Black and Blue
Losing Sucks! Having to endure one tough loss is “heartbreaking,” but being on a losing streak makes you feel black and blue all over like you are bruised and concussed and belong on “injured reserve”.
Fanatic, by definition, is a person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal, especially for an extreme religious, political cause or sports team. Any true fan knows you must battle through thick or thin, and that for every loss there is the ultimate “high” of winning the race/game, being on an extended “streak” OR cheering your team or candidate on to their respective sport’s “ship” (a.k.a. championship game or match).
So the World Series, NFL Season and Presidential Election “intersection” in this timeframe got me thinking about “how will we all feel if our team/candidate loses?”. Can we all endure losing? For whatever reason, memories can sometimes be short and people don’t remember what it feels like to be suffer a major loss or what the last losing streak was like.
So for a refresher course, let’s start with the Chicago Cubs. At the time of this blog post, the Cubs and their fan base are 3 wins away from a trip to the World Series and 7 wins away from winning it all and ending a 100+ year drought from winning the “ship” (longest losing streak in the World Series history). In fact, the anniversary of their last World Series win in 1908 happened on October 14th. Yet their fanatics choose to forget all this history year after year and still keep hoping and cheering for the World Series win to come. Good luck to all of you Cubbies…I am not a baseball fan, in general, but I admire consistent devotion to a team.
Next, let’s take my team, the Carolina Panthers. The eternal “undercats” (or underdogs), even after a 2015 regular season that resulted in 15-1, an MVP award for Cam Newton, a second Coach of the Year award for Ron Rivera and a trip to the Super Bowl. In our nation’s memory, the Panthers can not erase the “loss” in Super Bowl 50 and one bad press conference from the reigning MVP of the league. Now at 1-5, the Panthers are being “written off” for the 2016 season when we are only in the 2nd Quarter, so to speak, of a 16 game season. So for a history lesson, let me remind you of the 2014 season. The Panthers won the NFC South division with a 7-8-1 record. In that season we lost 6 in a row from October 19 to November 30, before we won 4 in a row to win the NFC south and then went on to win one playoff game at home against the Cardinals. That is also the season Cam flipped his car and had to miss a game and Ron and Stephanie’s house caught on fire after the Cardinal’s win and before we had to take on the Super Bowl reigning champs, the Seahawks and their “12th Man”.
So anything is possible. There are 10 games left in the NFL season and if we win 10 in a row (which we were able to do last year), our record will be 11 and 5, which is definitely a playoff caliber record (depending on how the other NFC South team perform). So “Black and Blue” fans, don’t give up hope yet…we play better as underdogs and we are consistently better in the 2nd Half of games (and 2nd Half of the NFL season too). And, one more point for context, just last year the Chiefs started the season 1-5 before making their own playoff run as a wildcard before losing to the Patriots in the divisional round.
And last, but not least, let’s talk about the Presidential race. My candidate and her followers have been patiently campaigning based on the issues our country wants to hear about, waiting for momentum to build and people to indicate they will vote “Hillary”. And as predicted, not through dumb luck as many may think, we appear to be winning while the other candidate is simply “self-destructing” and seems to be losing the election himself.
One obvious reason he is losing…he forgot there is no “I” in “Team”! Pretty hard to win without a team supporting you and keeping the fans faithful.
Peace and Love,
Tomato
Picture Credits: Fox Sports and https://dribbble.com/shots/2291842-Carolina-Panthers-Black-Blue-Crew-Logo