Dear Deion: It's not the media's job to cheer

Colorado's head coach can cackle and take as many victory laps as he wants after the amazing win over TCU, but he's been around long enough to know this: The media are not fans

I gave up my fan card in 1982.

It’s not really a card, per se, not something you carry around in your wallet or on your old-school journalist’s fedora, but it is something you carry around in your mind and heart. As a New York kid, I loved the Giants, Mets, Islanders and Knicks, but the minute I got my first job with The Record in Bergen County, N.J., right out by the Meadowlands, I gave up my fan card. Did it willingly. Did it cold turkey. Wasn’t even a challenge.

Yes, it was a very long time ago, a very different time when it was a point of pride for a journalist to be objective. I covered hundreds of games involving my boyhood teams and not once, ever, did I feel pangs of fandom. I took it seriously when they announced prior to games, “No cheering in the press box.”

Whether the teams of my childhood won or lost made no difference; I looked at it like Jerry Seinfeld, who pointedly noted that being a sports fan is essentially akin to rooting for laundry.

I bring this up to make a point about and to Deion Sanders who, like so many people in athletics, seem to think the media should be wearing pom pons and cheering on old State U – or in this case, Colorado.

It’s not our job to cheer.