“You must never be satisfied with losing. You must get angry, terribly angry, about losing. But the mark of the good loser is that he takes his anger out on himself and not his victorious opponents or on his teammates.”
— Richard Nixon
They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
If that’s the case I got a little stronger this past Saturday night.
My Atlanta Falcons, the team I’ve followed since I’ve been old enough to know how to follow a team, was shown the playoff exit door in a terrible manner by the Green Bay Packers. After compiling a more than impressive 13-3 regular season and earning the No. 1 seed for the playoffs from the NFC, the Falcons didn’t show up Saturday night.
At least the Falcons we had seen week in and week out from the 2010 season didn’t show up. Maybe it was the ice storm that blanketed the city during the week that caused problems.
Maybe it was the week off that caused Atlanta to lose its effectiveness on both sides of the football. Or maybe it was just the fact the Green Bay Packers have been on a hot streak and were not going to be denied.
The game Saturday night reminded me of the divisional playoff round back in 1980. The Dallas Cowboys rolled into Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium and did more than end a season for the Falcons. They left town having put an entire city in a haze that it took weeks, months even, to break out of.
Even as a very young fan I remember sharing in that pain. “What just happened?” I remember asking my father and trying to be tough and not cry.
My father, who has always been able to get over losses of these kind much quicker than me, responded with a “they lost” and then walked out of the room.
Saturday night’s loss was different than that one from more than 30 years ago.
The loss in the Packer game was decided so early that I couldn’t even stand to watch the final quarter of the Green Bay buzzards picking over the Falcon carcass. It was just too painful.
The one from three decades ago happened in the final minutes and was like the proverbial dagger through the heart. Both losses though were hard to swallow and like the one from the 1980 season, the one from the 2010 campaign will remain with me. It will stay mainly because it ended a season with so much potential.
To top off the terrible sports weekend (which followed a beyond miserable weather week) my second favorite NFL team, the New England Patriots, were unable to salvage the playoffs as they were upset in stunning fashion by the New York “We Like To Trash Talk” Jets.
That loss, combined with the Falcon defeat the previous night, was about more than I could take. Sometimes I wonder why I’m a sports fan. The pain just becomes too much to handle.
Yet I know when the new season rolls around I will be back pulling for that Falcon-Patriot Super Bowl just like I do every year.
Chris Bridges is sports editor of the Barrow Journal. Send comments about this column to cbridges@barrowjournal.com.
