On April 2nd, 1990, I peaked as a sports fan. My hometown team, the UNLV Runnin Rebels, had just defeated hated Duke 103-73 to win the national championship. It was the largest margin ever in a NCAA Tournament Final, and we had an even better team coming back for the next season. Life was good.
Unfortunately, I was 15 months old, and I could have cared less.
Every time I hear about the Glory Days of UNLV basketball, it’s bittersweet. It’s one of those “If a tree falls down in a forest with nobody around, does it make a sound?” deals. I can watch all the documentaries and listen to all my parents’ stories about how much fun it was, but it doesn’t come close to actually being there. My first memories of the Runnin Rebels came a few years later when they were a middle-of-the-pack team in the Big West Conference. Needless to say, I can only imagine that watching Larry Johnson and Stacey Augmon light up a sold-out Thomas and Mack was a little different than witnessing a Sunshine Smith-led squad get worked by UNR.
Although it should obviously be expected, losing never gets easier for us die-hard fans. Each new season brings with it a sense of hope, and no matter if that hope runs out after ten games or in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, the sting remains. You still have to wake up the next morning knowing that your season is over, and once again the fans of another team will be experiencing the euphoria of a championship run instead of you.
When I first decided to write this article, I wanted to recap ten of the most heartbreaking sports losses of my life. However, it didn’t take me long to realize that this idea was faulty for two reasons. For one, as a Rebels, Chargers, and Padres fan, it would be way too difficult to narrow the numerous gut-wrenching losses I’ve witnessed to ten. Secondly, I believe that it would have been short-sighted of me to only acknowledge the tough defeats that I’ve dealt with. All sports fans have been punched in the stomach multiple times. For every Nick Jacobson, Brandon Heath, or Ali Farokhmanesh I can throw out there, millions of others can respond with a Laettner, Edney, or, if their from Lawrence, their own Farokhmanesh. For every Trevor Hoffman blown save that has caused me to pull out my hair, an A’s fan could shoot back with Gibson’s homer off Eckersley in the Series or the Jeter flip. Hell, the Pittsburgh Pirates have had 18 straight losing seasons!
The great (or terrible, depending on how you look at it) thing about sports is that besides Bruce Pearl sweating through his suits, there are no guarantees. The Padres aren’t going to win a World Series in the next fifty years just because I root really hard for them, but then again, neither are the Yankees. Dodgers fans, when not busy holding up liquor stores or picking out which wife beater they are going to wear to dinner, would be quick to point out that they haven’t won a championship in almost 23 seasons. Northwestern, a Big Ten school located just outside of Chicago, has never been to the NCAA Tournament in men’s basketball, but Butler has made it to two straight championship games. Everybody poops, and everybody loses.
Losing isn’t always a bad thing, either. A great deal of what made the 2004 Red Sox season so great for their fans was that it came on the heels of 86 years where they came up short. A Lakers fan couldn’t possibly have appreciated a victory in the 2011 Finals like the Mavericks fans did. That’s what keeps us fans of perennial losers coming back- the mere thought that one day our team can win it all, even though the odds are stacked against us.
The 1990 Rebels will always hold a place in my heart despite me having no recollection of them whatsoever. They are an example of both how good things can be for me as a sports fan and what I have missed out on for the past 21 years. One of my teams may never win it all again, but that’s not going to stop me from cheering. Because without sports, I’d be a lot more boring, and we’d have to change this to some sort of theatre blog. Trust me, that would suck.
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