The Sun Also Rises

I knew it was going to be a good day Monday after a kind lady from the lost and found department at Veterans Memorial Ballpark, home of our Cedar Rapids Kernels professional baseball team, called around 9 a.m. to report that their clean-up staff had found my Blackberry.


Yes, somehow I managed to lose my connection to the world during a home game Saturday evening. When I went to pick it up Monday afternoon the receptionist told me they receive dozens of reports of lost cell phones every season, and almost none of them is ever found.

It was my day.

So I wasn’t surprised later in the morning when word started swirling through the college football blogs and websites that the Big 12 conference had reached a deal through which the ten remaining teams in the league would stay together and preserve our precious athletic conference.

For days the vultures had been circling, waiting to pick off various members of our dwindling herd, already ravaged by defections of Nebraska to the Big 10 and Colorado to the Pac 10.

During the past week it was especially disheartening to read comments by fans of the Big 10 and Pac 10 who relegated the Big 12 to utter darkness. Could they find nothing to say that was good about the Big 12? Nothing to support its continued existence?

Then it came to me. These were the cheeky, arrogant, unsophisticated, mindless, superfluous, uninformed, illogical miscreants who make up the bulk of the fan base of widely followed teams everywhere. They are the clingers, the wannabes, the know-it-alls and dupes who couldn’t find Ames, IA, Manhattan, KS or Waco, TX on a map if their lives depended on it.
They watch Sports Center, call sports radio shows, enter tournament pools and talk about the “big game” at work, but they have never enjoyed tailgating with friends prior to a football game they knew their team was likely to lose, but had a good time anyway.

These are the people whose only goal is to be associated with a winner. They are the losers who always pick the winners. Odd how that happens.

So it is with joy in my heart that I bid adieu to the twitterers who merely copy and forward other peoples’ ideas, and the bloggers who plagiarize people who actually think before they write, and the talk show callers whose main point is to repeat what the host just said. You have had your day. The show is over. The Big 12 is alive and kicking.

Yes, some of us will probably always be in the bottom half of our conference rankings. But we love our Big 12 andd we are glad it survived the attack made on it by a greed driven Pac 10. May your days be few.