Nieuwendyk

[gtsully]

Greg wrote:

[q]Would a Red Sox fan ever root for the Yankees?[/q]

Sure.  Just like a Cornell fan will root for Harvard in the NCAA's.  Personally, as an Islander fanatic I have no problem at all with the Rangers.  Being a fan of X doesn't necessarily mean you hate X's arch-rival passionately.  The whole "we must hate THEM" is almost always artificially-generated hype to flog more tickets, and it's usually pretty dumb.

This Red Sox fan would never root for the Yankees.  ::yark::   In fact, I had the very same discussion with a friend of mine who's a Cornell and Yankees fan, about who we would cheer for first, Harvard or Boston/New York, and we both agreed that we'd sooner see Harvard beat Cornell in, say, the ECAC title game than see our own baseball team bow to the other's in the ALCS.  There are plenty of reasons, but I just think you chose a bad example - Red Sox and Yankee fans HATE the rival team (no matter what Yankee fans will try to tell you about them not caring or about there not really being a rivalry...).  I'll have to get into the reasons later, but it was a pretty simple decision...

[Rich Stamboulian]

Not at all bizarre that Ranger fans root against the devils...not matter who plays.  This is easy for me,especially with Todd White being with Ottawa!

[Rich Stamboulian]

That is..."no matter who plays for the devils".

[jtwcornell91]

Growing up as a Yankee fan in the Hudson Valley, I was taught by my Dad to respect the Red Sox in the playoffs as "noble adversaries", and root for them in the playoffs as carrying the banner of the AL East.  I feel the same way about Clarkson.  (It took me longer to deal with rooting for Harvard out of conference.)

[jd212]

I am a Yankees fan, and I really in fact could care not care less about the Red Sox, nor the Mets for that matter. The problem I have with the Red Sox is its fans, not the players. I enjoy watching the team play, in fact. My team beats the Red Sox every year, so why should I dislike them any more than anyone else?
 At least they give the Yankees a challenge

[Rich Stamboulian]

As a Flyer fan you must have really enjoyed watching Ottawa beat them...especially with Todd White who Clarkie dissed playing so well aginst his former team...:-D

And yeah, us Ranger fans feel the same way about the Flyers.   :-}

[Greg Berge]

Difference in styles, that's all.

There was definitely a time that I hated Harvard enough to root against them anytime, anywhere, even when it might theoretically adversely effect the ECAC and by extension Cornell.  But that stuff tends to fade out, especially as teams rise and fall -- IMHO, naturally.  I'm amazed people can bring themselves to hate the Isles at this point, for example -- that's like kicking an ungainly puppy, or developing a deep hatred of mauve -- and if the Rangers continue to suck for a couple more years it will be the same with them.

I can see hating certain groups of fans forever for their sheer moronic obnoxiousness.  When I moved to Boston I liked both the Red Sox and Bruins, but years of putting up with the unparalleled parochialism and ignorance of BostonFan was enough to make me hate those teams by the time I left.  It's not quite the same when somebody like the Mets in the 80's or the Yankees in the 90's collects a bunch of bandwagon jumpers, because you know those people are temporary parasites (they're probably the same people, drifting from winner to winner in search of fulfillment) and can separate them out from the real fans.

Mostly I hate teams for being from dumb places.  California, Arizona, and the South shouldn't have a hockey team until every Canadian province does, including the new unpronouncable Eskimo one.  The "may the older, unmoved franchise win" rule almost always works.

[jtwcornell91]

Greg wrote:
Mostly I hate teams for being from dumb places.  California, Arizona, and the South shouldn't have a hockey team until every Canadian province does, including the new unpronouncable Eskimo one.

Nunavut, which is actually a territory.  "Thou'rt slain, buddy."

[jeh25]

Greg wrote:
including the new unpronouncable Eskimo one.  

"None-of-it" - as in, "How much is habitable by humans?" "None-of-it" "Well, then, why don't we give it back to the Inuit since we can't use it."  

 ::nut::

[Jeff Hopkins \'82]

1) Whether he was traded or free-agent jumped is not relative.  He's a Devil.  He's no longer to be rooted for.

2) Mike's point that Cornell benefitting from Harvard's success is exactly how I think of it, too.  If Harvard's success out of conference didn't help Cornell's reputation and recruiting, I would never root for them.

3) I chose my example of Red Sox / Yankees very specifically because I know how much the Sox fans hate the Yankees.  BTW, it doesn't matter if the hatred is reciprocal.  I've heard that Harvard doesn't make as much of the rivalry as we do.   I doubt the Yankees fans hate the Sox as much as the reverse.

4) These hatreds usually arise from some kind of inferiority complex on the part of the hating team (as in the case of Flyers/Devils or Sox/yankees), or from an old incident, long forgotten.

5) If we want to root for tradition, Ottawa makes sense.  They were a team long before the original 6, and they are in Canada.  That should be worth something.

6) Rooting against the Islanders now IS like kicking a puppy.  I never felt a real rivalry with the Islanders as I did against the other NYC teams.  Don't know why.  I suppose if the Devils' record became as bad as the Islanders' is now, I might not feel as strongly as I do now.  However, I will always hate the Rangers.  And I fully expect that Ranger fans will always hate the Flyers.

And that's the way it should be.

JH

[Rich Stamboulian]

Your "dumb places" argument is as bad as the parochialism you so despised.   Besides, the players aren't from those "places", just most of the fans.

Or are you focused on rooting for or against fans as opposed to the teams themselves?  ::rolleyes::

[Al DeFlorio]

Rich Stamboulian wrote:

Your "dumb places" argument is as bad as the parochialism you so despised.   Besides, the players aren't from those "places", just most of the fans.

Or are you focused on rooting for or against fans as opposed to the teams themselves?  ::rolleyes::

If the Devils were playing your favorite NHL team it would be understandable to be rooting for your team, but to root for some other team to beat one of the Faithful's all-time favorites is, to me, simply bizarre.



Post Edited (05-16-03 18:07)

[Jim Hyla]

[Q]Jeff said:

These hatreds usually arise from some kind of inferiority complex on the part of the hating team (as in the case of Flyers/Devils or Sox/yankees)

and:

BTW, it doesn't matter if the hatred is reciprocal. I've heard that Harvard doesn't make as much of the rivalry as we do.[/Q]Which is why I could never feel so strongly about hating Harvard, and why the interminable "Harvard sucks" makes me wonder about the inferiority complex of some of those who always have to say it.:-)

So, now see what you've started.;-)

Back to the original thought of this thread. Did you all see the picture of "our blessed Joe" in the front section of this weeks SI? Quite a bit of intensity on his face. Inferiority complex aside, I'm rooting for the Devils.:-P

[Keith K \'93]

[Q]Red Sox and Yankee fans HATE the rival team (no matter what Yankee fans will try to tell you about them not caring or about there not really being a rivalry...).[/Q]
Any so-called Yankee fan that tries to tell you that we don't care about the BoSox or that there is no rivalry is full of it.  Or a bandwagon jumper.  Now I have been known to say that the Red Sox aren't worth hating... after all, they always finish second :-P

One of the great things about the Yankee-Red Sox rivalry was that the players felt it too.  For many years, the players were taught to hate the guys on the other side of the rivarly, from the lowest level of the minors up to the big leagues.  Unfortunately, free agency has pretty much eliminated this.

[Greg Berge]

The funny thing about free agency is that players spend more time with a club today than they did in the years before free agency.  Trades are all but extinct, and they generated far more player movement than free agency has.