A day after the Super Bowl and possibly one of the greatest championship games that you will ever see, it is hard to believe that I've spent the last few hours trying to figure out exactly what is going on with Chris Bosh and the Toronto Raptors.
The team appears to be dead in the water as of this moment and as a fan, I understand completely the rage the fans are bringing to the Air Canada Centre. When the team comes and throws out two consecutive stinkers as they did against the Bucks and the Magic this weekend, there really does not really seem to be a more fitting of a response.
Earlier in the week I had a conversation with a friend of mine about the way Toronto sports fans seem to rally around the media and not their team when it comes to certain players and their deficiencies on the playing field. It had become really obvious that a lot of sports fans in Toronto were not capable of forming their own opinion on a player, but instead relied on guys like Bob McCowan to tell them exactly what to think of players like Bryan McCabe, Eric Hinske and Andrea Bargnani. I had remarked to this friend of mine how ludicrous I thought the whole notion of relying on sports talk radio to come up with an opinion of a player was. Although after the whole fiasco this past weekend with the Raptors, I'm starting to wonder if maybe I was wrong.
We all have things in our life that motivate us; the fear of failure, the desire to be the best, the almighty dollar. The thing in sports is to simply find out how to motivate a particular player to get the best of his or her ability. If you need to baby them, then baby them. If you need to scream until you are hoarse, you do just that. When it comes down to it though, I figured a team leader would look to find his own motivation when a crowd of people are questioning you and your teams toughness and ability.
Let's clear the air - I love Chris Bosh. I would put him in the label of a top-15 player, I think he's entertaining to watch, great to listen to and overall great for the basketball community in Toronto. What bothers me about Chris lashing out against the fans and his willingness to boo the fans if they have a bad fiscal year, is that he is setting us all up for more heartbreak as Raptors fans. As if the fiasco with Damon, Vince and so many other former stars of Toronto sports didn't leave us all bitter in the way those atheletes left, we now all seem threatened to feel as if we're the single 36-year old girl watching her last single friend get married. That we had fun during the whole dating thing with us, but to have you go off and marry a Portland, New Jersey or a lonely billionaire New York.
(By the way: Given the financial situation around the world, maybe multi-millionaire atheletes should boo us all if we have poor fiscal years. Manny Ramirez and Latrell Spreewell will be the first in line to do just that.)
Look, if Chris Bosh leaves in 2010 to go win a couple of championships and does so with grace, I'm sure the Toronto sports market will understand. But with efforts like we've seen over the past weekend, mixed in with the angry comments towards the fans that have embraced him since he came into the league, this is starting to feel all too familiar to all of us fans. We tasted the first bit of success as a franchise with Vince and it hurt when he quit. Chris lifted the Raptors up to a division title and back-to-back playoff appearances when most thought this project would take a few years to get back on track.
Don't break our hearts again, Chris. I swear we can change.
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I'm going to leave this as a short post for now, mostly because you're reheating coffee in my kitchen, and because I'm not well thought out on the subject at the moment. But I want to leave you with a thought:
ReplyDeleteToronto is historically having a very difficult time building winners and keeping iconic players. Maybe there is an underlying issue with our organizations, and we shouldn't just focus on the players themselves.
Also, I think the "economic situation" is a crutch today, especially among the lower revenue teams.