A Cleveland Fan's Superbowl Rant

Ok my husband is in the kitchen with like 10 other guys playin' hold-em. It's their new tuesday tradition... while I'm off knitting Matt wins all of their money. Works for me! Only now I just want to veg and go to sleep... and there's lots of smelly, loud guys in my house. So I'll blog instead....

So we all know the Steelers won the superbowl…. And my husband is thrilled… and I’ll blog about all of that next. First there is something that I need to get off my chest…and I think this cartoon pretty much sums it up:


I spent all day Sunday at a sports bar in Pittsburgh… and it was fun and all but there was one thing that really, really pissed me off. People thinking that Steelers fans and Pittsburgh fans are better than anywhere else. That it means more for the city or that people care more. I can’t tell you how many people asked me if I had ever seen anything like the crowd of people all in Steelers colors…. Or worse yet assumed that oh you’re from Cleveland so you’ve never experienced this, right? Um. YEAH. Cleveland was CRAZY during the ’95 and ’97 series!!! CRAZY! It was the same thing – everyone cared, everyone was so excited, hell even my Catholic school allowed dress down days for people to wear Indians gear on every day of the series. And all anyone talked about was that it was so important for the city and soooo important for our fans. Who by the way are still great fans despite the fact that we don’t have any championships to rest on. It’s a hell of a lot easier to be a fan of a team that is going for "one for the thumb" than a fan of a team that has never even been there. Not to mention the fact that we lost the Browns for a few years…and the fact that we’ve been ranked the most painful place to be a fanby ESPN - and yet still Browns tickets are hard to get. I remember that during the ’97 series (the most recent championship we’ve had) they even opened up Nautica (the amphitheater downtown) to show all of the playoff and series games on the big screen. That’s where I watched in horror as our team lost the series in the 11th inning of game 7 to a team that essentially bought themselves a championship…. that is heartbreak, people. And had we won there would have been the same insane celebrations afterwards. Walking out of Nautica that night a huge crowd of drunken baseball fans was essentially silent – some were even crying. And to say that a city who holds the longest running sellout record in Major League Baseball history at 455 consecutive games – a record that is third in all of professional sports history doesn’t have fans that "care as much" is simply ignorant.

If the Browns ever do get there I guarantee you our fans will be just as crazy as they are in Pittsburgh. It will mean just as much if not more for our city. Especially since it will be our first trip to the big game.

Ok. Off my soapbox now…much better to blog about it today then to get into a fight with some drunk at a bar on game day..... on to blog about more fun things. I think I'll start a new post....