Sweet Tea, Barbecue, and Bodychecks

Why do I hate the teams that I hate?  Why do I hate the Red Wings, the Blue Jackets, the Capitals, and the Flyers?

I decided to actually sit down and write a nice longish entry about it.

The Detroit Red Wings.

I have never liked this team, ever. 2002 has nothing to do with it, and I am far from jealous of anything that team has ever done (despite what most of the Wings fans would say). I merely disliked the Red Wings until about 1997ish. My mother (who, I am ashamed to say, is a Wings fan—she also likes the Celtics, the Cardinals, and the 49ers, which just goes to show that nobody is perfect) and I would go round and round about them, just because. I mean, I’m a fan of the Lakers, Dodgers, and Redskins—so we’d always be talking some smack to each other at any given point in a year.

And then I met representatives of the rest of the Red Wings fanbase—you know, the ones that hopped on the bandwagon in 1996 and wouldn’t even recognize Alex Delvecchio if he came up to them on the street and clubbed them over the head with a baseball bat. These people are the most assy and classless bunch of chavs on the face of the planet, and I want to see the Red Wings get owned as much and as often as possible just so I can laugh at them as they cry in their beers. They make my blood boil—they’re rude, obnoxious in the extreme, arrogant as fuck, and pretty much like your average English soccer lout (though they don’t cause riots). Of course, not all of them are that way—but enough of them are that if Detroit were burning, I wouldn’t even so much as spit on it to put the fire out.

And don’t EEEEEEEEVEN get me started on some of the players!

Up next,

The Columbus Blue Jackets.

My interactions with Blue Jackets fans have been rather uniformly poor, with few exceptions. I swear, I could go on a Blue Jackets board and say “hello”, and I’d get nothing but nastiness in return just cos I’m from a southern state—and heaven forbid I make my allegiances known, because then I get hailed on with all kinds of shit about how Blue Jackets fans are so much better than the Caniac Nation (est. 1997) because of a North Carolina invention:

The Personal Seat License.

If having to shell out a mess of cash in order to have the right to shell out even more cash to get season tickets makes you a better fan, then the Carolina Panthers (who are three hours down the road in the Kingdom of Charlotte, and who invented the PSL as a way to pay for the construction of their stadium) have the best fans in the NFL even though half of them don’t even show up when the Panthers are sucking on toast.

Whatever—get over yourselves, people. Your expansion team’s marketing genii put GO BLUE on the jumbotron during an Ohio State-Michigan game and the only two things you have going for you are Rick Nash (when he’s healthy) and Jaroslav frickin’ Balastik, so I really don’t think you have any room at all to bash us for anything OK?

Moving right along.

Your Nation’s Crapitals.

Now see, here’s a team whose fans I get along famously with—probably because (for the most part) we have the Redskins in common. The team, however….

CHEAPER THAN A 40-OUNCE KING COBRA AND DIRTIER THAN THE SUPERDOME, KIDS.

I swear to Malik, if I see Brendan Witt or any other Capital take a cheap shot at one of the ‘Canes again, I am going to be waiting for them out in back of the RBC with a blackjack and a huge-ass chip on my shoulder. At least Jason Doig doesn’t play for them anymore.

And finally we have….

The Philadelphia Flyers.

Two words: Derian Hatcher (the reason why I loathed the Stars for so many years).

Two more words: Turner bloody Stevenson (who I will never ever forgive for his antics during Game 3 in 2001).

Add to that a GM who’s trying to recreate the team that cheapshotted its way to two titles (three, if you count the Summit Series) in the 70s, and you have a recipe for hatin’. If you’re a Euro, Clarke hates you. If you’re not big, Clarke hates you (unless you’re Sami Kapanen, in which case you play like you’re big). And Ken Hitchcock is as cheap as they come—dirty play is a hallmark of a Ken Hitchcock-coached team. Though I hate the team passionately (except for Dennis Seidenberg and the aforementioned Sami Kapanen), this is another team whose fans I get along with for the most part, because the really annoying ones are easy enough to ignore (kinda like the more annoying of the Devils fans).
And there you have it.