If you're a Houston sports fan, however, it often feels that way!
Experts in my field are constantly writing books on how nothing in life, except for death itself, is the end of the world and that even that one is superseded by a strong faith in God and life in the hereafter. Problem is, most of these mental health professionals are not Houston sports fans and have no idea what it’s like to die a thousand deaths on the field with our teams to the familiar tune of the most painful last second results ever churned up in the script cauldrons of hell.
It is currently the season for the Houston Texans of the NFL to pull out our community toenails with a pair of psychological pliers, but they are only carrying forward with the rich tradition already laid out for the football fans of this area by the team formerly known as the Houston Oilers.
Remember Pittsburgh in the late 1970s? How about “Stagger Lee” in Denver during the 1980s? Or, the worst – a certain monumental “El Foldo” game up in Buffalo back in the early 1990s? No, the Texans still have some considerable ground to cover to equal the hope-dashing destiny of their professional football predecessors in Houston.
Being fans of college football at UH, Rice, or TSU isn’t much relief either. Once Rice pulled away from the ancient Jess Neely days, they sunk into an academic/athletic mire on the field. Rice got good at producing football players who graduated, but couldn’t play winning ball on their ways to getting their degrees. They were simply too much student and not enough athlete.
TSU just never seems to get their winning plane off the ground for long. It’s kind of hard to build much of a reputation for success when you possess only the flight range of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk.
My old school, the University of Houston, has come closest to mimicking the heartache patterns of our professional clubs. The Cougars enjoyed a brief surge of success when they joined the Southwest Conference in 1976 and promptly won or tied for conference football titles in three of their first four years in the league. UH also put together the famous Phi Slamma Jamma basketball club of Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler, but then stumbled into that horrible heartbreaking buzzer loss to North Carolina State in the 1983 national championship game. The basketball debacle came on the close era heels of the UH collapse in the 1979 Cotton Bowl football game. Leading Notre Dame and Joe Montana by 34-14 with seven minutes to play, the Cougars managed to convert this advantage into a 35-34 loss on the last play of the game.
Too many other instances of the Cougars snatching defeat from the jaws of victory are citable here. It’s enough for now to say that the experience has been overwhelmingly disappointing for those of us who have been following the Cougars forever. And this season’s loss of highly touted quarterback Case Keenum to in jury in the third game and the subsequent implosion of our season has not helped Cougar spirits. Our football pass defense is almost as bad as that bunch that plays for the Texans.
The Rockets did provide for a brief departure from “Choke City” name-calling by taking the “Clutch City” route to the 1994 and 1995 NBA championships, but they have long since returned to their hiding spot in the land of mediocrity. How a club can hide itself anywhere when one of their players is 7’7″ tall is hard to conceive until you remember that this particular player is capable of huring himself when he picks up the morning newspaper and is then perfectly capable of hiding hmself.
The Astros? Don’t get me started. As a baseball fan, I will never totally recover from the disappointments we suffered in 1980 and 1986. Both of those near pennant misses hurt worse than our four-game sweep loss in the actual World Series to the 2005 Chicago White Sox. They still hurt too much to go over the details again of how we lost to the Phillies in 1980 and the Mets in 1986. – We were right there – RIGHT THERE – and we couldn’t reel it in.
So, my question of the day is about how the general Houston sports experience has shaped your own personal attitude about the possibility of a “Houston Curse.” Of course, some of you soccer fans have seen some championship action lately with the Dynamo – and old Aeros fans may recall some of those early hockey crowns of the minor league type, but how has this overall fairly regular rendezvous with last minute team loss pain affected your own belief system about Houston sports.
It’s not the end of the world – and living in Houston may have nothing to do with our pattern of frequent disappointment in the cruelest of ways on the playing fields of our various teams, but what do you think, and please dig down deep for honest answers to these questions:
When it comes down to the last play, the last out, the last second play that’s going to determine whether Houston wins or loses, what is it that’s going on inside you in that moment? Are you confident and hopeful? Are you simply neutral? Or do you find yourself lapsing into something like, “Oh No! Here we go again!”
Yesterday’s last few seconds loss by the Texans to the Jets as a result of that completed long pass is a beautiful reference point to the above questions. How many of you started out thinking about that pass: It’ll never happen? How many of you simply didn’t know? How many of you saw that pass by the Jets working out before it was even thrown?
Please post your comments below as responses to this column. And have a nice day.
Houston, Baseball, & Other Musings.
The Pecan Park Eagle 