I generally enjoy watching professional sports. I love English football and hockey. Every now and then, I’ll take in an American football game … when I have three hours to waste. I watch the baseball playoffs when Detroit makes it, otherwise, I couldn’t care less … and I never watch the regular season. English football and hockey are the only two sports I’ll watch regularly, and I haven’t even been watching hockey because all I have at my disposal are the Rangers, Islanders and Devils, all of which suck and are disappointing wastes of my time.

Most importantly, I almost never pay to see a game live. When I do, it’s either a gift or I’ve gotten the tickets on discount. I have a ceiling for spending money on things that do not permanently enrich my life and that ceiling is very low.

I despise the Yankees. It’s a semi-rational hatred, but it’s mostly just base and instinctual and defies reason in its intensity. I’m not “jealous” of them, as many Yankee fans are content to lob at anyone who doesn’t like the club. I don’t care that they’ve won as often as they have. I know the Tigers suck. I don’t really care about that either. If they win a World Series, great. If they don’t, it isn’t going to negatively impact my life. No, I hate the Yankees primarily because I detest their sycophantic fanbase.

It’s wearying to hear people espousing all the great qualities the Yankees purportedly embody. It’s like people scrounging for scraps saying how much they love the great leader who’s living in the palace on the hill, dining on feasts. I don’t understand the idolization of the rich. They don’t care about you, the lowly fan; they have no reason to. You pay for your tickets and you buy their jerseys and you subscribe to their cable broadcasts. You provide the fodder for their immense contracts, you and the countless millions of other misguided fools who shell out a large portion of your likely modest income to follow “your” team. The only time any of these ego-centric, often under- or uneducated morons will care about the fans is when the money dries up.

Sports teams and the athletes that play for them depend on your support to make them rich, but it’s taken totally for granted. They’ve so effectively brainwashed the collective schlubs to believe that the team is an essential component of their lives. People invest themselves emotionally (and, subsequently, financially) in sports teams, often because it’s easier to invest yourself in something with which you have no interaction than it is to build meaningful relationships. Why love a person who can directly hurt you when you can be hurt by a group of someones who don’t even know you exist and therefore don’t requite your affections and can therefore not be held accountable for emotional injury? It’s the ultimate in martyrdom and masochism. The best of both worlds. Adult M&Ms. The fan overestimates their importance and somehow sees their self as a vital component of the team. It’s like pouring all of one’s self into a deep, dark, bottomless hole. It’s sad. It’s pathetic.

The Yankees especially irk me because they are so rich while the average New Yorker is so poor. It’s like the average Roman going to the Coliseum, or the peasants witnessing an execution in the square, there to cheer someone’s death. Their lives are so full of despair and hopelessness that they externalize their feelings by voting for someone to die or wishing they were the executioner. In our civilized society, it’s more aspirational and less literal … people still wish they were the executioner, they’re just wishing to kill the ball instead and rake in the glory, fame and adulation … and, of course, money. It’s all about wish fulfillment. The most pathetic thing is wishing for one’s wishes to be fulfilled instead of actually finding a viable means of accomplishing one’s own goals.

Perhaps most people don’t have any personal goals. Perhaps they realize they’re too stupid to contribute intellectually and too physically incompetent to contribute athletically. There are many people in the general population who serve no purpose except to function as cogs in the machine that makes the rich even richer. These could be the people that take up two seats on the subway, who are morose and hostile to others — both familiar and strange, who every day do some banal, repetitive and meaningless drudgery to make the meager living that is a big part of their despair. But at least they have the Yankees. At least something in their lives is a winner … even though they’ve failed to nab the prize in eight years.

To be honest, there isn’t much logic to it beyond that there is an emptiness and professional sports franchises are one of the things people use to try and fill that emptiness. Others use drugs and booze, still others use sex … there’s gambling and any number of additional vices being use to assuage the gaping chasm of unfulfillment that plagues nearly every contemporary Western life. Some people have one vice, some have multiple vices. I find complaining and excoriating others works best for me.

I have to say I’m grateful that I’ve never even thought to fear having my throat slashed for supporting any of my favorite teams.

Yesterday, Celtic and Rangers met up for the Old Firm Derby in Glasgow. Rangers beat Hoops 1 – 0, which is a huge disappointment, but worse than that, a gang of North Irish Protestants set upon a guy wearing a Celtic strip in Belfast and sliced his throat. Those purported to have done the slashing weren’t even Rangers supporters, they were just Protestants who singled the guy out as Catholic because of his Celtic shirt.

I root for Celtic because I’m Catholic, sure … but I wonder, sometimes, how religious affiliation could matter so much to someone that it’s worth slashing someone’s throat. I know it’s Belfast but, come on, it’s still barbaric. Then, Belfast is hardly a love-thy-neighbor kind of town.

As I think of it, there really isn’t an American sports rivalry with the same kind of acrimony about it as there are between clubs in Great Britain. New York has two baseball teams, but who really cares? Being a Mets fan usually just means you’re either from Queens or you just hate the Yankees organization. It’s not like Episcopalians root for the Mets and Evangelical Baptists go to Yankee games. Maybe Giants against Dodgers was (is) a big rivalry, but still nothing compared to the venom in Northern Ireland between Catholic and Protestant.

There aren’t even enough cities with multiple teams in America, either. While London has gobs of football clubs, Liverpool and its area has a handful, the Northeast of England has three teams in the Premiership, only Chicago and New York have two baseball teams apiece (yes, I did not mention LA or the Bay Area) and only NY has two football teams. Sure, Cubs fans and White Sox fans are not, in theory, buddies … neither are Jets and Giants fans … but has anyone in the U.S. had their throat slashed over a sporting event.

Probably.

But nothing springs to mind.