By David Todd McCarty | Tuesday, April 30, 2018
Philadelphia sports fans are no stranger to the messiah concept. The player, the coach, the strategy, or even the process, have all been promised to be the answer to our woes. We’ve been through Andy Reid and Chip Kelly, Donovan McNab and Allen Iverson, we’ve been promised national championships and the very reinvention of a sport. Most of that did not come to pass.
In 2008 the Phillies handed us a national championship and just this past year, the Philadelphia Eagles broke a 77-year drought and finally won their very first Super Bowl. Not exactly a dynasty, but it gives us hope. And really, when it comes to sports, hope is all you need.
Phillies fans always had hope, but what we lack is faith. This is understandable. You can’t get burned year after year and have faith that the powers that be have any idea what they’re doing. You can’t spent countless hours and thousands of dollars only to realize you’ve been following a charlatan.
Philadelphia sports fans take a lot of heat from the rest of the sporting world. We’re the bad fans. We threw snowballs at Santa. We boo our own players. We are belligerent. We are crass. All this is at least somewhat true.
But I’ll tell you what we aren’t. We aren’t phony. We don’t jump on the bandwagon. We aren’t daisies. We bleed for our teams and we expect our athletes to do so as well.
Don’t ask us to have faith. Show us what you are prepared to do because we are prepared to go the matt for our teams. We are prepared to take on all comers. We are prepared to yell louder and be more ferocious because we are that extra man on the team.
We are not men and women of faith. We are men and women of action.
But we have hope.
