I am a Philadelphia fan …
… is the kind of statement one does not typically make in polite company.
After all, these are the people who booed and threw snowballs at Santa Claus, who hurled batteries at a baseball player the first time he played a game in Philly after spurning the local team that drafted him, whose history of, shall we say, “uncouth” behavior necessitated a jail and courtroom in the old football stadium.
But please — hold off on the side-eye, cease taking note of my apparently missing ankle monitor, and hear me out before you have security escort me from the premises.
I, personally, am not from Philadelphia. I have never let Santa have it. Never whipped a double-A or 9-volt at J.D. Drew, even though he was a smarmy little clown. And I certainly have never been arrested. (Not under this pseudonym or SSN, anyway.)
I’m just a man who, as a kid, fell in love with Randall Cunningham’s sidestep-and-leave-you-grasping-at-air elusiveness, and with the “Minister of Defense” Reggie White’s bullrush/“hump” move that left many an opposing quarterback in a politely murdered heap.
Still … with the Super Bowl upon us, I nevertheless feel compelled to defend all the midnight-green-clad hooligans around the country.
Eagles fans are not that bad — from a certain point of view.
“From a certain point of view?” you might ask.
You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.
Yup, I stole that bit — look, if it was good enough for Obi-Wan Kenobi to spin his rationale for not outright telling Luke Skywalker that his dad was a psychotic, despotic warlord who murdered millions of people throughout the universe, then you can roll with it for this analogy, too.
For starters, let’s justify that past bad behavior just a little. That booing/snowball-throwing thing happened in 1968 — 19-freaking-68 — when the team was already god-awful and about to get worse because the abomination of an owner signed an abomination of a coach to a 15-year contract. Say it in the principal’s voice from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”: “Fif…teen…years.” So he rolls out St. Nick at halftime of another annihilation to placate the seething masses. Of course they gave Santa the business — the police wouldn’t let them torch the owner’s box.
And it’s not like things have gotten tons better since.
Of the 32 teams presently in the NFL, the Eagles are one of 13 never to have won the Super Bowl. You know who we’re keeping company with? In alphabetical order: the Bengals (idiot owner), Bills (lost four straight, god love ’em), Browns (god hates ’em), Cardinals (traditionally bad), Chargers (traditionally meh), Falcons (biggest SB collapse ever), Jaguars (too new), Lions (also traditionally bad), Panthers (also too new, but at least close once), Texans (also also too new), Titans (one yard short one time, but otherwise traditionally meh), and Vikings (really, just straight-up chokers in literally EVERY big game).
I’m too young to remember the Super Bowl where Ron Jaworski gacked up eleventy interceptions to the Raiders, but the SB XXXIX loss to the Patriots — wherein Andy Reid ran the single-most painstakingly slooooooooow late-fourth-quarter drive ever by a team trailing by 10 points — is seared into my memory banks, where it’s on repeat more than episodes of “M*A*S*H.”
Then, this year, we’re surprisingly, shockingly, legitimately good, starting to feel like we have a real shot (in spite of season-ending injuries to starting RB Darren Sproles, starting LT Jason Peters, starting MLB Jordan Hicks, K Caleb Sturgis, and special teams captain Chris Maragos), only for quarterback Carson Wentz — well on his way to the MVP — to suffer a season-ending knee injury in Week 14.
No wonder we’re a neurotic bunch.
Furthermore, however, Eagles fans’ relative un-awfulness is proven all the more with but a glance at the opposing fan base in Super Bowl LII.
True, the Philly faithful have a long, sordid and well-earned reputation for moral turpitude. Big deal.
Anyone rooting for the Patriots at this point is — to put it as nicely as I am capable of — a smarmy, simple-minded, vapid, vacuous, insipid, imbecilic, dense, dim-witted, ignorant, idiotic, obtuse, doltish, thick, daft, mad, senseless, ludicrous, ridiculous, injudicious, fatuous, asinine, braindead, moronic, bandwagon [expletive].
I think that about covers it.
How can you root for them? This is the team of Spygate, the team of Deflategate, the spoiled-rotten collection of weenies going for a second straight Super Bowl championship, their third in four years, and a record sixth overall.
Anything even tangentially associated with the Patsies is now (at least temporarily) tainted.
That can of New England clam chowder on my pantry shelf? I’d rather go hungry.
That Aerosmith “1990 North America ‘Pump’ Tour” T-shirt, a Christmas present newly added to my collection of band tees? Well, it’ll just have to hang in the closet a bit longer, a victim of both the band’s unfathomably ill fortune to have emanated from Boston and singer Steven Tyler’s wholly avoidable poor life choice to not only affiliate with Pats owner Bob Kraft but also to waft in the karmic stench permeating his luxury box at Gillette Stadium.
Anyway, I’ll leave you now to think about everything. Should you wish to not be on the wrong side of history this Sunday, hit me up.
I’ll just be hanging with the fam, wearing my “lucky” shirt and ballcap (clearly imbued with mystical, cosmic forces that undoubtedly contributed directly to the playoff victories over the Falcons and Vikings), wolfing down a delicious cheesesteak, praying to my atheist gods that Nick Foles can keep it together and that Fletcher Cox can dislodge a few teeth from Tom Brady’s oh-so-pretty face, not to mention the ball from his hands …
And, hopefully, belting out “Fly Eagles Fly” at the top of my lungs afterward.
Like any properly civilized Philly fan would.
