Let the Hatefest Begin!

If I have learned any lesson from my 28 years of rooting for the Boston Red Sox, it's this: loving Your Team can be wonderful, occasionally magical, even. But nothing in sport is as rewarding, fulfilling, and eternal as the hatred that a fan can develop against a good arch rival. Now that the Yankees have shown themselves to be human (mostly), my hate hasn't really waned, but it's mellowed, matured like wine, so that it is less brash and more complex. The sad thing is, since my Sox won it all, I don't care for them nearly as much. I still love them, and always will, but I will never let myself be hurt like that again. Not by them at least.

A good rivalry is like a good steak; it needs time to marinate and flame to seal in the juices. YanksSox was a good steak, the only thing in American professional sports in recent years that felt authhentic to me. Sure, it was hyped, but it was impossible to overstate what it meant to fans. Coming off of that high, I naturally gravitated to international football, especially the English variety. The rivalries are so real, so local. They're passed from father to son like a bad gene, along with a massive dose of wit.

I decided to immediately attach myself to a fan base. It sounds like carpetbagging, but it really isn't any different than when I attached to the Sox as a child; I'm certainly no more mature about these things. The power of the internets allowed me to do years worth of research on the EPL and the FA in a mater of weeks. And I had help from this guy, (yeah, I'm not an InSider™ either) who happened to have amazingly similar criteria to me. Anyhow, the winner was...Tottenham Hotspur FC, for reasons I will not go into now. Needles to say, my first order of business was to commence hating on the Scum, otherwise known as the Gooners, AKA The Arsenal. Fucking scum. This has come easily for me, accustomed as I am to manic hatred.

This brings me at long last to the MLS, whom it seems actively dissuades such rivalry by making it's teams as innocuous as possible and letting everyone into the playoffs. It'll be tough, but I'm up for it—I'm a massive Galaxy fan now. As soon as I get a chance I'm going to do some research and figure out what other teams are in MLS and decide who deserves my malice the most (I suppose it should be Chivas, right?), but at the moment, the Colorado Rockies Avalanche Rapids are at the top of my shit list. It turns out that, at this moment, there are DIRTY GOONER SCUM living in Colorado calling themselves a soccer team. That's right. The Raps have signed a deal with Arsenal FC. As far as I understand it, Colorado has to send Arsene Wenger one pacey boy virgin each new moon, and in return the Raps get to use West Ham's colours.

Seems fair.

So it's on then, you Rocky Mountain Hammers Gooners. I look forward to lobbing flairs and cupsful of pee into the away stands (wait, do we have away stands?) when you are in town, and crowning you Scum with a pint glass down the pub on a saturday. God I hate you dirty fucking scum bastards!

Davey, if you are reading this, I think that I speak for all of the Galaxy fans here when I say that you must understand that all we care about is beating the Scum. If you only show up for one match this year, please let it be a Colorado match. We live to beat these bastards, as did our fathers before us. Please, Mr. Beckham™, bring us triumph over our sworn enemies at long last.