World Series 2011: Go Rangers!

For the past three years, for various reasons, I have tried to ween off watching professional sports. I have my reasons, for sure. For the most part, it took time and effort, but I was able to get that monkey off my back. First, I stopped watching the Mavericks. I'd been following them since 1988, the days of Rolando Blackman and Mark Aguirre. Then, I just stopped watching them, stopped reading the highlights, stopped listening to the play-by-play on the radio.

Weening off the Cowboys was an altogether different matter. That took sheer will-power. I had lived and lost my mind with the Cowboys since the days of Tom Laundry. I learned the names of the 1988 Dallas Cowboys before I learned my multiplication tables. I hero-worshipped Michael Irvin and Jay Novacek. I cried when Aikman retired and cringed when I saw Emmitt in an Arizona uniform. Then, one day I woke up, and I no longer cared about them. It was like no longer loving the ex-wife. Just one day out of the blue, I became an ex-Cowboys fan. Maybe it was the Jerry Jones effect. Maybe it was that I stopped enjoying professional football. Maybe it was a lot of things. I'm not sure, but I watched my last complete game back in 2008. Curiously, that was the year that I was divorced from my starter wife. All you pop-psychologists out there are free to analyze that!

Walking away from the Mavericks was not difficult. No longer caring about the Cowboys was harder, and it hurt my soul, but I got it done. However, giving up watching the Texas Rangers is something I have yet to master. As a kid I watched all three sports, but the one that I always enjoyed the most was baseball. That was the game I stayed up late to watch, endured every gut-wrenching rain delays and suffered through endless losing seasons. Through it all, I continued to be a Texas Rangers fan, went to the ball games, cursed the TV when they lost and literally went into a depression when they traded away my all-time favorite sports player, Ruben Sierra back in 1992. Turning my back on the Texas Rangers proved to be impossible. I easily discarded my love for Dirk and Romo, even when Dirk and the Mavs were winning the Finals. I only watched with a passive interest. However, it has been almost impossible to ween off my first love, the Texas Rangers. I watch them on TV, listen to the radio broadcast, read the blog posts and now that they are in the World Series, the second in as many years, it is like a dream painted by Van Gogh.

Now that the #postseason is here and my #Rangers are close to winning the #WorldSeries, I can celebrate with the crazy 12 year old inside of me. Still, I'm still trying to ween-off all professional sports and maybe one day I will accomplish that, but for now, fuck it! Its the #postseason! And yes I'm cursing on my blog. The gloves are off. Go Rangers! Win or lose I'm going to wear my Nelson Cruz #Boomstick jersey and ya'll are going to have to accept it!