed person by most accounts, run laps around my house with my arm raised and sit there fuming on the couch ready to punch something within a week of each other and at ages where I should be long past such things. They’ve made me think the most, laugh the most, cry the most, and care the most. They have changed me for the better, worse, and everything in between to the point that I don’t completely know what the heck they did to me over the years. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to figure out by writing this book. Only a small fraction of sports fans in America truly know what this experience is like. Plenty of teams lose, but only a few have a died-in-the-wool tradition of losing in the most agonizing ways possible. Every fan suffers disappointment at some point in their life, but not every fan goes through dozens of them and still cares enough to remember every single one. And while errors in judgment occasionally plague every team, only several are plagued to the point where fans start to instinctually assume the worst for almost every possible situation before it even plays out. That’s really what this book is about; my personal trip through the insanity involved in being a Jet fan and how my relationship with the team has changed over the years. You’ll see how certain people resonate with me after all this time and how they’ve shaped my opinion about sports to this day. You’ll see every reason why I should have stopped caring years ago and every reason why I could never do that. Most of all, you’ll see the uniqueness and, yes, the insanity of my experiences because nothing defines the act of being a fan more than those two words. Therein lies the toughest part about writing something like this; trying to resolve the direct conflict of insanity and uniqueness. Trying to show how doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result produces, you know, results that are actually different for each person. And if that’s the case, is being a fan really even insane anymore? The only way to reconcile these two is to try and tell a story that gets right to the heart of what makes us fans. If this book excluded the personal element and chronicled the misfortunes of the Jets in a purely factual manner, it would be pure insanity to still believe in them. Facts will say that fans have kept coming back in relatively large numbers to see the Jets ultimately fall short time and time again. These facts are an important part of the story, and it would be dishonest of me to pretend they’re not important just because I don’t like them. However, they’re not the whole story. Fans are people, and the randomness of the fan experience comes from both the once in a lifetime mix of athletes on the field and how they are perceived differently through the eyes of everybody watching them. What you’re about to read may or may not bear some resemblance to your experiences. You may or may not agree with or even like what I have to say about being a fan. That’s OK, because your fanhood and how its changed you is a story that is every bit as one in a million as mine is. I cannot speak for every fan. I can't tell anybody else what they're supposed to feel and when they're supposed to feel it. All I can really do is tell my own story; the tale of how I’ve lived, died, and died some more with the fortunes of the New York Jets.