I Am A Washington Sports Fan and I Know Pain
As a Washington, DC sports fan, I’m used to a certain amount of soul-blighting disappointment. I know what it’s like to watch year after year of abysmal failure broken only by the tease of middling success that makes you think that maybe things have turned around only to watch grim reality dash your hopes against the wall like a bully smashing a little kid’s toy car. We haven’t seen a professional sports team hoist a championship trophy here since the Redskins won the Super Bowl in 1991. If that doesn’t seem like a long time ago, consider this: the halftime act at that Super Bowl was New Kids on the Block. Save for five years in my lifetime, the golden years from the Washington Bullets’ championship run in 1978 to the Baltimore Orioles World Series triumph in 1983 (oh, and this amazing fourth-and-one from my teenaged years), sports has been pretty much a horrible tease interspersed with the occasional triumph, but mostly not.
No local team has been more woeful for more years than the Washington Bullets Wizards. Since that glorious championship season of 1978, the team has done exactly nothing but flirt with mediocrity. Normally, you’d expect that a team as consistently bad as the Wizards would have gotten some draft help, but no. Even the draft has been a dismal failure, and the story of the team’s horrible luck with the draft lottery as compiled by Dan Steinberg tells you all you need to know about what a sad-sack basketball team we have here in Washington. Here’s a taste of just how bad it’s been:
Like a lot of you, I remember sitting in front of my television a year ago, when the Wizards had the second-best chance in the lottery. For reasons unknown, I had convinced myself that maybe this was the year. As it turned out, I’d have been better off betting on a major federal firearms investigation descending on the Wizards’ locker room. Heck, I’d have been as well off betting that space aliens would stage an armed takeover of the west bleachers at Verizon Center, demanding all the arena’s nachos, half the arena’s cheez product and several dozen unwashed James Singleton jerseys with which to build an unholy portal leading straight to the site of Landover Mall.
I’ve seen New Orleans levees with better luck than this franchise. I’ve seen Enron accountants hit the right numbers more often than this franchise. I’ve seen naked unconscious vomiting beer pong players find more success with ping-pong balls than this franchise. And so on.
I mentioned some of the sad stats earlier in the season — in 12 of their 13 previous trips to the lottery, the Wizards/Bullets have either failed to move up or have actually moved down in the draft order. But that doesn’t do justice to the misery.
No, it certainly doesn’t. Not by half.
You might remember, by the way,that I wrote quite a bit about the Wizards when they it actually seemed they had a young core of very good players who could make a few runs deep into the playoffs. Yeah, silly me. I should have known. I am, after all, a Washington, DC sports fan.
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Category: Hoops Happenings
You'll get no sympathy from me. I grew up on the N. Side of Chicago. I'll call your DC teams and raise you Da Bears (remember the Superbowl Shuffle?), Da Cubs (remember the Curse?), Da Bulls (except for those glorious Michael Jordan years), and Da Blackhawks (remember Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita?)
Hey, those are three powerful franchises plus the White Sox as a home team. Sure, that's a south side thing, but at least it happened, right?