If you follow sports, you know that this has been an interesting and exhilarating Vikings season. The “Purple” have won many close games, including a record comeback from 33 points behind. The playoffs beckon with the Super Bowl as the Holy Grail.
If you are of a certain age, like over ten, you also are cringing. You fear your allegiance and enthusiasm will be dashed violently against the rocks. Again.
I’m not as much a football fan as I used to be, so whatever fate awaits the Vikings will not tear my soul out. I am still as much a Twins fan as ever. The Twins have lost eighteen straight playoff games. That is not even possible. It’s baseball. The worst team in the league wins a third of its games.
As if losing eighteen playoff games, EIGHTEEN, weren’t excruciating enough, thirteen have been against the Yankees. That is like going to school knowing the bully will be there to kick you in the shin every recess. No one likes the Yankees; their wives and mothers root against them.
I have met people who are sports fans from other places, and they also lament painful losses and missed opportunities for their favorite teams. But I think Minnesotans can lay claim to a special kind of sports hell. We have honed the art of fan frustration to a high degree. It might not be coincidence that the creator of Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the football is a Minnesotan.
I was talking to someone, also old enough to remember the four Viking Super Bowl losses. We considered the heart-wrenching defeats in NFC Championship games since the last Super Bowl: 1978, the Drew Pearson shove; 1987, Darrin Nelson dropped pass: 1998, take-a-knee; 2000, 41-donut; 2009, twelve men on the field; 2018, whatever-you-call-that-debacle-in-Philadelphia.
Given that litany of horrors, Viking fans can’t be blamed for going tepidly into the upcoming playoffs, dipping a toe rather than diving in headfirst. There’s decades of pain and suffering. If this were a marriage, it would be considered emotional abuse.
In the realm of Minnesota pro sports, we can add the Timberwolves, North Stars, and Wild. Between them, they have exactly zero titles, with many distressing losses when it mattered most. The Wolves had a seemingly endless series of first round playoff losses with Kevin Garnett. After 13 years of futility here, Garnett won a championship with Boston. Same as David Ortiz. Has Boston ever thanked us?
We can also look at our major college program. An earliest memory of mine is watching the 1962 Rose Bowl with older brother Dale. I was six; I’m still waiting the Gophers return to Pasadena. Gopher basketball has had some good seasons interspersed with Luke Witte getting kneed, sexual assault in Madison, and Jan Gangelhoff’s term papers.
Add it all up, and it’s possible that we suffer from a particular mental affliction. I’m labeling it Minnesota PTSD. Post Traumatic Sports Disorder.
Have you thrown a remote at the TV? Have you upended a bowl of salsa into the chips? Did you growl at your innocent spouse as Blair Walsh was shanking a kick that she could have made? You may be suffering from Minnesota PTSD.
Have you turned off a Twins game in the fifth inning, even though the Twins are leading? Rocco is going to the bullpen, and you know how this ends. Do you let yourself be beguiled into thinking this is the year Byron Buxton stays healthy? Or maybe the week? You may be suffering from Minnesota PTSD.
(A note amidst my wisecrackery, post-traumatic stress disorder is a real and terrible affliction. I, in no way, want to minimize that. For those who battle that, we pray for your healing.)
I was talking to a fellow recently who was nine years old in 1987. He was peak fan age for the two Twins championships. He assumed then that World Series were something that would happen every so often.
His case of Minnesota fan’s PTSD is mild. Mine is severe. When I was nine, I was listening to my transistor radio as Sandy Koufax struck out Bob Allison, sealing the Dodgers’ World Series win over the Twins in 1965. I was crushed. How could anything be worse than that? I didn’t know that was just the warmup.
Two years later, the Twins lost the final two games of the 1967 season in Boston to get aced out of the pennant. That was when only the best team in each league made the playoffs, aka, the World Series.
In 1969 and 1970, the first seasons with divisions, the Twins lost two years in a row in the newly minted Championship Series to the Baltimore Orioles. This was the legendary Twins team of Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, and Rod Carew. I was 13 and 14 those years, when the fandom of boyhood made it doubly painful.
Years of mediocrity followed before the Twins won it all in 1987 and 1991. Unfortunately, I was boycotting the Metrodome. I had this crazy idea that baseball should be played on grass, under the sun. So, there was a weird space between me and those teams. I finally did go to the Dome when I accepted it was the only way I would be able to take my kids to a Twins game. The Metrodome was as awful as I suspected it would be.
The four Super Bowl losses bridged high school to college for me. This was the Vikings of Bud Grant, stone-faced, arms folded. It was Alan Page and Jim Marshall, seeing their breath steaming from face masks on the windswept prairies of Met Stadium. I get goose-bumpy thinking about it. Unfortunately, they had to go play those Super Bowls in warm places.
The last one was 45 years ago. The current Vikings head coach wasn’t even born when Fran Tarkenton was intercepted by Willie Brown to put away Super Bowl XI for the Raiders. It was one more blow leading to my self-diagnosed Minnesota sports PTSD.
But. This is a new season. Heck, it’s a new millennium. If I am going to see a Super Bowl win, it might as well be now. I’m in. It’s what fans do. Maybe Lucy doesn’t pull the ball this time. Skol Vikings!
