Joe says:
I realize this might not mean so much to the Steelers fans in the crowd, but I wanted to share this note I wrote last week to one of my long-time best pals, and life-long season ticket holder, announcing my divorce from the Washington Redskins. It's just something that's been unsaid, and building up for a long while now, and I need to quietly step aside and move on.
Hey Mahone:
I’m giving some thought to dropping my relationship with the Redskins and I wanted to run that by you.
I’ve mostly been a free agent in my sports affections in my time. Baseball has been an eclectic mixture of rooting for the Braves, the Phillies, the Mets, the Orioles and now the Nats, with stops in between to pull for a World Series team, like the Pirates in the '70s. The longest standing sports relationship has been the Redskins. As sorry and painful as that seems, I can always look back on those great teams of the Over the Hill Gang and Taylor and Hanburger and Talbert and Kilmer and Houston and Sonny and later Monk and Green and realize that my affection for the team was a childhood affection. It matured in the ‘80s with ups and downs, more ups than downs, but it has been a relationship that has been on a respirator since the early 1990s. That’s way too long a time. It’s not going to come back to life…and if it does ever emerge from the coma, I won’t recognize it. The ownership is simply too controlling, too nasty, too smug, and too pathetic for me to rally behind its product any more. Snyder and that loon Tom Cruise. That about says it all.
This has always been a Redskins town…but do you get the feeling watching the area change over the last 10 years that it’s increasingly not? That there might be as many Cowboy fans, for example? My kids and their contemporaries simply don’t worship at the Redskins altar. They are drawn to whatever team is on top when they first embraced the sport…Patriots, Colts, Rams, Steelers, Cowboys, Eagles, now perhaps Giants. They have never known a successful and attractive Redskins team in the Snyder era. I realize it’s still the most prized sports franchise in market terms...but can it ever successfully compete for the fan’s imagination with these soulless sycophantic boy monsters running the show?
This has little to do with the turmoil around the head coach, replacing Gibbs, and finding a new direction. You know me, I'm not one of those who worshiped Saint Joe. But I suppose that the haphazard way the organization managed this head coach hiring process has crystallized my sense of frustration. It's not a team...it's an organization.
I came to realize watching that terrific Super Bowl that I was more thrilled and impressed and excited watching the Giants than I have been in half a lifetime of watching the Redskins. Every play of the game seemed miraculous and crucial, going up against a historically superior Patriots team. And the Giants did it with a mix of young and old players…particularly the young players…a handful of them rookies. Crushing defense and the miracle play. That’s how you create a football legend. And it's been a long time since I've felt that kind of excitement watching a football game. Like a kid again.
So it's hail and farewell for me.
At least until next fall.
