You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will Read Free Page B

the Oklahoma City Thunder are perennial title contenders who could sell considerably more tickets if only they were available.
    And what makes that high school football trophy that resides in River Ridge every bit as prestigious as all those Stanley Cups in Detroit is the mentality of the people in those respective cities. Do you really think anybody in Odessa, Texas, loses sleep every time the Celtics raise a banner? Do you think folks in Athens, Georgia, feel less significant just because Tom Coughlin has added a second Super Bowl win to his coaching legacy? Of course not.
    All politics is local. All sports is, too, because deeply ingrained in these smaller towns is a sense that they are winning something that is every bit as important. They may wake up angry with the election of a new POTUS or feel slighted over the congressional veto of a farm subsidy, but sports gives them a sense of fulfillment and pride.
    Big cities have nothing on us. We don’t like their teams and don’t need their pampered stars. We’ve got all we want right here
.
    Sure, fans in the Midwest feel the coasts get a disproportionately larger share of the media attention, and they’re probably right. The coasts are where the masses live, and giant media conglomerates need viewers. But ask yourself this question: Would you rather be the St. Louis Cardinals, an envied baseball machine with an incredible fan base, or the New York Mets, a franchise so lacking in redeemable history that it hung wild-card banners at old Shea Stadium? Would you rather be the Packers or the remarkably well-funded and glitzy Dallas Cowboys, who have had as much playoff success over the past fifteen years as the
National Enquirer
has had on Pulitzer Prize day?
    Popular
can feel awfully hollow when it’s sitting side-by-side with
successful
.
    There’s no doubt my professional travels, bouncing from one corner of the country to the next, have limited the depth of the roots I’ve sunk in any one town. But it’s also granted me the opportunity to see things and meet people I otherwise wouldn’t. It’s allowed me to experience firsthand the depth of small-town loyalty that’s rarely found in major cities with transient populations and athletes seeking the next monstrous free-agent deal.
    Those people in smaller and more intimate places have opened my eyes to a wonderful landscape that is far too often underreported and undervalued. From white-water rafting down the Rogue River with Oregon State football fans to tailgating with Florida Gator football fans fresh off a win over rival Tennessee, I’ve discovered that these people don’t sound or act like people who are missing out.
    In a country that keeps score too often, that ranks everything we do, that pits you against me and compares everyone to everyone else, we all win with sports.
    What do we want out of life? For most people, the answer starts with three simple words:
a fair shot
. Our search for
fairness
has become a mini-obsession. So, with everything from jobs to college admission supposedly politicized, where do we find this elusive concept of fairness?
    Easy: you find it in sports, that’s where—in every corner of this great country.



Conservative Backlash
    I’ve always had a tough time figuring out the difference between a model and a supermodel. Is it about the cheekbones or the checkbook? The fashion or the fortune?
    And where does it go from there? Once we reach critical mass on supermodels, once it becomes standard to be super, will there be a supermodel so transcendent she becomes the first super-duper-model?
    Janice Dickinson claims to be the first supermodel. Since most of her success came in the 1970s and ’80s, most of the world knows her primarily as just another crazy and failed reality-show has-been. Her descent has taken a predictable path: she recently filed for bankruptcy, and it’s shocking—
shocking
, I say—to learn that much of her debt was to plastic surgeons and folks known as