Our teams are a fan’s nightmare
David Hyde: How did South Florida become pit of the sports world?
Welcome to my nightmare. It’s every horror movie where the hero enters an abandoned house, falls through a rotted floor, lies dazed in a dark basement and thinks as rats cover him, “What more can go wrong?”
Then the Heat lost again Tuesday by double digits to another nobody team. As the Dolphins walk their annual gangplank.
And the Hurricanes reverse hope.
And the Panthers again start as irrelevantly as the Marlins again ended. What more can go wrong? Do we even want to ask at this point?
Or do we just want to lie in the basement and wonder how we became the pits of the sports world?
We certainly don’t want to listen to Boston discuss their customary sports week. The Red Sox won the World Series on Sunday. The Patriots won on Monday Night Football. The Celtics and Bruins won on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, Boston fans turned out for the Red Sox celebratory parade. That’s the city’s 11th championship parade in the past 18 years. Birth rates must be spiking in New England so children get raised in that nurturing environment.
Not that anyone is jealous in South Florida. It’s all cyclical, we know. It will even out, for instance, how the Patriots have won 26 playoff games since the Dolphins last won one in 2000. I’ll be gone by then. You’ll be gone. But Tom Brady will still be playing in his 80s, which might offer some chance.
Seriously. What happened to us? We’re a destination area. Players like coming here. Money flows. Fans turn out for winners. We’re not, say, Milwaukee. And I say that with complete envy since Milwaukee has the always-contending Packers, the playoff Brewers, the decent Bucks and a Wisconsin team that outmuscled Miami in the Orange Bowl.
We’re not a lot of places right now. Kansas City. The Bay Area. Washington has the Stanley Cup and the 5-2 Redskins. Even in blasé Los Angeles, the Dodgers made the World Series, the Rams are undefeated, the Chargers are ignored despite being one of the AFC’s more interesting teams and they’ve now got LeBron James.
Our LeBron. Well, Cleveland’s LeBron. But the Heat rented him for four golden years and a couple of titles. That introduces the accompanying topic to our current mountain of mediocrity: Who’s our LeBron now? Who’s the prime-time player we watch?
You can’t keep saying Dwyane Wade. He’s 37 in January. So where is our “go-to” guy? Who do you catch on a dry day when you have no other column to write?
Oh, wait. That’s back to my nightmare.
But if I have compassion for fans, if I feel your pain in this desert, can you feel an old sports writer’s agony, too? Excellence is always the best subject to write. But I haven’t used half the English language in years. My fingers barely remember how to type some words: Great. Unmatched. Historic. Contending. Confetti. Champagne. I see how Latin disappeared.
The Heat were our one saving grace. Even in their understandable down cycle, they made the playoffs two of the past three years. But they just yielded 120 points in back-to-back losses for the first time ever and, well, who knows now?
The 1980s and 1990s were so full of high expectations that when Jimmy Johnson only won two playoff games and went to three postseasons in his four years, even he labeled himself a failure. Now the parade for that would run from Las Olas Boulevard down to Biscayne Boulevard.
But every team looks so lost right now a GPS couldn’t point the way.
The Dolphins remain the only NFL team to bob between six and 10 wins this past decade. The very definition of mediocrity. That’s not changing this year.
The Hurricanes are under fire after losses to Virginia and Boston College.
The Panthers might as well stay in Finland if they lose twice there to Winnipeg.
The Heat have started poorly in a soft schedule.
That’s our major sports world right now. That’s the era we find ourselves.
But don’t mind my whining. I’ll just lie here in the dark and let the rats run over me.