Favorite Players: The Memoirs

As I continue to grow into the age of reason and, above all, objectivity, I realized that I am slowly but surely losing my allegiances to certain players; my favorite players.

It's a childhood thing, I guess. You just absolutely idolize that one player in every sport. You want to be like him and you want to play like him. Naturally, you lose this sense of idolization the older you get. I'm reaching a point now where my childhood is almost over. (I consider college childhood.) So I feel like I need to document a chronology of my favorite players sport-by-sport before I forget what having a favorite player even feels like.

In the beginning, there was the 1994 World Cup. I was 5. So we'll start with soccer. (Remember, I grew up in Europe, so soccer was naturally the first sport I was drawn to.)

• The first time I really watch soccer, Brazil won the '94 World Cup. Best player was a young striker by the name of Ronaldo.
• Ronaldo played in Italy, however, and he didn't get the in-your-face, all-over-your-TV exposure where I lived. Instead, the German Bundesliga was the most prevalent league around. On my soccer team, you were either a Bayern Munich fan or a Borussia Dortmund fan. Dortmund was less flashy and had more likeable players, in my opinion, so I became a dortmund fan. Their best player was Andreas Moeller.
• Moeller was pretty old, though, and by the time Euro 2000 came around, he no longer was that great of a player. This was around the time I entered the realm of sports-dorkdome. I took stats on essentially every game and I really liked the Dutch National Team for some reason. They had a striker who, at the time, played for my favorite Spanish team (Barcelona). His name was Patrick Kluivert.
• Kluivert fell off a little after that and had a few injuries, but his teammate Edgar Davids was on the rise. Davids was a little pitbull who had a ridiculously hard shot. I loved watching him take deep free kicks just to see him power the ball into the box. Davids also was the original Ronaldinho. He was the first guy to show off his ability in commercials and online videos. He has been dubbed "The Godfather of Street Soccer". Everybody was trying to do Davids' tricks.
• In 2002, though, the Netherlands choked in qualification and didn't make the World Cup. I was drawn to the African playing style, the Nigerian team in particular. My family also happened to be friends with a Nigerian family at the time, so it worked out. Nigeria had a player who played similarly to Davids. His name was Augustine "Jay-Jay" Okocha.
• I always supported Dortmund, but around this time I became die-heart about them. Their rising star was a young midfielder from the Czech Republic: Tomas Rosicky.
• Rosicky got bought by Arsenal for a ton of money and when we got English satellite TV in 2005, I followed FC Liverpool more often. Their star midfielder was (and still is) Steven Gerrard.

Gerrard was my last favorite player. I graduated High School, enrolled at Penn State and stopped following soccer as closely.

So I'll move on to Baseball, where the history is much simpler.

• I got a pack of baseball cards in 1995 from an uncle. The first card in the deck: a Mike Piazza rookie card with the Dodgers. There were plenty of awesome players in that deck: Tony Gwynn, Kirby Puckett, Frank Thomas... but Piazza's card had the words "Rookie Star" plastered across of it. I was 6, so I didn't know what a Batting Average was or what "HR" stood for, but I knew what Star meant, so Piazza seemed like a good choice to be my favorite player.
• I really didn't follow Baseball very closely until 1998. That was when Piazza was traded to the Mets. I spent summers in the Poconos, where the Mets are a really popular team and all their games were broadcasted on the WB11, Fox5 and MSG. Eventually, Piazza got old and in 2005, there wasn't any reason to resign him, so I turned to the next rising star, a SS who could swipe 50 bags a season: Jose Reyes.

I still consider myself a Mets fan, but I have a real love-hate relationship with them. I just find them excruciatingly frustrating to follow.

This brings me to my next sport: football, where I also have been a fan of a frustrating franchise.

• It didn't start out that way, though. The first NFL game I watched was in the 1996 season. I forget who they were playing against, but Brett Favre and Antonio Freeman were torching them for 4 TDs. I was so impressed I wrote Mike Holmgren a letter at the time. (and got a framed response. I was a G!). Anyway, I bought a cheap Favre jersey and loved it when I saw them beat Parcell's Patriots in the Superbowl.
• The next year they lost to Elway's Broncos in the Superbowl and Green Bay started struggling after that. I was 9-years old, so I think I can be forgiven for ditching Favre. Plus, I was simply amazed by a player in the same division: Barry Sanders.
• Right around this time, my grandfathers started taking notice in me and my brother's interest in the NFL. My parents didn't really care (they're not huge sports fans), but my Texan grandfather and my Philadelphian grandfather sure did. We got Cowboys jerseys for Christmas, Eagles hats and jerseys for birthdays, but when push came to shove, Philly won, because my grandfather took me to Lehigh for Training Camp, where I could actually watch the Eagles in person. In 2000, a young QB that Pop-Pop was always talking about had a great year. Donovan McNabb became my new favorite player.
• Now I loved McNabb because he was one of very few players I actually knew. By 2003, I knew the team like the back of my hand and on fan appreciation day at Lehigh, one player stood out as the most generous and engaging player on the team. He signed autographs for players who arrived too late to get in line and he was the only player to take pictures with fans. To this day, there's a picture of me and Troy Vincent hanging in my old bedroom.
• Unfortunately, Vincent left after that season, so I needed a new favorite Eagle. The 2004 season was probably the greatest season to watch. T.O. and McNabb were lighting it up on offense while Lito Sheppard, Brian Dawkins and Michael Lewis ruled the secondary. But the team had one glaring weakness: run defense. They might not have made the Super Bowl that year if they hadn't made one enormous change on defense: The re-insertion and comeback of Jeremiah Trotter. All of a sudden, nobody could run on Philly, and I truly believe that Trotter was the difference maker. He made the Pro Bowl that year, despite only starting half a season.
• Trotter's knees had been surgically repared, though and he aged really quickly the next two seasons. Because he no longer had the lateral quickness to follow plays, Trotter would just shoot gaps as hard as he could and hope that was where the play was going. He had always done that, but in 2006 he was wrong a lot more than in the past, plus his ability to play coverage had dropped to practically non-existant. He was released before the 2007 season. I was forced to go to my number 2 guy. A guy that hit harder than anyone in the league, the greatest leader and safety of the decade (in my completely non-biased opinion): Brian Dawkins.
  

But he's in Denver now and almost all of my jerseys are outdated. To tell you the truth, I might just stick with the ones I have: Vincent, Trotter, Sheppard, Dawkins. Those were my boys and always will be.

Finally, the sport I intially loved the most, fell out-of-love with, and have rediscovered recently: the NBA.

• In 1995-96, Michael Jordan made his comeback and my dad (of all people) got me hooked. (Although he was going through a mid-life crisis at the time and was rooting for Stockton and Malone).
• The next season, I went with my family to Florida for Spring Break. The first night, I watched the Miami Heat absolutely destroy some team (don't remember who) and the player that stood out was a Point Guard with a sick crossover and a nasty long range shot. The player: Tim Hardaway.
• Miami was really good for a number of years after that. '99 was probably their best chance, but they blew it to the #8 seed Knicks in the first round. Eventually, Alonzo Mourning could no longer stay healthy, Hardaway got old and a trade for Anthony Mason and Eddie Jones didn't work out as well as hoped. They eventually wound up towards the bottom of the league in 2002 and drafted Caron Butler with the #6 overall pick.
• Butler was really fun to watch for two years, but when the whole Shaq/Kobe drama was going down, it became clear that Shaq O'Neal was going to be available. The best young player at the time for Miami was Dwyane Wade, coming off of a really solid season, so he wasn't going anywhere. The best bargaining piece was Butler. After he was shipped off to L.A., Wade really came into his own at the Athens Olympics and broke out in the 2004-2005 season. Watching Wade, I couldn't have any other favorite player.

When it comes to the NBA, I for some reason am no longer a Heat fan. My family stopped going to Florida in the spring, I couldn't stand Jason Williams and Antoine Walker and stopped supporting them the year they won the NBA Championship (ironic right?). I love basketball, although I don't root for any one team. I find Orlando the easiest team to root for right now, but I'm far from a fan.

So in 15 years, I've had 19 favorite players, 4 favorite teams across 4 sports. I've become a much bigger college sports fan in the past few years, but I'm biased towards players like Navarro Bowman, Mo Evans, Deon Butler, Jared Odrick, Talor Battle and Jamelle Cornley. I don't have the objectivity.

Not to mention, I'm the same age as them. I love watching these guys, but they will never compare to my favorite players that I idolized growing up.