Now is when the real fans emerge
Remember when Kobe Bryant dropped 60 points in the final game of his career? It was far more interesting and exciting than watching the Warriors win their 73rd game at the exact same moment. Though the Black Mamba ended his Hall of Fame career with the Lakers missing the playoffs, it was one of the grandest farewells ever for any athlete. You didn’t even have to be a Lakers fan to appreciate how it went down.
Once the excitement of the Lakers’ 17th and final win of the season died down, Bryant gave some parting words to the STAPLES Center faithful. Standing at center court with dozens of cameramen and photographers in front of him and a sold-out crowd surrounding him, he made sure to thank everybody. But the five-time NBA champion also said something that Bulls fans need to take to heart right now. It’s been a tough week to say the least, so why not consider this excerpt?
“I’m more proud not about the championships, but about the down years because we didn’t run. We played through all that stuff.”
The Lakers have now missed the playoffs four straight years, never winning more than 27 games. With the trade of Jimmy Butler for players no one feels is worth him, it appears the Bulls are headed towards a similar stretch. Those of us who remember the Tim Floyd/Bill Cartwright years are getting the unfortunate vibe of that era once again. The Bulls missed the playoffs in every season of Jimmy Fallon’s six-year tenure on Saturday Night Live, so everyone was grateful just to get back to the playoffs in 2005.
The outcry over the Bulls’ moves on draft night got so bad, people littered the team’s Facebook comments sections denouncing their fandom. I typically know better than to sift through those when a story is about something controversial or unpopular, but I regrettably just couldn’t help myself. All I could do was shake my head.
I have even better judgment than to respond to one of those comments, but one annoyed me to the point where I did so anyway. That led another commenter to call me an idiot for not seeing the preceding events as a “blatant betrayal.” I answered by questioning how it could be seen as such when the only likely outcome by sticking to the status quo for the foreseeable future was a low playoff seed or high lottery pick as well as wasting the prime of one of the NBA’s best. Those are thoughts I stand behind, even as emotions have cooled off a bit (I think).
We all have reasons for following the teams we do. In my case, the Bulls were the local team that just happened to be the best in the NBA and had the greatest player ever. But even as Phil Jackson guided the Lakers to championships in the early 2000s and the Bulls suffered one of the longest falls from grace in sports history, I never once thought about adopting another team. While I was upset with Jerry Krause trading Elton Brand for Tyson Chandler, this gross mismanagement didn’t turn me off from the franchise.
Enduring all this is exactly what Bryant talked about in his speech. If you stick by your team through the worst of times, it makes any future success all the sweeter. Sure, it comes with bandwagon jumpers who put more money in the franchise’s pocket, but wouldn’t you rather say you were part of the fan base when the team revolved around (insert player who wasn’t that good here)? To me, it carries on so much more meaning than going out to buy merchandise for a team you knew nothing about before.
I know what you’re probably thinking: don’t all sports fans start out totally ignorant? Well, yeah. We can’t expect to come out of our mother’s womb and immediately start talking about what the coach and front office should be doing. Still, if you stay on board after a team has had success and perhaps even becomes irrelevant, the badge of fandom shines even brighter.
When Jay Mariotti unceremoniously left the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert posed the following to his departed colleague in reference to the hardships of newspapers in this century:
Did you only sign on for the luxury cruise? There’s an old saying that you might have come across once or twice on the sports beat: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
So if you don’t want to endure however many years it takes for the Bulls to get back to respectability, be my guest. Even when they were a legitimate threat in the East earlier this decade, I could say I was so glad to see it happening after I had to endure Mark Bryant, Dalibor Bagaric, Dragan Tarlac, Jake Voskuhl and others for a long time. It’s unfortunate how that spell ended just as quickly once Derrick Rose tore his ACL, setting course for the path that culminated in the Butler trade. Now, no one knows where the franchise is headed besides days of doom and gloom, but I can take it as I’m sure others can.
I’m ready to take my battle wounds in the present and see what young talent will make up the next great Bulls team. Kobe surely feels the same about the Lakers. Wouldn’t it be appropriate to see these franchises meet in the Finals if the Bulls ever get back there? It happened once before and we all know what happened after that.
Sign-up for our Newsletter! Bulls Confidential in your inbox every Friday!!
