Hard loss? Try Netflix and sugar
Do you think Sean Payton will watch the Super Bowl?
Sure, he’s an NFL head coach, so maybe he’s bound by some sense of professional obligation.
But Payton, whose New Orleans Saints were blatantly robbed of a spot in Sunday’s game by one of the worst no-calls in league history, has admitted he felt just like all those thousands in the Saints’ “Who Dat Nation” after the crushing loss to the Rams.
I think most fans, no matter your team or college affiliation, can recall a loss or two that made you almost physically ill.
It’s one of the things that makes sports so unique.
We all can identify so thoroughly with a group of athletes simply because they have a certain uniform — and we project all of our hopes and fears onto these people.
And in most cases, we’ve never even met them personally.
How many of you actually know Nigel Williams-Goss?
Just a few, and yet when Williams-Goss had a critical shot blocked in the final two minutes of the biggest game of his life, basically costing Gonzaga a national championship...
ZAGS FANS around the world went into a deep, sick, almost unendurable mourning.
That feeling of loss – an unfair loss — is almost indescribable.
It doesn’t just go away, either.
Williams-Goss’ blocked shot, and the North Carolina breakaway dunk that came from it, occurred two years ago but will remain vivid in the minds of Zags supporters, well...
Forever.
I can actually see it now, in excruciating detail.
At the time, in that precise moment, I remember yelling, “No!”
The thing is, re-running it right this second brings on an instant depression, the kind for which there is no cure.
Fans suffer deeply from a disease called, “What if...?”
Folks who don’t follow sports never can understand why the result of a child’s game can possibly affect us so much.
They don’t get it, and it’s useless to explain.
You can only beg them to live with it.
But the hurt can be crushing, and Sean Payton confessed straightaway that he felt precisely the same as the fans who follow his team.
“I would say honestly after the game for two to three days, much like normal people, I sat, probably didn’t come out of my room,” Payton said this week.
“I ate Jeni’s ice cream and watched Netflix for three straight days.”
WAIT, IT gets worse.
Payton had to suffer through some quick phone calls from various NFL suits, all offering apologies but telling him the wrong result must stand.
And after each conversation?
“Again, I’m back to the ice cream and the Netflix,” he said. ”There is a point where you know that things are not changing, and then you get wrapped up in a new series, a new episode.
“And then (the loss) comes back again, and then you get wrapped up in a new series, a new episode, so...”
Payton was asked what he watched all that time.
“Listen, you watch the Ted Bundy tapes (a hideous four-part series about America’s most famous serial killer), then all of a sudden you watch a series called ‘You’ — and it’s like if Ted Bundy met ‘Dawson’s Creek.’
“It’s brutal.”
I know for a fact that every one of you true sports junkies out there has felt like Payton at some point.
You’ve had the ultimate, unbelievable joy snatched cruelly away from you.
We feel for you, Sean.
Apologies to non-believers, but...
It really is brutal.
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Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” appears on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He also contributes the “Zags Tracker” package on Gonzaga basketball each Tuesday.
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Twitter: @BrandNewDayCDA
Email: scameron@cdapress.com