It has been almost a week and I may finally be ready to talk about it. I don’t know; it is all still pretty raw. The grief that one feels after a loss like this one really requires some time and distance. It has to be put into perspective. I am referring, of course, to the loss of our Bears at the hands of the dreaded Green Bay Packers.
It wasn’t pretty – let me tell you. It was super cold and so were the Bears (bah dum bump). But the real disappointment to me was not the players or the game. It was the fans. I had worried about the behavior of the Packer fans, but the ones I saw celebrated appropriately. On the other hand to hear some Bears’ season ticket holders, you would think that they hadn’t won a game all season. A woman in my section called them “losers” as she left midway through the forth quarter. Had she looked at her ticket, she might have confirmed that she was in attendance at a “championship” game. Chicago sports fan can be completely irrational when it comes to a loss like this.
Then to add insult to injury the fans, the media and even his fellow NFL players turned on the quarterback, questioning his toughness. Really? I know he is not going to win Mr. Congeniality any time soon, but he isn’t running for office. He is a quarterback not the Bachelor. The guy has been sacked something like 58 times in one season, more than anyone else in the league. He was even one of the only three quarterbacks to have the privilege of being pounded into the frozen University of Minnesota tundra a few times. Yeah, he is a total wuss.
I won’t listen to sports talk radio. Even in the best of times it is painful to listen to these sad beer-bellied wanna-be’s second guess a professional sports team’s decisions based upon their experiences from that one season of football they played in seventh grade. In the wake of this loss we should fire the coach (again), axe the general manager (again) and castrate the quarterback. But as it turns out, I don’t have to listen to sports talk radio. I just have to walk into the lunch room in my testosterone filled office. So that’s what these guys do on weekends.
Anyway I sat Shiva. I wailed. I mourned the loss and I came to grips with the end of the season. And now I am done with football until next year. No Super Bowl for me. I am not a fair weather fan, but I am not just a football fan either. I am a Bears fan.
