Read this article the other day and it made me think to do a survey... I copied a condensed version of the article here (full article linked below) as a prelude to the survey...





Running on sports-hate empty
By Bill Simmons
ESPN.com

My list of sports-hate guys is dwindling. Hell, it's been decimated. I am at a loss. I am grasping at straws.

If you're not familiar with the term, "sports hate" is an underrated part of fandom. Everyone has guys they don't like, and more importantly, guys they enjoy not liking. The reasons are unique to us. There doesn't have to be anything rational about it. Sports hate can be triggered by one incident, one slight, one game gone wrong, anything.

If you read my basketball book, you might remember me making roughly 500 jokes about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He was my least favorite athlete of all time. I loved rooting against him. Everything he did bothered me: every expression, his goggles, the way officials constantly bailed him out, even the monotony of his skyhook -- and his Lakers uniform made me sports-hate him even more. When he announced his battle with leukemia this week, you know what happened? I felt terrible for him and hoped he would recover soon. I may have disliked him as a player, but still, my life as a sports fan was always more interesting with Kareem in it. Again, there's a difference between real hate and sports hate.

As fans, fundamentally, we need to root against certain players. Need to be bugged by them. Need to have our least favorite guys fail in the clutch just so we can say, "See, I told you, he sucks when it matters!" Need to taunt our friends who root for their teams. Need to see the pouty look on their faces when things go wrong. Need to say things like, "He'll never get it, he's a loser" and "He's selfish and that's that." Need to be definitive about people we don't like. And why. And for as long as we can possibly keep it going.

So when our sports-hate guys render that sports hate obsolete, it's a little disorienting. Look at me, for instance. Just in the past five months, my two least favorite teams -- really, the two teams I sports-hate more than everyone else combined -- won the NBA Finals and World Series. And if that wasn't enough, the following three realities have become undeniable:

1. Peyton Manning is clutch. He's a champion. He's the heart of the Colts, and for all we know he's coaching them, too. You cannot wager against him, especially in night games. He's the most important player in football. Take Manning off the Colts and they disintegrate into dust. If that's not enough, he has proved to be a likable, engaging guy with a sense of humor. Damn it all.

2. Alex Rodriguez carried the Yankees to the 2009 title. He was their biggest bat, he had the most clutch moments and he finished with one of the better statistical postseasons in a while. If that's not enough, he dumped the Crossover Superstar quest and just concentrated on playing baseball, hanging out with his girlfriend and that's it. Even his teammates seem to like him this year. Damn it all.

3. Kobe Bryant won a title his way -- by establishing a Kobe and the Kobettes dynamic that actually worked -- becoming one of the ten best NBA players ever and proving he could prevail without Shaq. If that wasn't jarring enough, Shaq's exit from Phoenix marked the fourth time he left a team on bad terms, making everyone re-evaluate the whole "Was Kobe really the bad guy in the Shaqobe Divorce?" saga that had been buried years ago. Maybe Kobe wasn't as much to blame as we thought. Maybe Shaq was the problem. Maybe the hotel clerk lied about him. Maybe he took a ton of flak for no reason. Maybe he's … (gulp) … a good guy and a family man who works his butt off and never seems satisfied and kills himself to get better every summer and maybe … (gulp) … was greater than we thought. Damn it all.

Read those previous three paragraphs again. (Actually, read them for me. I am covered in smoke because my flesh is on fire. I can't see my laptop.) Imagine you're me. You have a sports column. You're a passionate guy. You care a little too much about sports. You're all about the Boston teams. You love getting riled up about players who you feel are either selfish, overrated, attention hogs, bad teammates, transparent or whatever. You always believed that Manning would choke when it mattered, that A-Rod was a fraud, that Kobe's selfishness would trump his talents. These realities are no longer true.

Do I feel empty inside? Yeah, a little. My sports-hate tank is on empty. I can still root against the Yankees and Lakers, obviously. I still have the YouTube clips of Parish beating up Laimbeer and Bird's steal from Isiah. I still have the 2004 ALCS and 2008 NBA Finals. I still have Kobe folding in Game 6 of the 2008 Finals, A-Rod's sissy slap of Bronson Arroyo in 2004 and Manning putting up a 3-spot in 2004 at Foxborough. But it's morphing into ESPN Classic Sports Hate. You can't root as vehemently against players that you respect totally and completely, and to be honest, the Kobe/Manning/A-Rod troika won my respect.

What's left for me? Well, I still have Sasha Vujacic. As I wrote a few weeks ago, my sports hate for Sasha runs so deep that I wouldn't run him over if he walked along a crosswalk in front of me, but I'd definitely consider it and glance around to see how many people were looking. (In a best-case scenario, I'd "accidentally" side-swipe him at a slow speed just to see if he flopped.) I also have WNBA commercials and John Cougar Mellencamp ads. I have Vince Carter, and even better, every Vince Carter game in Toronto. I have Terrell Owens. I have Jorge Posada and the chance that every Sox-Yankees pitch might be the one that gets foul-tipped into his groin. I have any NFL studio show that has more than four guys. I have every professional poker player except Phil Ivey. I have Jay Cutler, and I have Jay Cutler a second time, because man, is it fun to sports-hate Jay Cutler.

Best of all, I have Mike Dunleavy, someone who is so bad at his job that on Wednesday night -- after I walked out of a game in which he waited 47 minutes and 22 seconds to insert Steve Novak (his only decent outside shooter with Eric Gordon sidelined) in the game to "spread the floor," which would have been fine if Novak wasn't ice-cold, although that's what made it so fantastically abysmal, the fact that Dunleavy probably broke the career record for "Most Times Putting An Ice-Cold Guy into the Biggest Possession of a Close Game" -- I said to two of my Section 102 friends (Jesse and Lenny) as we were leaving, "I'm actually going to miss games like that when they finally fire Dunleavy. I feel like we're watching a level of incompetence on a daily basis that transcends sports and might be something I tell my grandkids about someday." Thank God I have Mike Dunleavy.

But look at that master list again. No big names. Nobody that matters. Nobody polarizing. Nobody that anyone else would bother to defend. Even if I did pancake Vujacic and his hair net, I doubt that a jury of Lakers fans would convict me. I think they'd deliberate for five hours, then ultimately come to the conclusion that "Yes, Vujacic probably had that coming. Did he flop?"

So I cannot wait for Sunday. I think the Patriots can win, but my guard is up. When Peyton Manning is on the other side, it has to be. Welcome to my sports world in 2009: a place where Manning is feared, Kobe is a champ, A-Rod is clutch, the Yankees have good chemistry, and I have no idea whether the Patriots are tough enough to beat the Colts. Forget about lighting myself on fire. Too easy. I'm leaning toward giving myself a colonic with a leaf blower.





SURVEY:

1 - Which teams / players do you sports hate?

2 - Why?

3 - How do you react when someone else sports hates on your team?

4 - Have you like the author of the article found a reason to give up your sports hate?

5 - Is there a player or team you sports love? (This team player can do nothing wrong, ever, you will defend them with your dying breath, etc., etc.)

Yeah I think this is all I've got...

Enjoy!

~Dominic