Browns' Showtime: Hype & Reality

While I like sports in general, since the time I was a little kid I loved baseball and the Cleveland Indians. I loved the Indians so much, I got too close and too wrapped up in what is supposed to be entertainment and fun. Our teams become a part of us, but as long as you can see a line between your life and your favorite sports teams, you'll likely keep some healthy perspective; after all, sports teams aren't doing research on deadly or crippling diseases, they play goddamn games. For quite a number of years I took it all far too seriously, and I was too sensitive to criticism of the Indians especially. For many years there was a Cleveland sportswriter named Bob Dolgan who regularly wrote many an article critical of Cleveland sports teams. He was tough and often I would bristle at the things he wrote. He challenged my hopes and dreams for these teams, no matter how unrealistic, and I didn't like it. Time and the explosion of BIG money in professional sports brought me to view sports with a far better perspective. I also saw that getting my feathers ruffled about criticism of my teams or favorite players was not something that should anger or devastate me. Criticism is given by people who care and want to see improvements in things. When sportswriters, commentators and fans stop criticizing a team, that team is in deep trouble, because apathy is the real enemy of any entity. I came to VERY MUCH appreciate Bob Dolgan and his sometimes scathing articles. In more recent times I feel the sports media has climbed into bed with the sports teams they are covering, and far too often they seem to be employed by the public relations departments of the teams, lacking only pom poms to complete the role of cheerleaders, although I've often wondered if we could open their bedroom closets that the pom poms would fall out. Fans have a responsibility in all of this too, because I have a sneaking suspicion that if someone wrote a "Dolganesque" article in these times, there would be a big part of the public that would tear them apart, perhaps even literally, and then retreat to their own little corner of the Internet to join with like minded people to reinforce their own beliefs. Most media companies would likely not dare hire or keep such a person nowadays.

For a couple of decades now, I've rarely watched or listened to complete games in any sport, because all I do is complain, so I check the score and perhaps watch for a short time. I've also learned to pick on and make fun of Cleveland teams myself. It's something they generally deserve, and if you live and die with a team or teams, where ever you live in the world, you'll find that poking fun at YOUR team will not end civilization, and that it all helps you to feel a little better about any particular loss, as it helps to kill the pain. I'm not saying you won't still be mad about things somewhat, but if joking can limit that anger, it's a good thing. Anyway...  

For months the Cleveland sports media, with support from the national media, built the hyped up narrative of the Cleveland Browns and a potential championship. Many fans fell for it, but that's understandable; those hopes and dreams we have for our teams, and for us and for our egos that we have attached to those teams. For others more financially tied to the fortunes of the Browns, they loved all the hype. Understand, things may yet work out, but the narrative got far out of hand before even one game was played, and many players made their contribution to the escalating and already overblown expectations. So these "spinners" lived a good life for months, because they could offer all sorts of support for a big season, but they didn't have to offer any results... at that time. Like true spinners who weave cloth into clothing, like underwear, eventually they have to put on those underwear, and if the underwear unravel, the spinner is "exposed." On Sunday, September 8, 2019, the Cleveland Browns put on their "spun" underwear, and the underwear unraveled. You have to make hype INTO reality. 

WORD HISTORY:
Hyperbole-The first part of this compound is distantly related to "over," a word from the Germanic roots of English, with the second part related to "ball" (the noun meaning, "a dance"), a word English borrowed from French, and which traces back to Latin and then to Greek. The part "hyper" goes back to the Indo European root "upo," with the notion of "from under" or "from below," "to go over/above," and its extended form "uper," meaning, "over, above." This gave transliterated Ancient Greek "hyper," also meaning, "over, above;" thus also, "beyond." The "bole" part goes back to Indo European "gwele/gwela," with the notion of, "bubble up, rise up, overflow, throw outward or upward." The Indo European form gave transliterated Greek "ballein," meaning, "to throw," which provided the form "bol," meaning, "the act of throwing." The resulting Greek compound was "hyperbole," which meant, "throwing beyond, throwing out beyond;" thus the figurative, "a throwing of ideas out beyond truth or reality," thus, "exaggeration." Latin borrowed the word from Greek and English borrowed it from Latin in the first half of the 1400s. Latin also used the altered form "hyperbola" as a geometrical word having to do with planes, cones and angles. English borrowed this form in the middle of the 1600s.