One And Done

This blog post is not about the Washington Wizards. It does, however, deal with an underperforming sports team that I love. There's a connection.

For the past 37 plus years, I've been a die-hard New York Jets fan. Yes, not only did I choose to start a blog about one of the lowest performing NBA teams (the Washington Wizards), I'm also a fan of one of the lowest performing NFL franchises. I fell in love with the Jets when my mom and dad moved me and my sister to the United States in 1979. I think it was probably the design of the helmet that did it. Could have been a Patriots or Giants fan living in Connecticut but I ended up with the Jets. 

Since I was 11, I've rooted for the Jets every year and seen them achieve relatively little. Yep, in 38 seasons (including this year) I've seen my beloved Jets win two division titles and play in four AFC Championship games. That's it. That's all I got for almost four decades of beating my heart against a wall. I even spent two of those years as a season ticket holder while I was living in the Washington, D.C. area. That's dedication, folks. The two division titles by the way is the fewest of any team from 1979 to now. The Jacksonville Jaguars are tied with the Jets but they entered the league in the '90s. 

When I was younger before I really understood how big my new home was, I always wanted to go to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Canton, Ohio. Wherever that was. Football (and the Jets) was my number one sport for a little more than 20 years before I became an obsessed Wizards fan and I dreamed of getting to a spot in the middle of nowhere of a state I'd never been to somewhere in the midwest so I could learn more about my favorite game. 

Last month, I made it to the Hall on my trying-so-hard-to-be-annual D-League swing. This journey took me through Canton, Ohio and Erie, Pennsylvania with a stop for drinks in Cleveland before the thing really got going. I couldn't pass up the Hall of Fame that I'd so long wanted to visit and see more than anything else, the players that I'd watched play in green and white for my beloved New York Jets. 

But there was a problem. There aren't really any New York Jets that I've watched in the Hall of Fame. I found this surprising. Go ahead, mock me. I mean I get that the Jets have been terrible for the better part of four decades but I think we've had some pretty darned good players over that period of time. And don't tons of guys make it into the Hall every year? I can remember the New York Sack Exchange, the D-line that terrorized opponents' quarterbacks in the early '80s. We seemed to have some great receivers over the years in Wesley Walker, Al Toon and Keyshawn Johnson. And what about some of our offensive linemen like Marvin Powell and Joe Fields? Or Pat Leahy, our place kicker that seemed to be on the team forever when I was a kid. 

Ummm...no. None of those guys are in the Hall.

So who is? There has to be someone, right? Well there are. The obvious two are Joe Namath and Don Maynard, the quarterback and receiver combo that shocked the football world in 1969 by beating the NFL's Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. That win legitimized the AFL's existence and ultimately led to a merger between the two leagues. Their coach, Weeb Ewbank, is also in the Hall.

After that, it's some tough sledding. Yes, there have been a number of players that have been on a Jets roster that have become hall of famers recently. Art Monk (played one year after a stellar career with Washington); Ronnie Lott (two years after multiple Super Bowls with the 49ers); Brett Favre (also one year and we won't talk much about that); and John Riggins (Jets gave up on him; he delivered a title in Washington) are all enshrined. 

The Hall sells t-shirts with the inductees from each team screenprinted on the shirts. They include Riggins on the Jets shirts but not the others in the previous paragraph. I would disagree with that but I also wasn't watching the team when Riggins was on the roster. Know how many Jets there are in the Hall that I've watched? ONE! Curtis Martin. That's it. 38 years. Two division titles. One Hall of Fame inductee. That's it. How do I pick these teams? It's moments like this that I wonder if I'll ever see a team I love win it all.

Now there is some hope for more Jets in the Hall. This year there are five players in the list of nominees with a Jets history. Four (Jason Taylor, LaDanian Tomlinson, Alan Faneca and Ty Law) are in the same category as Favre and Co. But Kevin Mawae, the center who anchored the Jets O-line for eight years, is also on the list. He spent more seasons with the Jets than any other team so I'd have to consider Kevin a Jet when he enters the Hall, which I have to believe he will at some time. In the meantime, I'll keep hoping. The Jets once again disappointed me this year.

This blog post wraps my Midwest D-League swing. Back to Wizards coverage, I promise. Looking good at home lately. We just got to do better on the road.

The Wrong Teams

Early evidence of me as a Jets fan.

Wednesday night in Detroit, Michigan marks the start of my 14th season as a Washington Wizards season ticket holder and I'm still waiting for my team to win something. That's right, the Washington NBA franchise has not hoisted a banner of any sort for winning something since 1979, when they won the Eastern Conference championship as the Washington Bullets en route to their second consecutive NBA Finals (they won in 1978 and lost in 1979). Now before you take pity on me for the plight of my beloved Wizards, let me just say I'm used to losing. I've had a ton of practice. In fact, I'd say if I had tried to be more strategic in picking teams in the four major U.S. sports that would not win much at all, I don't think I could have done it.

When my mom and dad moved themselves, me and my sister to the United States in 1979, I was forced to abandon my allegiance to football (soccer) and pick a new sport. This was not a quick emotional decision; it wasn't possible to get any coverage of domestic soccer in this country in the late 1970s, let alone a league all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. Fortunately for me as a sports crazed 11 year old kid, America offered four major leagues to choose from and follow. No longer was I limited to a late summer through early summer sports schedule like I was in England. Now I could follow sports all year round. Unbeknownst to me, I was about to embark on a horrible series of choices in this regard. 

The first American city I set foot in was Boston on the day I immigrated to this country. My family took off from London and landed seven or so hours later in Massachusetts with our eventual destination just east of Hartford, smack in the middle of Connecticut about equidistant between where we had landed and New York City. Over the next 34 years, those two cities would produce a rich sports winning tradition over all four major sports which is probably unmatched in the nation. But I was not destined to take part in any of that. In the months after I got off a plane at Logan Airport in mid-summer of 1979, I'd set in motion a series of events that would prepare me very well for the last 13 seasons of being a Wizards season ticket holder.

The first American sport I took to was probably baseball and the first games I ever watched were between the Baltimore Orioles and the California Angels in the 1979 American League Championship Series. This was back when only four teams made the playoffs in Major League Baseball. I'm not sure why I started rooting for the Orioles although if I had to take a guess, I'd say it was because of the orange in their uniforms (I've always been partial to orange for some reason). The Orioles defeated the Angels before losing to the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series but I stuck with the Orioles as my team.

All things considered, the Orioles were not a bad choice at that time for a first American sports team. They had been one of baseball's most successful teams over the past decade and a half and were stocked with future hall of famers like Jim Palmer, Eddie Murray and manager Earl Weaver. In 1983 the Orioles would win the World Series with that lineup and rookie Cal Ripken, Jr. who I can still remember leaping to catch the last out of the decisive game against the Philadelphia Phillies.

Next up was football. My initial choice of professional football teams was the New England Patriots. I mean, that's logical, right? We lived in New England. But somewhere between July 25, 1979 when we landed in this country, and the end of the 1979 NFL season, I had become a New York Jets fan. I believe my switch in allegiances was made solely on the basis of helmet design. And I think it occurred while ordering a dessert.

When we first lived in the United States, my dad used to take us to Dairy Queen a lot (my dad loves ice cream!) and in those days DQ used to serve sundaes in miniature football helmets. I believe my memory of this is fairly vivid. I remember looking at all the helmets available and picking the Jets sleek modern looking 1970s helmet over the Patriots' crappy looking Pat patriot helmet for my sundae one day and that was it. From then on until this day, I was a New York Jets fan. Ice cream. It's almost cruel what it left me.

The last American sport I picked up in the '70s was hockey. No basketball yet (ironically); hoops wouldn't enter my life until college, and then only in a casual way. For hockey teams, there was only one choice. In 1979, the World Hockey Association had forced a partial merger with the National Hockey League and one of their four teams to survive the merger was the Hartford Whalers, making the Whalers the only team in the four major sports to reside in Connecticut. The Boston Celtics played a game every now and again at the Hartford Civic Center but the Whalers were Connecticut's only real team. Sold! I'm proud to say I followed the Whalers from their inaugural 1979-1980 season until they split for North Carolina in 1997.

Champions at last in 1998! 20 years in and only one division title.

How smart were my initial choices of American sports teams? Not very. Despite the rosy start to my Orioles fan stint, the team soon faltered. After their championship run in 1983, the Orioles embarked on an unprecedented (for that franchise) run of futility, punctuated by an 0-21 start to the 1988 MLB season, the worst starting mark to open a season then and to this day.

The Jets were a poorer choice. They didn't win anything until 1998 when they finally won the AFC Eastern Division. Yes, it took 20 seasons before my football team won a division title in a division with only five teams. We had a good run as a non-division winner in 1982 when we made the AFC Championship game but couldn't get past a rain soaked Orange Bowl field against the Miami Dolphins.

The Whalers were a little more successful (sort of) than the Jets as a division champion but still only won a total of one division title and one playoff series in their 18 seasons in the NHL. While I can credibly argue that the Whale would have gone on to win the 1986 Stanley Cup if they had just been able to get by Montreal (they lost in overtime in game seven), they didn't. My love for the Whalers died the day they left Hartford and I won't root for the Carolina Hurricanes ever but the team in Hartford sure didn't have much success.

I stuck with the teams I picked as a pre-teen for a long time. I'm still a Jets fan, I picked up the Washington Capitals when I moved to the Washington D.C. area in 1999 (since I had no hockey team at that time) and I defected from the Orioles when the Montreal Expos moved to D.C. and became the Washington Nationals. No great winners in the Caps (despite many many division titles in the last decade) and the Nationals, although the Nats did finish with the best record in baseball in 2012 before bowing out in the first round of the playoffs.

All of that long narrative of hopelessness brings me to the Wizards, who are sort of the subjects of this whole blog. Between living in Connecticut and moving south to northern Virginia, I latched on to basketball as a sport and fell in love with the game. When I lived in upstate New York, I became a Knicks fan, a fantastic choice of teams considering the franchise made the playoffs every year I was a fan between 1994 and 1999 and managed to reach the NBA Finals twice in that span. When I moved to Washington and was presented with a pro basketball team less than ten miles from my apartment, I switched teams and started buying season tickets. Making that decision was like a flashback to the late '70s and it set me on the course of mostly misery I have been on ever since.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post and in my preseason blog post last year, the Wizards have won nothing in my time as a season ticket holder or in fact for a long time before that. Sure, there have been four playoff appearances and one playoff series victory in the last 13 seasons, but in terms of winning something which is represented by a banner in the rafters, the Wizards have nothing. Nada. Zip. And all of that's par for the course for me.

So as if all the whining and complaining in the previous 14 paragraphs weren't enough, let's sum up my lamenting with some graphs to prove my point about how poor my professional sports team choices have been. Each of these graphs have been prepared assuming each team in their respective leagues stands an even chance of either making the playoffs or winning their division, conference/league or championship. I know there's no way this is true in any one year, but over time, it should start to even out a little, right? We'll start with a look at playoff appearances.

In assembling these graphs, I was surprised to see my teams didn't fare worse when it came to making the playoffs (that's optimism, right?). The Capitals and Knicks exceeded the league average during the time I supported those teams which is no surprise considering how good they were or have been in the stretches when I was or still am a fan. The Jets and Orioles also represented pretty well over the last 34 years, finishing at about 90% and 80% of the league average respectively. The real disappointment is in the rest of the teams, which of course includes the Wizards who finished with about half as many playoff appearances in the almost last decade and a half as they should have.

Let's move on to division championships.

While I was pleased with my playoff appearances graph, things start to fall apart when we start looking at actually winning championships of any sort. These are the victories that mean something. Making the playoffs as a non-division winning team is an important step and many teams in all four sports have won championships the same year they didn't win their own division. But if you don't win it all, winning your division counts (at least in my book where I'm craving wins).

Once again, the Capitals show strongly in this category, having dominated the NHL's now defunct Southeastern Division over the past ten years or so. But the rest of the bunch is not so impressive. The Knicks are a touch above the league average in the six years I was a fan but the rest don't look so good. All my other teams have struggled in this category but the worst of them all is the Wizards, who have no division wins with me as a fan.

When we get to the conference championships graph, my teams' performance starts to look really really thin. Now instead of just the Wizards with nothing to show, five of my seven teams are posting a goose egg. Only the Orioles and Knicks have any success in this category and maybe only because when I picked those two teams, they were winning at the time. The other five teams I have supported since I moved to this country are zero for 87 combined seasons.

Finally, there's the championship graph. Despite making the NBA Finals in 1994 and 1999, the Knicks came up empty both times, leaving only the Orioles with a single championship in professional sports since I moved to this country. I've been here 34 years plus and have only one championship to show for all the blood, sweat and tears I've poured into professional sports in that time. It's been 30 years since the Orioles won that lone championship in 1983 by the way. That's a lot of suffering so don't feel bad for me that the Wizards haven't won anything in my 13 years as a season ticket holder. I'm keeping the faith and will continue to do so until it pays off.

Now I know there may be fans out there who think they are long suffering. In the past ten years or so, I've heard the laments of Washington Redskins, Boston Red Sox, Dallas Cowboys, Miami Dolphins and even St. Louis Rams fans bemoaning their teams' lack of recent success. For all those people, I'll just ask you to re-read the above. But if re-reading all of the above still isn't enough to convince you that I have it worse than you and have picked absolutely the wrong combination of teams, consider these three additional facts:

1. For the first 12 years I lived in the United States, I resided either full-time or part-time in Connecticut. Despite my residence in New England, I have never been a fan of any Boston sports team. During the past 34 years, each of the Boston sports teams in the four major sports has won a championship. The Bruins have won a Stanley Cup, the Red Sox have won two world series, the Patriots have won three Super Bowls and the Celtics have won four NBA Championships. If only...

2. When I arrived in this country, there were seven New York teams in the four major sports: baseball's Yankees and Mets, football's Giants and Jets, basketball's Knicks and hockey's Rangers and Islanders. Of those seven teams, only two have not won a title in their respective sport since I set foot in America. The Yankees and Mets have won a combined seven world series, the Giants have won four super bowls and the Rangers and Islanders have combined for five Stanley Cups. The two teams who haven't won a championship, the Jets and Knicks, are the two teams I picked.

3. Not only have my teams only won one championship when I have been a fan since living in this country, most haven't even won either before or after I have been a fan. The one exception has been the Carolina Hurricanes, the one team I refuse to follow ever for taking my Whalers away. The Hurricanes hoisted the Stanley Cup in 2006.

What a downer!

The 2013-2014 NBA season tips off tomorrow (the Wiz have to wait a day) and once again, I have high hopes for the Wizards' chances of at least making the playoffs. It's the second year in a row that I am hoping for a playoff appearance before the season starts after a few years of really having very little faith whatsoever. I honestly believe that this team is on the right track. I know I'm not winning anything this year but I hope maybe a few years from now I might. I'll just keep hoping.

J! E! T! S! JETS! JETS! JETS!

September 11, 2011: My first home Jets game.

According to Google maps, Verizon Center, home of my beloved Washington Wizards, is 6.8 miles from my current residence. By Metro, I can get there in about a half an hour, meaning if a Wizards game goes a little long, I can make the round trip in about 3 hours and 30 minutes.

In 1979, my family moved to the United States and I picked the New York Jets as my professional football team, probably because I liked the helmet. Last year, I bought Jets season tickets for the first time and I decided to renew this year. MetLife Stadium is 231 miles from my current residence and it takes a lot longer than 3 hours and 30 minutes to do the round trip. A typical day trip consumes anywhere from 12-15 hours to take in a three hour or so game. It can be absolutely brutal. This past Sunday, a pathetic 30-9 loss to the Miami Dolphins, was probably the last time I will make a single day trip as a season ticket holder. While I may still take in a game or two per season in the future, the value of buying season tickets for a team located three to five states away (depending on how you get there and how you view the District), just isn't there for me.

In my time as a season ticket holder, I’ve traveled to East Rutherford, NJ using about every combination of ground transportation I can think of: I’ve driven up and back in the same day; I’ve driven up and back over multiple days while staying with my sister; I’ve taken the train up and back in the same day; I’ve taken the bus up and back in the same day; and I’ve taken the train up and the bus back in the same day. Most of the trips I’ve taken have been smooth and uneventful; just the kind of travel I like. All of the games have been wins or close losses except this past Sunday when we got beaten badly. Did I mention the word pathetic already?

Along the way, there have been some unexpected events or crises to deal with. A couple of weeks ago after the Jets whipped the Indianapolis Colts 35-9 our train stopped dead with no power about two miles from Baltimore on the trip home. My friend Chris and I were subjected to a non-stop verbal assault from a guy on the other end of our car thinking he has stand-up talent while Amtrak non-scrambled non-furiously to find a solution. It took about 70 minutes and an all crew meeting in the dining car (announced over the PA system) to finally send another engine to pick us up after about four trains passed us. We ended up getting to Union Station after midnight. I like the train but the concept of customer service seems lost on Amtrak. Still waiting to hear on the resolution to my complaint.

I'd take train stoppages and after midnight arrivals in DC though over the late night hospital visit my friend Mike had to make after the 2011 home loss to the hated New England Patriots. That night could have literally been fatal. When I got a text message from Mike accusing me of leaving him in New Jersey (I was waiting outside the bathroom for him and he had wandered out of the stadium, for the record), my cell battery was literally 15 minutes away from empty. Getting a confused, angry, drunk guy who has lost blood (we didn't know that at the time) to find his way to the train knowing my phone was about to die is something I don't want to go through again. I don't think I've ever been happier to see Mike when I finally found him.

Anyway, I'm probably done with single day trips as a season ticket holder but just for the record, I put yesterday's trip into pictures for posterity.

6:46 a.m. Ballston Metro, open early for the Marine Corps Marathon. It's usually gated at this time so I'm typically waiting with a pretty sketchy crowd. The homeless guy doing laps of the Metro entrance made it feel like a usual Sunday morning.

7:55 a.m. All aboard! Please please please Amtrak, don't run out of power again. The trip up has always been uneventful. With a storm bearing down on us later in the day, I'm wondering if I've made the right choice with the bus return trip.

10:06 a.m. Philadelphia. This is the only skyline worthy shot until New York. I love checking out the Frank Furness designed Philadelphia Zoo on the way out of town. Sit on the right side of the train. Furness also designed the Wilmington train station that we passed through about a half hour earlier.

11:28 a.m. Switching from Amtrak to New Jersey Transit at Newark International Airport. Switching at the airport is definitely the way to go. This becomes train number four of the day.

12:05 p.m. MetLife Stadium through the filthy window of train number five. As opposed as I am to stadiums built outside of cities, I actually think this one is pretty well designed. They spent some money that they didn't have to here.

12:22 p.m. Lunch. There's something about eating hot italian sausage with peppers and onions with globs of spicy mustard in New Jersey, even if it is just stadium food.

1:05 p.m. Almost kickoff time. Fireman Ed on the screen leading the J! E! T! S! JETS! JETS! JETS! chant. It didn't work on this day. Our team came out flat from the opening kickoff.

2:40 p.m. The Jets retire Dennis Byrd's number 90 jersey. Byrd suffered a spinal injury when he collided with teammate Scott Mersereau during the 1992 season and subsequently recovered sufficiently to walk, although not normally. Nobody on the Jets had worn number 90 since Byrd. He definitely sacrificed for this team. The Jets are losing 27-3 in what has to be one of the most pathetic displays in recent memory. The first half featured almost no offense, a drive sustaining 15 yard unsportsmanlike penalty on defense, a recovered onside kick by Miami and a blocked punt returned for a touchdown. Oh, we also knocked their starting quarterback out of the game and proceeded to make Matt Moore look like an all-pro.

3:31 p.m. End of the third quarter. The game at this point is well out of hand and with Frankenstorm bearing down on the east coast, it's time to get going. If we had come back and won, I would have been pissed at myself for leaving. No realistic chance of that today. I'm thinking "same old Jets" as I'm walking out.

The cattle line for the train back to New York. Since the Jets were getting stomped, there was no line this past Sunday. This picture is actually from the Colts game. I'm amazed nobody panics in these things. That would not be good. On our way out of the stadium on Sunday, I was handed a scratch and win card for an opportunity to secure my very own Mark Sanchez bobblehead. I passed. As much as I love bobbleheads, I just couldn't do it. Not that day.

4:48 p.m. Waiting for the Vamoose bus on the corner of 7th and 30th. I love the Vamoose bus. They are flexible about reservation times (I actually had a 6 p.m. reservation) and they stop in Virginia, not DC!

5:15 p.m. Bye bye, New York after a quick half hour stay. The Lincoln Tunnel has to be my favorite tunnel of all time, although all the cool art deco stuff is best seen from the Jersey side coming into the city.

8:37 p.m. Somewhere in Maryland on the bus. 4-1/2 hours or so of this view. On the iPod on the way home: some shuffling, a movie (Welcome to Death Row) and two episodes of Family Ties. :)

9:58 p.m. Rosslyn. Orange line train to Vienna. The bus on Sunday evening costs about $120 less than the train, which means I can really afford a cab home from Rosslyn. However, finding none, the Metro is always ready.

10:20 p.m. Nothing says home like a New Belgium Snow Day Ale and a bowl of jalapeno cheddar Chex mix. Actually there are a lot of things that say home way more than those two things, but that's what I had when I got home.