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.
