I am all about the player not the jersey when it comes to covering sports. I don’t have a favorite team. I never have, never will. Growing up in San Diego didn’t mean I was a Charger or Padre fan. Fandom has it’s place, just not with me. When the Cardinals and San Diego line up to open the season, I will get to see a tremendous tight end in Antonio Gates and one of the better quarterbacks in the NFL in Philip Rivers, neither one plays for Arizona. I won’t care who wins the game. Just give me a good game.
WIth that said, I AM rooting for good story lines this coming football season. I want to see Tyrann Mathieu out on the field for the Arizona Cardinals. He is someone I would like to see have success. If he doesn’t, well, I have to tell that story too.
I am going to enjoy watching Larry Fitzgerald and Darnell Dockett for another year, but I know they are on the back-nine of their careers so my expectations of them aren’t nearly as high as they once were. Steve Nash, Adrian Wilson, Charles Barkley and Luis Gonzalez have been some of my favorite players to cover and critique. Their performance on the field at the end wasn’t nearly as crisp as the beginning. Didn’t matter to me, because I wasn’t rooting for the team, thus I was able to admire and enjoy them at the end just as much as the beginning and middle of their careers.
When A-Dub came to the end of his Cardinals run, many fans couldn’t wait to see him go. In sports, fans just want wins, the human element is taken out of the mix simply because the guy in the jersey has a decimal point several places greater than the fan in the stands.
So when you put on your 90 or 11 jersey this year, enjoy what your seeing. Both players are coming to the end of the line here in Arizona. I hope fans remember that when either Dockett or Fitz aren’t producing quite as well as they once did.
