Death to the Dallas Cowboys
As I get older, I have less of an emotional investment in sports. I still watch a lot of sports, and I enjoy it more than ever. But sports no longer bring me to ridiculous highs and lows like it did when I was a kid. They never inspire any righteous anger. They never make me cry1. Philadelphia sports teams were once demiurges that frequently determined my mood. Now they’re a group of 5-70 strangers who happen to play 30 blocks south of where I live.
Some friends I know say their passion for sports has diminished because of the countless times interviewing professional athletes in locker room and on practice courts. It’s become a career. Writing about sports is a career for me, too, but I don’t think that’s responsible for my attitude change. I still love sports and take them seriously. But not the results. Taking the results too seriously sucks the fun out of it. There are great plays to relive, stats to pore over, moments of hilarity to joke about with friends. Sports are some of the best comedies on TV! Live and die with them, and you miss all the jokes.
But I still hate the Dallas Cowboys.
The Cowboys were the top sports team in the country when I was younger. They made the playoffs from 1991 to 1996. They won three Super Bowls. They were (and are) called “America’s Team.” They had Troy Aikman, an incredibly competent quarterback. I hated him because he was always better than whoever was under center for the Eagles that day. They had Michael Irvin. I hated his dancing and his long touchdown catches. They had Emmitt Smith, the best of the bunch. I hated him because there wasn’t anything but his talent to hate him for. When they signed Deion Sanders, I hated it because I liked Sanders. Now that he was on the Cowboys, I’d have to hate him. I hated the Cowboys’ coaches. I hated their assistant coaches. The Cowboys had a backup quarterback I hated. They had lineman I hated. They had a punter I hated. And they almost always beat the Eagles.
The Eagles would usually give you a big tease. The Eagles sacked Aikman 11 times in a 24-0 win in September but were eliminated from playoff contention with a loss in the penultimate game of the season. The Eagles broke a seven-game losing streak to the Cowboys with a 20-17 win in 1995, then lost 30-11 in the playoffs. The Eagles had lost 34-10 to Dallas in the playoffs a few years earlier (after a 31-7 regular season win). To me, the media adored the Cowboys and treated the Eagles’ eventual failure as inevitable. And, in a way, it was; the Eagles might get Dallas in the regular season but in the end, the Cowboys would do better. They might even beat the Eagles on the way to a Super Bowl win. The Eagles, of course, have never won a Super Bowl.
And this was the fate of the Eagles in the 1990s, every year. The next decade was better, and the Cowboys were awful for much of it, but that didn’t diminish my hated any more. I took immense delight in the tarnished image of the Cowboys. Watching them lose is almost as good as watching the Eagles win. Ex-coach Jimmy Johnson needing money enough to do a commercial for a snake oil where he essentially admits he had a small penis warms my heart. It really does.
The Eagles lost to the Cowboys three times last season, the first time that ever happened. They lost to them (big!) in back-to-back weeks, including a playoff loss. It was a tough year for a Cowboys-hater based in Philadelphia. This year, though, hasn’t been so bad. The Eagles are 8-4 and first in the division, while the Cowboys started 1-7 and are out it. But if the Eagles lose to the Cowboys tonight, it probably means another year of frustration — a year that even when the Eagles were better than Dallas, the Cowboys managed to ruin their playoff chances anyway. (The teams also meet in the last week of the season.) It would not be fun.
Today I really will have been waiting all day for Sunday night. Don’t let me down, Eagles.
1 This kind of mania is way more fun when it’s over a girl, anyway.
1 year ago