I Have Been Defeated...

I do not want to cover up my wonderful "guest" Peter King article I have below but I wanted to let you all (no "all" in there?) know I have been defeated.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/080514

Bill Simmons has written a KSK type pregame speech Doc Rivers "gave" to his team. He is mocking Doc Rivers, thereby I can not mock him. Bill has taken a blogger's way to mock someone and thereby not allowed me to mock him. Make sense to you? Me neither. The whole column is Doc Rivers' fake pregame speech and me being a closeted Celtics fan (you can guess why, and no I did not jump on the bandwagon, I jumped off and kept a 1986 Celtics mini-basketball up in my office. Before you hate me as much I as I hate my unlucky fate in life, please remember I partially jumped off a bandwagon out of embarrassment. Has this been done before?) did not read it. I don't care about it honestly and I am a Celtics fan from Bill's era. So you know it is bad. Fortunately for me, Bill felt the need to preface it with an introduction and I am on it like white on rice. There was one passage that was so egotistical, it had to be commented on.

Then I realized in my zeal I had misread it and it was a perfectly normal sentence that displayed no egoism. So in summary, Bill Simmons posted a column I could not mock, he included enough exposition to make me run to the attic and fire up the Mac only to find out I can't read, and I lost the only reader I had because I am a Celtics fan. Just a bad day all around.

Let me describe to you in Simmons' style the levels of fandom I have in my life so that you may possibly relate and see why I should not hate myself as much as I do for liking the Celtics and them being a popular team:

Level 1- you have uniforms of the team, you don't miss games they play and plan your life around them, you have broken one household appliance in a loss, you hate the teams that have beaten them in big games, pulled a muscle celebrating a win, and you live or die with their good and bad games.

My examples: my favorite baseball, college basketball, college football, and pro football teams.

Level 2- you don't really follow the sport obsessively but you know what is going on, you have team stuff that you wear and have around, if they win then you are happy but if they lose it will not ruin your day, you still hate the teams they lose big games to, and there is a reason you are not a bigger fan and if that reason did not exist, they could enter Level 1.

My example: my favorite pro basketball team

Level 3- you don't like the sport and like the team, you have no apparel of that team and no one probably knows that is your favorite hockey team, you will watch games with slight indifference but do actively cheer for them. They will probably never enter Level 2 unless you move to the direct vicinity of the team or start to enjoy the sport a whole hell lot more.

My example: my favorite hockey team

I feel better now, though my reader(s) still probably hate me and I still hate Simmons.

Please read the "guest" article by Peter King below and tell me how unfunny I am.