Homer Simpson's famous quote has run through my mind more than once in water cooler discussions of the sports teams I follow. Having grown up in Michigan I am required to pathologically follow the exploits of the Detroit area teams. As you may know, it's 50-50 in Detroit these days. The Pistons and Red Wings have been dominating their respective leagues over the past few years. Meanwhile, the Tigers and the Lions have been down so long that most fans think its time to stop attempts at CPR. As a blindly loyal Tiger fan I am still burning a candle of hope that my long, baseball nightmare is about to end. I have no such delusions, however, about the Lions. In a rare, almost historic, circumstance, I actually agree with my father about something: the Lions will continue to suck as long as William C. Ford owns them.
Franchises in all professional sports have their ups and downs, but to STAY down really requires a commitment to ineptitude from the top. You really need a bonehead owner to throttle the hopes and dreams of a team's fans in the long term. The Lions have a world class idiot at the helm. The parity obsessed NFL shines a klieg light on incompetent management and ownership, and only the ever-hapless New Orleans Saints and Arizona/St. Louis Cardinals can compete with the Lions in sheer managerial stupidity. Ford runs the Lions only slightly more ineptly than he runs the Ford Motor Company, and you need look no further than the boarded up houses in the Detroit metro area to get a feel for how jaw-droppingly bad he does that.
The other hapless Detroit team, the Tigers, is owned by pizza mogul Mike Ilitch. To be fair to Ilitch, he purchased the Tigers as damaged goods from a TRULY horrible owner, Domino's Pizza dullard Tom Monaghan. (My personal Domino's boycott is now entering it's 20th year.) Ilitch, who also owns the Red Wings, seemingly purchased the Tigers to keep the historic franchise in Detroit and not out of any great love for the game of baseball. His first sports love is clearly hockey, and the Red Wings have reaped the rewards of an owner committed to winning. Luckily for the Tigers, the NHL's self-destructive lockout left Ilitch with nothing better to do than pay attention to his other team, and the long Tiger death spiral seems to be turning around.
In the spirit of suckiness, ESPN.com's page 2 is conducting a survey to determine who the fans think are the worst sports franchises in professional sports. Go ahead and take the quiz. I've looked at the results already and will be commenting on them in my next post.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment