Ramblings from the Ultimate Sports Sentimentalist

With football season nearly upon us, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on this summer in my sporting life.  It is a summer that I will remember for a long time, whether I want to or not.  Since I’m not a baseball fan, I direct most of my energy as a fan towards golf and tennis during the summers, particularly on the majors.  Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and British Open are 3  highlights of my sporting year.  Two of these events are held in Great Britain, so obviously that nation becomes the center of my attention during the months of June and July.  And when looking back at this summer, the first thing that comes to my mind is the eerie resemblance everything has been to the experiences of the legendary cinematic character Rocky Balboa.  We all know (or should know) of the journey of Rocky’s fictional boxing career beginning with an unlikely title shot against Apollo Creed in 1976 and ending with a split decision loss to Mason “the Line” Dixon in 2006.  Also, for the record there were only 5 Rocky movies: I-IV and Balboa (Rocky V never happened).  At any rate, the ”Rocky Balboa” analogy is often overused and overstated, but I think given the events of this summer in our Motherland across the sea that such an analogy could never be more true. 

It first started in a non-sporting environment.  Yes, some of you may roll your eyes at the mere mention of this lady’s name but I’m going first talk about the immaculate Susan Boyle story.   I know that her experiences on Britain’s Got Talent and beyond has very little to do with sports, but the Rocky Balboa parallels here are obvious and have been brought up over and over again.  In fact the countless comparisons that have been made between Susan and Rocky serve as the inspriation for this entry.   If you don’t know who Susan Boyle is then just type her name into You Tube and you’ll get a few hundred hits.  To quickly summarize, she was a rather unattractive lady from Scotland who auditioned for Britain’s Got Talent this past spring (the British equivalent of America’s Got Talent) and after being laughed at by the audience for her unpleasant looks and awkward demeanor went onto deliver one of the most awe-inspiring singing performances of all-time.  All of this has been talked and analyzed in-depth, so I’m not going to do another Susan Boyle social critique.  But I feel like the Rocky Balboa parallel here extends beyond the simple “Rags to Riches” underdog motif.  I have yet to see anyone point out the fact that much like Rocky, Susan went the distance but ended up losing.  Just like when Balboa fell to Apollo in the first Rocky, Susan lost to a dance group called Diversity in the final of Britain’s Got Talent in May.  As upset as I was about this first disappointing development of the summer, it gave me comfort that Susan had gone the distance, inspired the world, and was going to go on to have a very lucrative successful career, exactly like Mr. Balboa.

Now on to the real sports and the further advancement of Rocky’s journey through Britain in the summer of 2009.  If Susan Boyle’s triumph is a depiction of the original Rocky, then Andy Murray at Wimbledon has to be analogized to Rockys 2-4.  As I have talked about for years, witnessing a Brit win Wimbledon is one of my life sporting goals (see my first blog entry for the others); therefore Murray’s march to the Wimbledon semifinals was my obsession for the last 2 weeks of June.  Unfortuantely, Murray lost to Roddick, which is the glaring difference between it and Rockys 2-4.  Balboa won the final fight in all 3 of those movies, but even though Murray may have lost at this year’s Wimbeldon, he has still become a great champion just like Balboa.  He has won 13 ATP titles and recently surpassed Rafael Nadal as the # 2 player in the world.  He’s also only 22 years old, so the major championships will inevitably come.  Murray has rapidly ascended to the top of the tennis world just like Balboa did in late 70′s and early 80′s  in the first 3 Rocky sequels.

So if the traditional Rocky story played out with Susan Boyle in Britain in May, and you allow me to analogize Rockys 2-4 to Andy Murray in Britian in June, then there is only one part of this epic left to be told  Without a doubt, the plot of “Rocky Balboa” (the final movie in the series) came alive at the British Open in July.  It pains me to talk about it still.  Along with this year’s Master’s, the 2009 British Open serves as the worst golfing heartbreak of my life.  Tom Watson… he was about to pull off the greatest sports miracle since the Miracle on Ice.  But then he bogeyed the 18th hole and lost representing the most recent disappointment in a devastating 18 month cycle, where every team I like has lost and every team I hate has won.  At any rate, the similarities between Waston in 2009 and Rocky in 2006 are obvious.  Both men were great champions finishing up their careers with one last epic performance.  Both “went the distance” one last time and came up just a little bit short.  And eerily enough, both were 59 years of age.  Tom Watson definitely gave a great portrayal of Balboa in his final night in the ring, but unfortuantely the tone was entirely different.  While Balboa’s split decision loss to Dixon was uplifting and gratifying, Watson’s playoff loss to Cink was gut-wrenching and excruciating.  We should react as the audience did for Rocky and applaud Watson’s past greatness and phenomenal old-age performance.  If the final round did not play out like it did, then we probably would have.  However, Watson seemingly had the tournament won causing us to become  spoiled rotten with grandiose thoughts of witnessing world history. 

So there you have it…  my whimsical retelling of the Rocky fable through Britain’s major sporting events of 2009.  Though these 3 recent events did inject a great deal of sadness into an otherwise amazing summer for me, the Rocky parallels soothe the pain a little bit.  For despite all the ups and downs, when we think about Rocky Balboa it makes us smile, and when I think of Susan Boyle, Andy Murray, and Tom Watson, I  plan to do the same.   Hope you the entry, and I would appreicate your comments.  Also, in case you were wondering where  Rocky V fit into all of this, remeber that it never happened so nothing is to analogize it to.  However, if you do believe in the existence of Rocky V and insist on trying to make it fit into this storyine, then you would need the world’s worst disaster to take place in London.  Something of epic propotions like a terrorist attack or an monsoon.  Only then could we begin to start making Rocky V analogies.