As a sports journalist, and one with around five thousand Facebook friends, I sometime end up in some lively debates about teams that I like and openly cheer for. There are some sports journalists who claim that they aren’t and never were fans of any team. Yeah, right………can you spell LIAR ? Anyone who believes that, is about as naive as can be. I have my biases, but I have always been very open about them. It would be great if everyone else in the business did the same.
One of those colorful chats on my Facebook page, revolved around my support for the Chelsea Blues of the English Premiership. Like many teams in professional sports, they have a few players who have had issues that created negative headlines. Fans of other teams in soccer, like to use that as part of their debate material, to put down my support of the team. Whether it is team captain John Terry, and his alleged involvement with a former girlfriend of former England teammate Wayne Bridge, or striker Nicolas Anelka, and his verbal tirade against then France coach Raymond Domenech at the World Cup, which led to the team wide strike by Les Blues in South Africa, I really don’t have the time or energy to care, or get emotionally caught up, in every moral issue on teams that I support. Quite frankly, the older one becomes, the more you realize, that what many of us learned about from biblical times, especially the passage about “ Let he who has no sin, cast the first stone,” is something we should all be paying more attention to. The spirit of that message carries over everywhere. There are very few people anywhere in the world who do not have any skeletons in their closet. Some are more fortunate than others, in not having their secrets revealed. That doesn’t mean that anything goes, but it is just too difficult and a waste of time to try and pick teams by everyone’s personal record of transgressions. Sports for me, and many others, is a diversion, and I am not going to get involved in moralizing about every player and every wrong doing. The professional athletes are just like the rest of society. They have good, bad, and in-between. I am a Chelsea fan, and to a lesser degree, I cheer for some other clubs in the Premiership, who I like for different reasons, like Liverpool, West Ham, and Portsmouth. I have no intention of changing my allegiances because of individual troubles that have arisen, or that may surface in the future.
I think we should all leave the work of the Lord for the Lord in terms of passing judgment, if you believe in a higher authority, as I do. In any case, sports is entertainment, and most of us do not have the time or energy to start creating a fantasy team of perfect people. That’s just not going to happen. Furthermore, I don’t know of anyone else who ever stopped supporting a team, because the roster had some individuals who crossed the line in terms of accepted behavior. Whether others have or not, I won’t be among them. Let’s go Blues, Reds,Hammers, Pompey, and of course, Let’s go Orange !!! I think that pretty much goes right across the spectrum of sports, in a most colorful way.
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