THE THRILL IS GONE

THE DOWNSIDE OF FANDOM

I  am in a funk and the game last night only added to my sorrow.  I received the sad news that my dear cousin Bobby died and  with a grieving heart I began to watch the game  hoping the CAVS  could lift my spirit a  little. Instead I saw that LeBron is too heavily burdened with the lifting of the entire  team and I could not add my sorrow.  

I turned the game off and went to bed when LeBron went to the bench in the last moments and seemed to down a quart of water in one long gulp.  I woke up several times in the night with the sadness and thought that  letting myself care so much for his victories meant that I cared  too much about his defeats.  They felt like they were mine.


My mother always  tried to stop me when I would wax too passionately about one of my idols -- TED WILLIAMS  and ELVIS, and  yes, when I was  a toddler ROY ROGERS,
Being Irish she would use derision to stifle my attachment--
Asking rhetorically--here you are worried about Ted Williams--how many times do you think he talked about you today?

And that was the end of the talk-- but not the devotion.  I was hurt and had no response. It would  be many years before I recognized that she challenged in me a trait that she hated in herself  --  mothers do that,
She had worshipped an English Channel swimmer Gertrude Ederle and often delighted in the wins of a woman tennis player .  She  even made tennis whites for herself and had her picture taken swinging a borrowed tennis racquet.  She knew what hero worship was all about.  Like me she enjoyed a rich and lavish fantasy life.

Gertrude was the first woman to swim the English Chanel and that happened in 1926 when my mother was 16 and that made a big impression
on her. She talked about it all the time.