Lovable Losers

Just so you’ll know, we are losers here in the greater Philadelphia area. We are reminded on a daily basis by newspapers, television and radio that the losing has reached epic proportions. Never mind that property values are sky-high, the weather has been unseasonably warm and we live in an exciting part of the country where there is an abundance of art, history and entertainment - we are losers. Our sports teams lose, and we lose with them. We are losers by association, or so we are told.

The whining has also reached epic proportions, as the “woe is me” refrain has become as old and tired as the losing. The football team that two years ago was near the top of the world is now being subjected to cries of “fire the coach” and “get a new quarterback”. In true chicken or egg fashion, I don’t know whether the fans begat the media or vice versa. Whatever the answer, the local sports media is feeding the frenzy by enabling the loser mentality.

This past Sunday on our local Comcast Sports channel, they aired a piece that detailed a sting of losses that the local sports teams went through over the weekend. It started with Friday after-midnight Sixers and Flyers losses and included the Eagles humiliating defeat at home against the Titans. However, they seemed to go out of their way to include the Phillies’ “loss” of free agent Alfonzo Soriano, who signed with the Cubs, even though they never really had him to begin with. Can you lose something you never had? It struck me that, in order to make a point, Comcast went to a lot of effort to emphasize something that did not warrant emphasis. The Phillies no more “lost” Soriano than they lost other free agents who signed with other teams before Sunday, but it fit in with the “loser” theme, and was included. Piling on, as it were.

Last Wednesday, the Philadelphia Daily News published an entire section devoted to the fact that it has been 23 years since a team has won a championship, and interviewed local personalities, asking who would be the one to break the streak. The focus of the section was not on the successes of the winners, but on the gloom of losing, and to remind us that it was the 1983 Sixers who gave us our last championship.

The bigger issue, I think, is that in some strange (dare I say, sick) way, Philadelphians enjoy the losing. The city that former Eagle and current radio/TV host Garry Cobb termed Negadelphia, for our penchant toward the downbeat, wallows in its own defeats as to glorify them to the point that they define who we are. Nobody enjoys losing, but here, we have come to embrace it, and we have even allowed it to seep into the culture.
We make it part of that blue-collar city spirit that we cultivate here. As though losing makes us tougher and emboldens our city pride when we can say that the jerks who live in towns like Dallas and New York don’t understand what it’s like to want. They are spoiled and reviled for having the nerve to win while we appear needier and as such, deserve something more.
Scratch a Phillies fan and you’ll uncover a Yankee and Met hater. Scratch an Eagles fan and you’ll uncover a Cowboy and Giant hater – as well as a few others. It isn’t merely because New York is a bigger city, it’s partly because they win and we don’t.

Our local sports-talk radio station (WIP) would probably tell you that there is a spike in callers and a slight increase in their ratings on the Monday following an Eagles loss. It starts with the post-game show and does not let up until the next game time on Sunday, when a completely new set of analysis starts, depending on the outcome. Generally, though, it seems that the emphasis is on something negative – even in victory. Mike Schmidt expressed it nicely when he analyzed the post-game mindset this way: “The thrill of victory, and the agony of reading about it the next day”. Winning is bad for the sports talk radio business. Who wants to listen to a bunch of happy people? Misery does indeed love company.

One of WIP's station breaks goes: "Sharing the agony with the Philadelphia Sports fans". Great. Thanks for the confidence boost.

Where to now? The Eagles season is presumably over. The season ending [career ending?] injury to quarterback Donovan McNabb, combined with their 5-5 record have caused fans and media to write-off the season and look to the next one. The Sixers are dismal, and the Flyers, having recently fired their head coach, are still struggling to score goals. It is virtually guaranteed that the losing will continue into the spring, when the Phillies will carry the torch through the summer to what we all expect will be another season of almost good enough baseball, as it has been since their last playoff appearance in 1993.

It’s Philadelphia, where losing is an epidemic and talking about it is fun. I'm not sure what the fans in this city would do if a team actually won something.

Maybe soon, we'll find out.