 |
| This shot went in somehow |
“The difference in college basketball between winning and losing is so small. The difference in your feelings is so large.”
– North Carolina coach Roy Williams
THE NCAA title game was terrific, which finals rarely are in any sport.
Kris Jenkins’ buzzer-beater gave Villanova a 77:74 win over North Carolina, coming just 4.7 seconds after Carolina’s Marcus Paige tied the score with one of the most ridiculous shots I’ve ever seen. The Lose had no rooting interest in this game, as I appreciate both of their head coaches for insisting on still coaching offense and encouraging creativity through what has been an appallingly deadball era in the game, during which many supposed “genius” coaches have simply taken to trying to defensively suffocate the opposition. Calling Villanova
an underdog is something of a stretch – they won a championship in 1985, have consistently been near to the top ever since, were ranked #1 in the polls for a bit this past season, and were ranked #1 in the nation by
some of the statistical metrics – but it’s nice to see a relatively fresh face win the title and break the sport even more out of the stasis and predictability that was coming to stymie it. The final was a terrific game, well played and extremely competitive, and the denouement made it one of the sport’s more memorable acts. I’d have been happy to see them play another 5-10 minutes of OT, just because it was a great game. It truly was a shame someone had to lose.
The one-and-done nature of the NCAA tournament contributes greatly to it
being the most dramatic endeavor in American sports. Losses can be so
sudden and swift. In an instant, your season is over or, even more, your
career is over, since a good number of the college kids involved will
never play basketball at this sort of level again. That fact adds an
element of cruelty to it all, since your last game is a loss and you
almost certainly didn’t play your best game. The losses can certainly be
traumatic. I don’t think that the DePaul basketball program has ever
recovered from 1981, when they were ranked #1 in the nation and
lost in the second round
to a St. Joseph’s team so nondescript that the winning bucket was
scored by a guy named John Smith. The iconic image from that game,
captured and documented on film, is that of DePaul’s star, Mark Aguirre,
clutching the ball tight to his chest in the aftermath, the tears
rolling down his cheeks. I always rooted for him after that. I was happy
when Aguirre got a ring with the Detroit Pistons later that decade.
And what’s all the more galling is that most of the time, you lose in
the NCAA tournament because first and foremost, you didn’t shoot very
well, and after you’ve spent much of the previous 22 years throwing a
ball at a rim in gyms and on playgrounds and in the backyard, you’ve
probably gotten pretty good at shooting the ball, only to have this
fundamental skill of the game betray you at the worst time possible. Not
playing your best, and not showing what you truly are capable of doing,
adds to the disappointment.
With time comes perspective, of course,
particularly if you were a player at a lesser school of whom nothing was
expected. Reaching the NCAA tournament in the first place is the true
accomplishment. The details of how you exited the tourney, in most
cases, will disappear into the dustbin of history. Unless, of course, you lose the way North Carolina did last night, which condemns you to being part of
the montage.
Television loves their montages of great buzzer beating moments in the
NCAA – and they should love them, because the drama of the NCAA buzzer
beater, and the explosion of emotions good and bad when it occurs, is
like nothing else in sports. It makes for great TV. And so you can be
sure that every March, from now on, you’re going to see a commercial or
an opening montage in which Kris Jenkins hits a 25’ jumper at the
buzzer. He’s joined the ranks of
Bryce Drew and
Lorenzo Charles and
Rip Hamilton,
immortalized in glory for their spectacular last-second NCAA exploit,
whereas North Carolina now joins the ranks of Ole Miss and Houston and
Washington (LOL Husky scum), in suffering the worst possible indignity
of getting beat at the buzzer and now having to see that moment replayed
again and again and again, over and over and over,
ad infinitum, being
reminded time and again how they failed on the biggest stage they’d ever
stepped onto. This feels like a fate straight out of Greek tragedy, the
repetitive nature of which is designed to slowly drive you insane. You
definitely want to avoid the montage. (And for god’s sake, stay out of a
documentary.)
CBS has compiled a nice montage of legendary NCAA moments which serves as the opener to their telecasts, and one of those moments in particular resonates with me: the image of Gordon Hayward racing up the court with the ball in the dying seconds of the 2010 NCAA Championship Game between Butler and Duke. Hayward launches a stunning heave from half court …
… aaand thanks to a clever edit, you don’t see whether the shot goes in or not.
Go back for a moment to 2010. Here was Butler University, a well-respected educational institution in Indianapolis with a good basketballing tradition, but certainly not a great one, reaching the NCAA championship game – and that mere fact alone seemed unthinkable. But the Bulldogs were blessed with a coach, Brad Stevens, whose mind for the game and tactical acumen greatly exceeded the status of his program. Under his tutelage, several of his players had developed into legitimate NBA-caliber talents. Butler had snuck up on everybody, becoming really good when no one was paying attention, and over the course of the month of March 2010, Butler had become the ultimate NCAA Good Guys, champions of little guys everywhere, a triumph of hard work and tenacity and resourcefulness. And then it comes down to the final seconds, they’re down two with almost no time left, but Hayward has the ball and he’s their best player and he heaves it up from half court, and when it leaves his hand and you watch the rotation and trajectory of the shot and you think, “my god, that just might go in …”
… but it didn’t go in, of course, and Duke prevailed over Butler 61:59. Butler had become the ultimate NCAA Good Guys during the 2010 tournament, and they wound up losing to the NCAA tournament’s undisputed Public Enemy #1. Duke hates fun. Duke ruins your day. They’ve been ruining the narrative of the NCAA tournament for the better part of 25 years.
Duke won their first title in 1991, having pulled a stunning upset in the semifinal of an undefeated UNLV team which, player for player and play for play, was probably the best team we’ve seen in college basketball in the past 40 years. The following year, 1992, saw Duke defeat the Fab Five in the final, the Michigan team of Chris Webber and Jalen Rose and Juwan Howard whose five starters were all freshmen.
Duke’s third title, in 2001, changed the dynamic of the Final Four insofar as that what had once been a stale, neutral court environment ceased to be that way, because the Maryland fans were
so angry about the Terrapins’ loss to Duke in the semis that they booed the Dookies constantly and mercilessly throughout the final game against Arizona. A narrative which has dogged the game for decades is “Duke gets all the calls,” and sure enough, the officials pointed Duke’s way at a few critical moments in the semifinal, as well as in the final against Arizona, as they seemingly always did. (This narrative conveniently leaves out the fact that Maryland blew a 23-point lead, of course.) A legitimate complaint about the game of college basketball over the years, in my opinion, is that the annoying and insufferable hero worship of the college basketball coach extends to the actions of the officials on the floor. Pit two teams against each other, one coached by a legend (which Coach K is), and another by an also-ran, and you can take a pretty good guess as to which team is going to get all of the 50-50 breaks from the zeebs. I don’t think there is any intentional malice in this, mind you. Referees are human and are affected by external forces, such as the sway of the crowd. This is why the home team generally gets the breaks from officials. As a player, you know this going in and you try to play through it, knowing that your team is going to get the breaks in your own gym. But when a team who “gets all the calls” seemingly “gets all the calls” all the way to winning a championship, the narrative and legacy it leaves behind is that it’s not a fair fight, it’s an unfair game.
Duke then beat Butler as mentioned above for Title #4, a stunning
rebuke of little guys and romantics everywhere, and Title #5 came a year
ago against a Wisconsin team that had defeated previously undefeated
Kentucky in the semifinals. Kentucky had a chance to be the first team
in the history of the game to go 40-0 in a season, a truly remarkable
accomplishment, a stamp of ultimate greatness. Nope, sorry, instead we
got Duke again.
Duke is no fun. Duke kills your dreams and stomps on your ideals. You should never invite Duke to the party. Duke ruins everything. They ruin a good narrative, they ruin a great story.
And ultimately, from the perspective of history, the narrative is what matters. A large part of the advancement of any sport is the selling of its legends. This gets completely tiresome during a baseball season, of course, because at some point in every single game you watch or listen to, someone involved in the broadcast feels a compulsion to retell some story of the team’s past. Cricket is even worse on that account. The game going on itself seems almost like an afterthought at times.
“He bowled 65-3 when Australia was 187 all out during the first innings of the Ashes match at Lord’s in 1977, or was it ’78? … oh, and by the way, there’s two runs, and England are now 181 for 6 … now where were we? Oh yes, it was 1978 ...”
In the case of those last two sports I mentioned, you wonder at times if there is
anything at all to the sport but past narratives.
And since there is an international audience who reads this blog, a good number of whom probably know nothing about American college basketball, and care little about the plights of a bunch of 20-year old American college kids, I should probably use an analogy that the international audience can understand. If college basketball is soccer, then Duke are the Germans.
* * *
 |
| Johan Cruijff, Netherlands v. Uruguay, 1974 World Cup |
“Football is played with the head.”
– Johan Cruijff
Johan Cruijff died just recently at the age of 68, and football and the world of sport are definitely the worse for it, as Cruijff was probably the most influential figure the sport has ever known. As a player, you’d have to rank him as the best European player ever. His prowess on the football pitch places him with the Peles and Maradonas and Messis of the world. He was
that good.
But what makes him the most influential figure in the game is not only his skills on the pitch, but his success as a manager and executive. Cruijff was fundamental in the creation of the F.C. Barcelona style of play still prevalent today, and his greatest triumph came in the building of the Barca youth academy which has cranked out great players for decades, many of whom composed the core of that Spanish national team whose achievements rank it as among the best ever – winning the 2010 World Cup and Euros in 2008 and 2012, the only country to win three majors consecutively. Cruijff’s fingerprints are all over Spanish football, and he was the integral force in Dutch football, which had become something of a backwater pre-Cruijff, having not been to a World Cup in more than 30 years. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, Ajax Amsterdam and Feijenoord were winning European silverware in the late 1960s and early 1970s, while Cruijff was busy winning three
Ballon d’Ors. The Dutch had suddenly gone from being also-rans to international powerhouses, with Johan Cruijff leading the way.
And this Dutch success was not simply down to great talent, although Cruijff & Co. had plenty of that. (You don’t get
a move named after you for nothing.) It was success based more in the way that the Dutch
thought about the game. Cruijff’s most famous quote above (and there are many famous quotes to choose from), speaks to this. The Dutch played the game with their heads. They thought about it differently. There is a reason why there are so many Dutch coaches involved in the game on a worldwide level, as this approach has become pervasive over time. Cruijff was an innovator, a contrarian, rebellious by nature and willing to challenge the orthodoxy. He thought up ways of doing things on the pitch that no one had ever conceived of, and then went about doing them. Watch a great game of football today, and Cruijff’s influence is everywhere. Systems and tactics and techniques you take for granted were radical back in the early 1970s, when those crazy orange-clad guys straight out of Europe’s bastion of hippie counterculture were doing stuff on the pitch that no one had ever seen.
The World Cup final of 1974 is arguably the most talked about, most written about sporting event in the history of humanity. An entire bookshelf’s worth of literature has been written about that game: sports books, of course, but also books on sociology, philosophy, psychology and even history. The game had
that much of a resonance. The game opens with a stunning sequence (just watch
the first few minutes) in which the Dutch keep possession of the ball, systematically march down the field, and the first German to touch the ball at all is the goalkeeper
who is picking it out of his own net. It’s the single most devastating foray that the game has ever seen, about three minutes worth of fury which provided a legitimacy and validation to all of Dutch football and serves as the foundation of their legacy as one of the greatest teams of all time.
And then they played the remaining 87 minutes of the match, and the Dutch proceeded to lose. One of the commonly repeated jokes about the 1974 World Cup final is that the
Oranje did everything in that game except remember to score the second goal. The Dutch ultimately lost the World Cup final 2:1 to the hated Germans.
But to Cruijff, ever the contrarian, the Dutch had, in essence, “won” the World Cup. The Dutch of 1974 were memorable, after all. They were innovative, they were creative and exciting, whereas the Germans were a typically methodical, humorless, bland outfit that not even their own sporting public enjoyed all that much. After the 1974 World Cup was over, no coaches nor football managers were going to be attempting to replicate what the Germans were trying to do – but
everyone wanted to figure out what the Dutch were doing and copy it, learn from it. That impact on the game, in the mind of Cruijff, was the true success.
An interesting notion, on Cruijff’s part. Certainly, it’s easy to be skeptical about such an attitude:
“Cruijff said afterwards, ‘We were very successful in a way because we were acclaimed for our style and everybody said we we were the best team.’ But it deflected attention away from the failure. Over the years it became an excuse. The Dutch thing became beautiful losing. It became a national brand in their football. But that’s not how it was pre-’74. The guys who played in that team were used to winning and Rinus Michels invented Total Football not as a way of making beautiful patterns on the field but as a way of winning. The Ajax team that were European champions three years running were much better than everyone else and won. That was the plan for 1974. Holland weren’t there to make up the numbers and finish second and get acclaimed for their loveliness and their open-mindedness and their philosophical nature. They were there to win. So it was one thing before July 7, 1974, and then afterwards it was kind of retooled and reimagined as, ‘actually, we succeeded anyway.’ But they didn’t. It was a failure. But a success in other ways. It was always a prickly thing that you couldn’t come to terms with or move on from. It was an unresolved trauma. The beauty and achievement was creating a wonderful brand of football.”
– David Winner, author of “Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer”
Certainly, the idea of losing elegantly seems to be inherent to Dutch soccer. The
Oranje have lost three World Cup finals. A fourth team, in 1998, was the best team in the tourney yet somehow contrived to lose on penalties in the semis after drawing 1:1 with Brazil in a game they totally dominated, squandering chance after chance after chance. But it’s never been a case of simply winning or losing for the Dutch. They have to look good doing it, a fact which is often written into national team manager’s contracts. The Dutch were heavily criticized for taking a cynical, clinical approach to the 2010 final with Spain, often resorting to playing the man instead of the ball while conniving to create a counterattack opportunity. Never mind, of course, that it was probably the right approach given the opponent, and had Robben not blown his breakaway opportunity, the tactics would have worked. At some point, you should really stop trying to look good and start trying to win the game, don’t you think? You can claim all you want that the results don’t matter, but it’s still a results oriented business:
“The virtuous Dutch against the ugly Germans? I don’t think that works any more. Replaying the war? I don’t think that really works. What happened was they took so long to face the problem directly. The first reaction was ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’ They had a party when they came home. They had a reception with the Queen and it was as if they were rehearsing for all the future disappointments. But their feelings were very raw. They pretended they were satisfied sometimes. Knowing that they were the best and that they came up with this completely new way of playing football which was better than everyone else’s – that was a part of it. It wasn’t okay to come second. It was an enduring pain. And it happened again in 1978 and happened again in a slightly different way in 1998 when the best team should’ve won it. Dennis Bergkamp – an embodiment of the mentality that disasters aren’t that disastrous and the joys aren’t that joyful – he’s still haunted by 1998, which was his generation’s 1974. Holland should’ve won. They were the best team. They were the team the French didn’t want to play in the final. They were better than the Brazilians and yet they failed. And it nags at him, but he can’t do anything about it some 16 years later. It’s too late. You can’t replay the game. It’s that moment: you had to take your chance and you didn’t. That’s why it lingers and gnaws away. And because a World Cup comes around every four years, it’s not like a Champions League or a league title. It’s once in a lifetime and that’s why it hurts.”
– David Winner
I get all of that, and I agree to an extent, yet Cruijff has a point. History is complicated. Nixon once quipped that history would judge him favorably, yet historians wouldn’t. One of the more laughably stupid themes of the entire Deflategate kerfuffle is the idea that it would somehow taint Tom Brady and the New England Patriots’ legacy. Guess what? In the moment, you don’t give a damn about your legacy. You give a damn about winning. How you are perceived and remembered in the future isn’t up to you. Your legacy gets determined for you, and sometimes it has nothing to do with results. A large part of Barca’s successes, and the successes of Spanish football as a whole, trace back to the expat Dutchman who steered the club for decades, yet Cruijff’s legacy, first and foremost, is defined by having captained and led the side who were the purveyors of the game’s most storied failure.
“I’m ex-player, ex-technical director, ex-coach, ex-manager, ex-honorary president. A nice list that once again shows that everything comes to an end.”
– Johann Cruijff
* * *
And what we’ve seen time and again, over the history of sport, is that it’s not the winners who we most fondly remember – but, in fact, it’s those who come up short who are far more beloved than those who prevail.
Which is not to say that champions aren’t revered. The ’27 Yankees, ’85 Bears and ’96 Bulls are among the most revered and legendary teams of all-time. As the Warriors have been chasing down some of those records set by the ’96 Bulls, it’s been met with a somewhat astonishing backlash from basketball old-timers, all of whom seem to think that the game is somehow played in a vacuum and that you could stick the ’96 Bulls and 2016 Warriors on the court and the Bulls would somehow prevail. This is, quite frankly, completely idiotic, as the game has changed in 20 years, the schemes are far more sophisticated and the skill sets far more developed. Everything that you do in the present gets learned from and improved upon in the future. The Warriors would wipe the floor with the Bulls, and the San Antonio Spurs would do the same, for that matter, but the Dubs are messing with history here, you see, and I’ve found it rather amusing to see the Warriors transitioning from being perceived as heroes to villains, when as far as I can tell, all they’ve been doing is going out and winning basketball games at a slightly more frequent rate this season than last.
But the Dubs are a good example to point out here, since their cutting-edge style of play is directly drawn from that of one of the most beloved teams in recent NBA history, the
Seven Seconds Or Less Phoenix Suns, who were the greatest show in the game from 2004-2008 and who revolutionized the game of basketball … and who couldn’t win an NBA title. It’s in
this article about the Suns where Bill Simmons and Chris Connelly float an idea which I’m vamping on in this post, that of being ‘critically acclaimed’ and thus lovable even though the success wasn’t ultimately there. Notice how the 1974
Oranje are high on that list of critically acclaimed athletes and teams, as are the Fab Five and we’ll get back to them in a minute, and also a team near and dear to my heart, the Loyola Marymount team from the turn of the ’90s who routinely scored 140 or 150 points in a game and whose best player, Hank Gathers, dropped dead in the middle of a game. (It still makes me sad to think about this.) Loyola Marymount played their hearts out in the 1990 NCAA tourney without him and reached the final eight, only to be crushed by UNLV, and LMU coach Paul Westhead – an English professor as well as a coach – was remarkably philosophical about it all. The winning and the losing in the NCAA tournament ultimately didn’t matter all that much, in a greater context. Hank Gathers had died and eventually you’d have to come to terms with it. There were never going to be enough games to hide behind. Had they won the whole tournament, they still would have their day of reckoning where they came to grips with Gathers being gone. In the end, Loyola Marymount made many friends simply through their inspired play in the most unimaginable of circumstances, and it was how they carried themselves through difficult times, and in defeat, which said more about them than any actual result on the court.
Indeed, one of the reasons why Duke has become reviled over time is the perception that they are sore winners, that they are elitists possessing a sense of entitlement. They also usually have some sneaky little shithead on their team, be it Christian Laettner or J.J. Reddick or Grayson Allen, who thrives upon antagonizing the opposition and who occasionally resort to dirty tricks in order to do it. This narrative isn’t entirely fair, of course. Duke reached the championship game in 1990, the year before their first title, and they were absolutely annihilated 103:73 by UNLV, a humbling beatdown if there ever was one. For all of his titles over the years, Coach K’s best team of all was one that didn’t actually win the title, the 1999 team which lost in the final to Connecticut, a program which is equally successful and equally obnoxious, if not more so. That ’99 Duke team was ranked #1 almost the entire season, didn’t play anywhere near their best game in the final, and
still only lost by three to UConn in a game that went to the buzzer, at which point they were forced to show a shocking humility and grace seemingly unbecoming of the program.
But that happens, of course. It’s in defeat that you see that humanity come out. The most ruthless killing machine of sport in my time on this earth – the Soviet hockey team – lost a game to the U.S. at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980, and what was stunning about it was just how human they suddenly seemed. The coach made a bad decision – yanking his goaltender, Vladislav Tretiak, in a fit of rage after the first period – the players began to make inexplicable errors, and they tightened up once the momentum had shifted the Americans’ way. (Several great documentaries have been made about this team,
Of Miracles and Men and
Red Army.) The Duke documentary that I mentioned earlier chronicles the so-called ‘
Laettner Game,’ Duke’s 104:103 OT win over Kentucky in the 1992 NCAA East Regional final that is considered by many to be the greatest college basketball game of all time – and given the pedigree, and somewhat dubious history, anything that can wind up with both Rick Pitino and Kentucky portrayed in a sympathetic light is noteworthy, but Kentucky were nothing less than gallant in defeat on that particular day.
And for the record, that’s not the greatest college basketball game ever played. It’s the second-best game ever played.
This is the best game ever played, #2 NC State beating #1 Maryland 103:100 in OT in the 1974 ACC championship. Maryland had six future NBA players on their team, shot 61% and lost. It’s a game which changed college basketball forever, since this was the #1 and #2 teams in the country essentially playing a loser-out game, since back then only the conference champions got to go to the NCAA tourney. The NCAA tourney then began to expand the following year, since it seemed ridiculous to leave a team like Maryland out of the field. Interestingly, Maryland declined an invitation to the NIT that year, deciding to let their great season come to an end:
“Why risk losing to an inferior team just because we didn't come to play? Then our legacy is destroyed. In the end, I think we were vindicated by the fact that when they (N.C. State) were asked who the best team was that they played, and they said it was us.”
– Len Elmore, Maryland center
And after Duke beat Kentucky in that Laettner game, they went on to win the national championship against Michigan, aka
The Fab Five, one of the most groundbreaking teams in sports. It seemed nuts for Michigan to start five freshmen at once, but The Fab Five
changed the game of college basketball with their style and their swagger – a style and swagger which occasionally masked what made them successful on the court, which was a high IQ game and a group of five who played wonderfully together as a team. After losing to Duke in the 1992 final as freshmen, the Fab Five returned to the final as sophomores, only to lose 77:71 to North Carolina in 1993. The pivotal moment of the game came when, down a bucket in the closing stages, Michigan’s Chris Webber called a timeout that his team didn’t have. It was a brain cramp, pure and simple, but far too many Fab Five-haters, many of whom trawled and trolled as hero-coach worshipping journalists, chortled it up in the aftermath, hailing Michigan’s loss to a Dean Smith-coached Carolina as a triumph of substance over style, which was utter nonsense. And with that loss came the end of the Fab Five: Webber jumped to the NBA immediately, and it was later revealed that there had been
improprieties involving a Michigan booster, so all of the Fab Five’s achievements were officially stricken from the record books. They vanished almost as quickly as they had arisen. There is almost a James Dean,
Rebel Without a Cause sort of quality to the Fab Five which has made their fleeting success seem almost larger than life.
And who even remembers that North Carolina team from 1993? Name me one guy who played in that final who was wearing powder blue? Winners are surprisingly unmemorable a lot of the time. This is because winners, in fact, tend to play it safe. They aren’t groundbreakers or revolutionaries. They tend to fall in line with orthodoxy and convention.
Memorable losers like The Fab Five, or the SSOL Suns or the Clockwork
Oranje, do things differently. They have different approaches and different ideas. The phrase ‘ahead of their time’ has become a cliché for a reason. People around the NBA didn’t think it was possible for a team like the Suns to win the title – only to see, seven years later, the Golden State Warriors play in much the same manner and do exactly that. You may lose in the moment, but Johan Cruijff was right: in the long run, if you’re memorable, you’re the ultimate winner.
Which is why, when I see the opening NCAA montage, and see Butler’s Gordon Hayward launching it from half-court in the dying seconds, you don’t have to see whether or not the ball goes in the basket. It doesn’t matter whether it did or not. By simply getting to that point, Butler were the winners. In the long run, the actual outcome of the game only matters to a select few. They promptly undid their hipster indie credit the following year, reaching the title game yet again and then losing to Connecticut 54:41 in what was, quite simply, the worst basketball game that I have ever seen. The two teams combined to shoot .261 from the floor in the game, missing 88 shots between them. Yeech! At that point, Butler were no longer lovable losers. They were just bad. Their time had run its course. But in that first finals loss against Duke, Butler captured imagination, they excited minds and they showed what was possible. It’s better to have been loved, and lost, than never to have lost at all.
We need narrative, we need myths and legends to maintain our interest. And those who come before us and who fail ultimately move us forward, as we attempt to improve in the areas where they came up short. Copying what winners do, ultimately, simply muddies the waters, because everyone does it and the end result is a suffocating sameness and staleness. Great ideas come from everywhere, but the execution of those ideas is often longer in coming. If we didn’t have legendary and lovable losers, we’d lose a great deal of the texture and context. Success changes that narrative, of course: in two cases in baseball, long-suffering franchises have recently become big winners, with the Red Sox and Giants each winning three World Series after going more than a half-century without winning any. You may shed that lovable loser tag at that point – I can look forward to reading about “arrogant and entitled Giants fans” on message boards now, as we march towards yet another Giants even year bullshit pennant – but that legacy of failure makes success all the more sweet, and the stories of how you came to fail, just like all good narratives, are bound to just get better and better (and funnier and funnier) as you get older, aging like a fine, fine wine.
