Conflicted rooting interests

I'll be the first one to admit that my rooting interests change in a heartbeat. Team loyalty is not my specialty. The Packers and Brewers are the only teams that I have always been a consistent, die hard fan of. I have been a fan of the Steelers, Bucks and Michigan football for almost as long as I can remember, but my passion and dedication for those teams has fluctuated largely throughout the years (usually correlating with those teams' success). The other exception is Marquette basketball, but that's heavily influenced by the fact that I am a Marquette alum.

You could call me a fairweather fan, and to some extent I am guilty as charged because I do lose interest in my teams when they are losing. But the main cause of my flimsy fanhood is that I cheer for players, and collections of players, rather than particular organizations. In the 90s, you would have been hard-pressed to find a bigger Pacers fan outside of Indiana than I was. But the team I loved was made up of Reggie Miller, Rik Smits, the Davis "brothers," Mark Jackson and the rest. I could give a damn less about the Pacers today. In the same manner, I have always cheered against teams who had players that I hated. The Cowboys of the 90s were easy to hate because Aikman and Irvin were easy to hate (it didn't hurt that they kept knocking the Packers out of the playoffs). My hatred for Roger Clemens has led directly to my hatred for whatever team he was playing for.

Once in a while, there is conflict caused by players I like and players I dislike playing on the same team: A-Rod and Jeter, Pujols and Eckstein, Garnett and Spreewell. But never before has the conflict been this great.

Shaq, perhaps my all-time favorite athlete, was traded to a contender! Hooray, I'll be able to cheer on the Big Aristotle in the playoffs! Oh, if only it were that easy. But it's not. Because, see, there's this other player on Shaq's new team that I kind of don't like. I mean, I really don't like him. I've made it very clear how much I don't like him. And it especially enrages me that he is never criticized by the sports media. So how can I bring myself to cheer for any team he is a part of?

What's more, my second favorite player in the NBA (yes, more than Wade, LeBron or Agent 0, and yes I was a HUGE Lakers fan in their most recent Championship days) had just got himself some all-star help in Pau Gasol, giving me a contender to cheer for in the West.

At first, I brushed it off, saying, "Shaq's got nothing left. He's a shell of what he used to be. He's not even the same player that I fell in love with. I can cheer against the Suns without feeling like I'm cheering against the 'real' Shaq."

Then came his press conference, and those sound clips that made him so damn loveable in the first place:

"You just don't really want to get me upset. When I'm upset, I'm known to do certain things -- like win championships."

And, as a Shaq fan, I want him to be right. I want him to prove everyone wrong, find a reserve fuel tank and, as he said, "Get ready to play another 10 years."

In a perfect world, Steve Nash would suffer a season-ending injury before the playoffs, and Shaq would lead the Suns to a championship averaging 30 points and 15 boards in the playoffs. Also, in a perfect world, I would get paid millions of dollars a year to watch porn and drink beer...oh, and there would be no hunger, poverty or any of that shitty stuff.

In the slightly more realistic world, I'm hoping that any success that comes to the Suns will be attributed properly to the appropriate players, whoever they may be. Alas, we all know that the gritty, under-sized white guy always gets more credit than he deserves.