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| The San Francisco Giants celebrate their 2012 World Series victory with a ticker tape parade. Photo by Ed Frauenheim |
Suddenly, Scott Norwood’s wide-right kick doesn’t hurt so
much.
The San Francisco Giants not only won the 2012 World Series,
they also won me a degree of psychic freedom. Freedom from half a life’s worth
of futile fandom, including Norwood’s errant kick that sealed the Buffalo
Bills’ first of four straight Super Bowl losses in the 1990s.
The 2012 Giants helped liberate me from another
sports-related enslavement, a deeper, darker one. Their plucky, lucky win
fueled my break from a story I’ve long told myself about being destined to be a
loser as an athlete.
That may sound harsh. Perhaps it is a slight
exaggeration. But this fear, and at times conviction, that I’m a hopeless
also-ran on the court, diamond and field is firmly rooted in an American culture of triumph and shame. I’m
talking about the country’s obsession with winning and losing, and the way the
latter can be cast as utter failure. “We are the champions,” Queen sang in what
was one of the dominant anthems of my 1970s childhood. “No time for losers.”
It may be that Freddy Mercury had his tongue in his cheek when he wrote the song—was poking fun of an
obsession with winning. But that made little difference to me and my childhood
pals who blasted it out as we dreamed of leading sports teams to victory.
That I never did so in real life came to haunt me. The
closest I came in youth hockey was a tie, and in many ways that final
championship game at age 12 or so felt worse than a defeat. I was the best
player on our “C” line, the group of 5 players with the lowest skills on our
team of about 15. My counterpart was a hulking kid. During the regular season,
he’d knocked me unconscious with a check against the boards—the only time that
ever happened to me in some 5 years of playing. In the final game he scored
several goals against me and my C-line mates. A fellow on our “A” line managed
to score several goals at the end to force a tie. But I felt I let the team
down.
To this day, I can’t tell whether I “choked” in that last
game or whether I played admirably against a ringer. My hindsight isn’t 20-20.
It’s blurred through the lens of guilt and shame. What I see mostly is that I
let the team down. If anything, that lens solidified and that sense that I
could not be clutch deepened over time. In college, I took two intramural teams
to championship games only to lose in the final contest. On both my ultimate
Frisbee team and my hockey squads, I was the most talented player. But I could
not overcome some rival star players in the finals.
These events mixed with a preexisting penchant for
self-doubt. For fearing things were wrong with me despite evidence to the
contrary. Once as a child, for example, I became paranoid that I couldn’t
inhale enough oxygen. Only when my parents took me to medical specialists did I
calm down about breathing.
While I overcame that physical freak-out, a creeping
frustration and self-criticism was sinking in by my early 20s around sports.
And then fandom fanned those flames. My home football team Buffalo Bills became
a powerhouse just as I graduated from college. I remember watching the 1990
Super Bowl from my Brooklyn apartment, and seeing Norwood’s last minute field
goal attempt to beat the New York Giants miss. That kick hurt. And the pain only grew as the
Bill made it to an unprecedented three more consecutive Super Bowls. And lost
by at least 13 points each time. Norwood’s kick, it turned out, was our best hope.
And we blew it.
It was more of the same with the Buffalo Sabres hockey
team and the New York Knicks basketball squad. The Sabres made it to the Stanly
Cup in 1997 but lost on what looked to be an illegal goal in triple overtime.
And the Knicks, who I adopted as my team when I moved to New York after
college, could never get past Michael Jordan and his Chicago Bulls. When Jordan
retired for a spell, the Knicks made it to the finals against the Houston
Rockets, only to lose in a deciding seventh game.
When I moved to San Francisco in 1995, I became a San
Francisco Giants baseball fan. The team led by slugger Barry Bonds got to the
2002 World Series. Ahead 3 games to 2 in the best of 7 match-up against the
Anaheim Angles, they had a 5-run lead just eight 8 outs from the promised land.
But they didn’t get there. The Angels staged an improbable come-back in game 6
and went on to win the deciding game 7.
That 2002 World Series was more than a heart-breaker for
me. It was a back-breaker. It was the straw that told this camel he is cursed.
So I retreated. Became less of a Giants fan. Which is why
it was hard for me to fully absorb and accept the Giants’ 2010 World Series
victory. I loved that team and had followed it with increased interest throughout
the year. I saw rookie catcher Buster Posey’s first game, for example. But as
this group of self-described “misfits,” spurred on by first-baseman Aubrey Huff
and his sparkling red “rally thong,” clinched the final game against the Texas
Rangers, I was conflicted. Did I deserve to partake in the joy, to savor the
championship? Was I merely a fair-weather fan? And did the victory really
constitute a lifting of the curse?
This year was different. That’s partly because I followed
the team more closely. But I think it also is because this year’s World Series
championship had a calming message to me: it’s a lot about luck. The 2012
Giants benefited from some stranger-than-fiction breaks. A crucial hit by
outfielder Hunter Pence where his bat broke, and then the broken half of the
bat bonked the ball two additional times--giving it a circus spin impossible
for the St. Louis Cardinals to field cleanly. A high-stakes bunt against the
Tigers that 99 percent of the time rolls foul but in this case stayed fair by inches.
Three homeruns in a single World Series game by the Giants’ Pablo Sandoval,
even though he’d hit just 12 in the 162-game regular season.
The combination of the Giants good fortune and the repetition
of my baseball team taking the World
Series has me thinking that fandom luck may even out after all. That after 43
years of tough breaks and no championships, Fan Ed Frauenheim is finally
getting his due. It helps that one of my closest friend is a long-time Boston
Red Sox. Those fans, too, had decades of frustration relieved when the BoSox
won two World Series in the past decade.
Luck wasn’t the only message of the 2012 Giants team.
Pluck also carried the day. These Giants faced elimination six times in the
playoffs and pulled out wins each time. Talk about persistence and performance
under pressure. Then they hammered the best pitcher in baseball in the Tigers’
Justin Verlander and generally beat up the favored Tigers. Particularly
inspiring was the way the Giants embodied a team-first spirit, complete with
rousing pre-game speeches and the playful ritual of tossing sunflower seeds on
each other like little kids.
I’ve had that story in me as well. Sitting next to the
nasty narrative of personal sports failure is one where I trust that effort and
teamwork eventually win the day. That winning truly isn’t as important as
trying hard. It’s the mantra I teach my kids. And the soccer team I’ve coached
for five years now.
I’ve even lived it out a few times on the basketball
court. Although I haven’t played organized sports much since college, I did
play basketball every Sunday with the same group of guys for more than a
decade. And as ludicrous as it may sound, a single drive to the basket I made
during a game a few years ago disarmed much of my athletic self-doubt.
During this game, my team got off to a strong start. But
our opponents made a strong run of unanswered baskets and were close to
overtaking us. The score was probably 16 to 12 in our favor and the game was to
20. I had the ball near the foul line, matched up against a guy who was
generally my equal in skill. And I determined I would try to stop the bleeding.
I drove to the left, got by him and made a layup. That basket put us one away
from winning the game, which we did. I was clutch! And that was part of a
winning streak of 4 games that gave my team what we called a “dynasty”—a mini-championship.
That successful drive to the hoop gave me a degree of
freedom from the painful narrative of fading and failing during crunch time.
And the liberation widened with the Giants’ 2012 championship. It feels like an
unexpected gift, this greater ease with myself as a fan and an player. This
ability to home in more on the bigger, better story of progress rather than
points on the scoreboard.
In fact, I’m now gravitating toward physical activities
that aren’t so much about winning. A series of injuries has all but ended my
basketball career. But I’m largely at peace with that because I’m determined to
return to and explore the realm of running. And to continue with a yoga
practice that over the past 15 years or so has helped me become stronger and
more fit than I ever was as a college athlete.
Oddly enough, the Giants’ victory is fueling this
non-competitive fitness focus. I’m less tormented by Scott Norwood’s kick. And
more glad to be alive and kicking.
