Sounds like the title should be a blues riff, but it’s just another whine on a familiar theme. The good news is that it’s the last one for this year.
Okay, so on with the whine.
There are thousands of reasons to live in the Pacific Northwest. However, being a sports fan is not one of them, unless your sport is something one does in relative anonymity (biathlon comes to mind), and/or results are determined totally by performance. But, if your sport, team or favorite player needs a popular national vote to succeed and you live here, you’re headed for heartache.
The Blazers, Seahawks, and Mariners can win championships because if you win on the field often enough, you get a shot at the ring.
In college football, where the BCS is not much more than a popularity contest, it’s tougher. Can you see Oregon playing Oregon State for the BCS title? Under any circumstances? No way. Even if the Beavers lost to Oregon by three and neither lost a game other than that? Not ever!
In any sport, at any level, it’s about the money. Anyone who says differently is either uninformed or a hypocrite. For the pros that’s how it should be. For college and on down, there ought to be a better way. But when a football player’s uniform and pads costs thousands of dollars, and travel expense is what it is, college sports will stay about the bucks.
The college football bucks really start to build when you think about the price tag of facilities to attract marquee quality stars to a program. Without Phil Knight and his Nike largess, the Ducks are rooting in the mud with the Cougars. Look at Oklahoma State. The Cowboys played in the Sooners shadow for decades until Boone Pickett opened the valve on his money pump and rebuilt the campus and its athletics. Now days an angel the magnitude of Knight or Pickett can elevate Eugene and Stillwater to compete with Los Angeles and Dallas.
Is it harder in the pros to win out here in the small market, nationally perceived land of Birkenstock and hemp? Where readers fill the coffee shops and hikers crowd the trails in the national forests instead of arenas? In the first place that’s harsh because the Blazers pack ‘em in, the Seahawks do nicely at the gate despite their record, and the Mariners did very well until they couldn’t play .400 ball.
Despite the ambivalence of the question’s modifiers, the answer is a definitive yes, it is harder to win here. It takes a roster loaded with talent to win the World Series, or the Super Bowl, or the NBA title and that’s tough now that the top players are picking where and with whom they want to play. Do you think Salt Lake City or Portland would ever draw the big three the way Miami did? Not ever! Young, hip, athletes want clubs not hiking trails.
People live here in part because of the nearness to wide open spaces. Living here, they know, with fresh air and home on the range in their hearts and souls, they are better off.
Wide open spaces, by definition, do not include sports writers who vote on such things as the college football polls and the Heisman Trophy. Given the choice of looking out the window at (A) the Pacific Ocean or the Cascade mountains, or (B) a building filled with sports writers (I know the metaphor is stretching a little thin here) I’ll take (A) every time. I’m a lucky guy, but I’m greedy for wanting it all — wide open spaces and winning teams.
But, that said, I’m pretty OK with my annual goal for the Blazers to make the playoffs, then suffering in silence when they lose in the first round. No big names, not even with Paul Allen’s diminishing billions headed their way, are going to play at One Center court in a Blazers uniform to take the team further. God knows what I’d have to give up in quality of life to see them make it to the second, or, gasp, third round.
It doesn’t matter what I think or care about college football because nothing is going to change. I can say to hell with it and hang up my chips and beer like so many of my friends have in the last year (friends that live in other parts of the country, as well as here!), but with my obligations to Oregon Sports News I’ve got to stay in touch. Besides, if I give up on too many sports I’d lose my bar seat at the Extra P_oint. That is unacceptable.
The Pacific Northwest is the land of plenty. We’ve got millions of trees, thousands of lakes, hundreds of miles of Pacific shoreline, and tens of snow-capped peaks. If that’s the price for reduced expectations when it comes to sports and my favorite teams, I can live with it.
After all, I could live in New Jersey.
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