The obvious: I’m a huge Lakers fan, as well as a huge Kobe Bryant fan. If you’re aware of how I first began blogging, you know this. With that said, let’s hope our venerable Editor-In-Chief, Matt Moore, is having a good day… if he isn’t, he probably won’t speak to me for a week because of this. Here goes nothing.
In this post:
Believe it or not, not everything about being a Lakers fan is “super awesome”
Controversial calls in Golden State and San Antonio
The bloggers react with indignation and outrage, but can’t seem to make up their minds
More bad calls, this time against the Lakers… and no reaction
Free throw differential in Boston and Sacramento
My challenge to you
I’ve been a part of the ideological minority for most of my life. I’m a Mac user in a Windows world. I’m a Christian in a very hostile and increasingly secular society, but I’m also an intellectual in a Christian sub-culture that tends to frown on my thought process and the questions it leads to. I’m a moderate conservative who attended two of the most liberal colleges in the nation and, until very recently, was living in one of the biggest liberal hotbeds in the United States — all environments very hostile to conservatives, especially Christian conservatives. For that matter, I’m a conservative in a culture that is swinging decidedly left. Oh, and here’s one for you: I absolutely believe that global warming is real, but I absolutely don’t believe that it is a human-created problem.
I believe this is the part where you ridicule and insult me because I don’t believe what you do.
Here are a couple more for you: I’m a Lakers fan in a sports world that loves to hate the Lakers and their fans, and I’m a Kobe fan in a world still full of Kobe haters. And as many of “us” as there are, there are a lot more of “the rest of you” — and you don’t tend to play nicely with others us.
The one thing that all of the above have in common is that in each case, being a part of that group means suffering a constant onslaught of verbal affronts from the vocal majority. It means being continuously inundated from every direction with rhetoric that, aside from typically being untrue, is unwelcome and offensive to me.
As someone who has had plenty of experience as a member of ideological minorities, I can tell you this: It’s tiring. It wears on you, and it just gets old. Sooner or later, you just want to withdraw yourself from the conversation entirely, because you’re tired of fighting the world — and more than anything, you’re tired of everyone constantly attacking you, and the things you love.
So it is with the Lakers — in the media, among sports fans, and more than anything, throughout the blogosphere.
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