Growing Up Cardinal

In Which I Try and Explain What It's Like to be a “Fan” of the Worst Run Franchise in Sports and How Their Surreal Rise to Prominence has Affected Me

(Edit. Note: I actually am a Cardinals fan. I didn't just jump on the bandwagon during the past two weeks and this isn't some frivolous attempt to be culturally relevant like Rick Riley's truly awful article on Beer Pong)

Webster describes a fan as “an enthusiastic devotee, follower, or admirer of a sport, past time, or celebrity, etc.”. When it comes to my fandom of the Arizona Wildcats, Phoenix Suns and the Arizona Diamondbacks, I feel like this description undersells my over-the-top, border line religious support of those teams. But as far as my NFL team, the Arizona Cardinals, is concern, well that's a different story. For most of my life I've lived in Arizona and I've been a follower of the Cardinals, which wasn't always easy considering 95% of our home games in the metal coffin known as Sun Devil Stadium used to be blackout on local TV because they never came close to selling out unless the Cowboys or 49ers were in town. I've always rooted for them over any other NFL team* and was generally rewarded for my support about 5 times per season. Now going back to Webster's definition, it's truly hard to admire such ineptitude, in fact to call the Cardinals inept seems like an insult to inept teams everywhere. I'm not being over-exaggerating here, after all The Cardinals have only had 2 winning seasons in my life time. In a league that's actually over active in promoting parity, such incompetence is truly something special. The Cards have raised the bar on how to run a franchise into the ground. You'd have to be a masochist to be an enthusiastic devotee of such a putrid team. So really the only part of Webster's dictionary that applies to me is “follower”. Yes I care about the team and have been let down so many times that I've lost count and have been desensitized over the years. Given the years of numbing defeats this team has dealt me then it's understandable why the Cardinals unprecedented playoff surge has felt more surreal than gratifying for me.

Quick tangent: I read an article from a Phoenix paper earlier this week about how the problem with the Cardinals these past 21 years wasn't their horrible owner Bill Bidwell being cheap, but it was the fact that Bidwell just didn't know how to win. WHAT!?!?!?!?! That’s the best excuse they could come up with? If by some chance it’s true that Bidwell didn't/doesn't know how to win, then how dumb is he? How did this guy make enough money to own an NFL team? I mean continuing to own an NFL team and not having a clue how to win makes about as much sense as me saying "Well I don't know how this whole stock market thing works, but I'm gonna pour a lot of money into anyway", and doing that for 21 straight years. I mean this is truly unbelievable. Even if it was true at the beginning of his tenure, don't you think he would have figured something out in his 21 straight years on the job? I mean honestly, this was one of the sh*ttiest articles I've ever read. I would have found it more believable if you had told me that the reason the Cardinals were so bad these last two decades was because Bidwell's mom was sick so he couldn't fully concentrate on running the team. I’m honestly, it’s great that the Cardinals are finally winning, but let’s not rewrite history here and try and portray Bidwell as anything but one of the worst and most frugal owners in sports history.
Ok, tangent over.

Anyhow, I still don't fully believe that the Cardinals are playing in, let alone hosting, the NFC Championship game. For starters, this is a team whose greatest accomplishments are finding new and interesting ways to lose games (and ending Steve Young's career). Some sports teams, like the championship era Yankees or Cowboys always found miraculous ways to comeback and win the seemingly unwinnable games. Since moving to Arizona in 1988, the Cardinals have done the exact opposite. They’re practically the antithesis of those aforementioned dynasties. Even last week as Jake Delhome was submitting the worst playoff performance of all-time**, I still never felt comfortable until there was about 3 minutes left in the game. Only then could I relax and actually allow myself to think that the Cardinals would win.

For the past 5 days I've been trying to come up with an analogy of what the Cardinals improbable run to the NFC Championship game has been like. Here's the best I could come up with: Imagine you had a close relative, for this example's sake will say a cousin, who's roughly the same age as you but has always been a colossal f*ck up. By the time he was 10 he was already smoking cigarettes and getting into fights at school. When he was 13 he go drunk on Thanksgiving and challenged your dad to a fistfight. A few years later during Christmas Dinner he left the table and went and took a dump in your living room. Since then he's been in and out of rehab and every time it looks like he just might be clean, he relapses, generally in the most public and embarrassing of fashions. And no matter how sad, upsetting, obnoxious, and all in all hopeless he may seem, you still care about him and keep tabs on him because he's family. Then one day, without any warning, he's out of rehab for the umpteenth time and doing great. You're expecting him to relapse at any moment, but it looks like he may actually have his life together. And now he's written a book, and Oprah just selected it for her book club. He's the talk of the literary world, he's doing the talk show circuit and all that jazz. This whole time as you're watching from a distance you’re incredibly proud of him, and yet at the same time you’re thinking “that's the same guy who took a dump in my living room a few Christmases ago”

(Note: This analogy is wholly fiction. As far as I know this describes no one in my family. immediate or otherwise.)

And that's what it's like right now to be an Arizona Cardinals fan. You're proud, amazed and yet complete bewildered because it goes against everything you've ever known about the Cardinals. Regardless of what happens Sunday, this has been the best Cardinals season of my life time. I suspect they'll probably lose by 10ish, but then again I thought that about the last two games. In fact, I feel like the Cardinals will lose by about 10 in 95% of the games they play, but that's neither here nor there. So, um, go Cards.

Until We Meet Again
* With the exception of few years in which I was a young child and allowed my father and older brother to influence me and I rooted for the New York football Giants and Dallas Cowboys over the home town Cardinals. What can I say, but 'when I was child I reasoned like a child', etc.
** That might actually be an understatement. Calling it the worst performance of all-time doesn't fully capture how truly sh*tty Delhome was.