I don’t think any sports fan can say that he or she became a fan on their own.
There’s always some influential figure in our lives who’s responsible for passing the sports bug onto us — be it a parent, coach, teacher, friend or whatever the case may be. I’ve written in the past about the influence my dad had when I was growing up, but there’s more to the story than that. If my dad is responsible for getting me into baseball, as well as putting a tennis racket in my hand and briefly helping me out on the wrestling mat, there were others who are responsible for pretty much everything else.
When I lived in Buffalo, I did grow up enjoying the Bills and Sabres. But it wasn’t until I moved to another part of town at 8 years old that I learned more about other sports, and also when I started to see football as something more than what I should be into because my dad liked it.
Among the many wonderful things my best friend Jordan’s family has done for me, one of the most low-key important things was opening my eyes to the sports world. His dad has always been a big football guy, balancing the Bills and Notre Dame pretty equally in the house, but it’s his older brother, Shane, who I consider most responsible.
Jordan was always more into video games and cinema than sports, and is now a film critic at a Buffalo-based weekly publication. But when I didn’t feel like playing video games, or whatever else we were doing, I would go watch sports with Shane. I didn’t always know what was going on, but I eventually started picking up on it.
Whenever I played sports around the neighborhood, which happened every so often, it was with Shane, among others. It was usually shooting the basketball around in the family’s driveway, but we did branch out to football, and at least one time we played baseball with tennis rackets because we all realized how far we could hit them.
Basketball was always his favorite, even though he tried just about everything he could. Possibly the only Orlando Magic fan in Buffalo, Shane played throughout high school and college as a wing, and when he would grow out of his old NBA or collegiate replica jerseys, gave them all to me. Ironically, several years after he gave me one of my first jerseys — a Kansas Jayhawks jersey, which was probably for Paul Pierce — that school became one of my least favorite in all of college sports.
Speaking of video games, Shane was the one who introduced me to some of my favorite sports titles. In particular, the NBA Street series: I used to play his copy of the first NBA Street whenever he wasn’t using the PlayStation 2, and got hooked on it. I still have my PS2, which is older than some of my readers, just so that I can play NBA Street V3 and a few Tony Hawk games I got back then.
It may not sound like much but, in some way, shape or form, Shane is the reason why I started caring enough about some sports to learn them, even though I was never a great athlete. I am and always will be grateful for that. I’ll be in Buffalo celebrating his wedding with him and his family by the time this story is published, but this is in no way a draft or trial run of a speech I was going to give him. It just made me think about how we all find our biggest sports influences, whether they’re direct or indirect.
So tell us: who’s your biggest influence?