Re: All Things Denver XXX
It's playoff time and there is plenty of room on the DU bandwagon for all of those that have been uncertain about the team all season. You just need to find a seat in the shut the hell up seats. No seats are available for those that have whined about the team and have talked smack about individual players all season but cry tears of joy when DU wins it all. You make the those of us that have been cheering the team on this entire season, cheering on Championship teams since the 50s and even those recently jumping on board; sick. It would be better for you to find a politically correct blog that will ignore your hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy? How about honesty? make you sick? Don't read it, then. No one is forcing you.
In your mind, the only good fan is a cheering, but non-dissenting one? Where are we, Cuba?
Sorry, I don't subscribe to that theory. This is America where we are free to say what we want to say and there is plenty of room on the DU bandwagon for all DU fans, vocal or not. Fans invest emotionally and often financially with their teams, and the fans are the fuel for the entire enterprise. Without us, there are no Division I sports. We are the ones who pay the gate revenue, watch TV, drink the beer, pay the parking, enable coaching raises and make the sport relevant beyond campus. Without us, it's club sports and intramurals.
This message board (and others like it) are our gathering places, where we celebrate, commisserate and share joy and agony. It's also a place where we vent, where we suggest and where we share our views about the program we care about. Fans are part of the family. And like some families, sometimes it's messy -- we squabble, we argue and get angry when we see things we wish were different. It doesn't make us us any less of a fan. In fact, I'd argue that fans who speak out do more than just cheer perform a very important role - they give the players extra motivation -- a target for proving them wrong, as well as making far more interesting reading than pure cheerleading does.
And the boys on the hockey team? They are Division I players in a revenue sport (and their parents) need to develop thick skins. Their performance is going to be graded far more severly by fans when they get to the pros (and 85% of DU players do play some form of pro hockey after college). They need to get used to it - it comes with the territory.
As the captain of one of DU's title teams told me in 2004 - "If I don't play well, I expect to be ripped by the fans. They are the ones who made my scholarship possible."
