A tall glass of Haterade

I was talking with my boss today about college basketball (he's a huge Villanova fan, as his father went there and he grew up in Philly), and it occurred to me as something of an aside that pretty much all of my most hated teams were taken from a very specific time - the mid-to-late 90s. I guess this makes sense, as it was around that time that I started to really follow sports. I don't remember very much about the Bulls' first three championships, for example. (To be fair, I wasn't even eleven years old when Paxson knocked down the three. By comparison, when Jordan returned to the league I was going into eighth grade and at exactly the right point in terms of both awareness and who I was hanging out with to be excited about it.) The later three, much much more.

But let's take a look at the teams I hate the most in each sport. I can pretty much cite to you the exact moments, let alone years, that generated each one.

Baseball: The Yankees, and this will never change. In the earlier part of my life I hated the Mets, because my dad hated the Mets as a residual bitterness from 1969. When Edgar Martinez roped the double into the left field corner in Game Five at the Kingdome in the 1995 ALDS to beat the Yankees, however, I remember vividly jumping up and down on my bed (I had been listening to the game on the radio in my room because it was after midnight Eastern), and my dad even came down the hall to celebrate the news. The odd thing is, at the time, the Yankees had never been in the playoffs in my lifetime. How I knew so instinctively to hate them I'm not sure - certainly I was aware that they had a ton of historical success, and I've never loved that, but it was probably more a knee-jerk "New York sucks" type of thing. Needless to say, next year was the Jeffrey Maier incident in Game One of the ALCS - and since the Orioles were a team we pulled for slightly more than casually (my dad having developed an interest in them during his time in Baltimore, and their AL status making conflict of interest in a Cubs game all but impossible, since interleague play did not then exist), that pushed the Yankees over the edge. I remember watching the final outs of the sixth game of the '96 Series at a Halloween party with grim disgust. I can even tell you who caught the final out - Charlie Hayes. How many non-Yankee fans can do that? But that was certainly the year. If I had to pick the specific moment, it was probably Maier. That little bastard.

Football: This is the only one where it's different now. Right now I would say I hate the Packers most of all, whereas in the mid-90s it would have been the Cowboys (this was definitely due mostly to their winning, the obnoxious "America's Team" claim, and all the bandwagon friends I had). With the Packers, I actually rooted for them in the Super Bowl I attended (though, I will be honest, probably mostly because I expected them to win, which they of course did, or perhaps to deflect the bragging of NJ Dave, who, it must be said, had absolutely no reason to be a Packers fan) - nowadays, though, I can't stand them. Brett Favre is adulated by the media to a sickening degree, especially now that he really does suck. (29 interceptions this year! Just six shy of the post-merger record. And he's won just two of his last eight playoff games, dating back nearly a decade at this point. I respect what he's done over the years, but seriously, everyone just shut up about him already.) So why the change? Well, the Cowboys sucked for a few years, which made hating them a bit more boring (though that hasn't stopped me with other teams, but my hate for the Cowboys was never quite as personal as some others); meanwhile, the Bears play the Packers two times every year and win those games quite infrequently (last sweep before 2005: 1991; even in the 13-3 year of 2001, two of the three losses were to the goddamn Packers). Thus, hate.

Basketball: The Knicks. If this one has waned it's only because the rivalry was driven by those Knicks teams of the mid-90s that somehow had themselves convinced they were better than the Bulls, even though they could never beat them when Jordan was playing (and it still took a phantom foul call in 1994 to do it). I also knew a lot of Knicks fans in middle school and high school, and they were even more obnoxious than players like Ewing and Starks, because they actually bragged about the Knicks even though they never won anything. They reveled in the 104-72 win in 1996, which is understandable... except that it was the Bulls', what, sixth loss of the season? That was the 72-10 year, of course, and started the second three-peat. Meanwhile, even though the Bulls have been at best mediocre since 1999, the Knicks have done little more in that time aside from their preposterous Finals run in '99, and if they didn't have a great coach in Larry Brown, this current team would probably be even worse than it is. But since the Bulls are no longer the dominant force in the league, and I no longer know any Knicks fans, it's hard to care that much. Still, I always root against them. The Lakers, during their period of dominance, probably surpassed the Knicks, but I really just hate Bryant; the team as a whole I don't care quite as much about.

Hockey: The Rangers. Easily. And I can point to the exact moment here: Stephane Matteau's wraparound in Game Seven of the 1994 Eastern Conference Finals, a moment so traumatic in my nascent sports-obsessed years that I still refuse to watch footage of it or listen to the call. (Some ESPN countdown featured that goal - I think it was "Best Game Sevens of the Last 25 Years" - and when I saw that that game was coming, I had to change the channel and come back when I was certain I had missed it. There isn't another play in sports I feel as strongly about, though there are a few others I refuse to watch - the Maier takeaway, the "great play" toss that Jeter made against the A's [P.S. Giambi was safe], the Bartman deflection, Aaron Boone's homer in the 2003 ALCS, and one more we'll see shortly.) I already didn't like the Rangers, as a Devils fan, but the head-to-head confrontation and bitter loss (the Devils had been up 3-2, and then Messier guaranteed a Game Six win) really cinched it. The Devils won the Cup the following year and twice more since, and the Rangers missed the playoffs every year between 1998 and now, though annoyingly they still found the time to knock off the top-seed Devils in the second round in 1997. (I maintain that we got screwed by the refs in that series.) So I got over it to some degree... but I did revel in the Rangers' crappiness, while their "return to form" this year bugs me.

College football: Nebraska. Notre Dame is really, really close, but again - the Domers haven't been title contenders since before I started paying attention, while the Huskers won three titles right in that period. The last of them, the split with Michigan in '97, is the one that I really remember because they wouldn't have gotten there without the kickball to Matt Davison on the last play against Missouri. Totally illegal, obvious kicking motion - but of course none of the refs saw it. Nebraska wasn't helped by their ridiculous appearance in the title game in the 2001 season, though thankfully Miami drilled them.

College basketball: Kentucky. And this one is obvious. Titles in 1996 and 1998; finals appearance in 1997; obnoxious, we-should-win-every-year fanbase (see also: Notre Dame) that is more annoying for Ashley Judd's involvement, not less; coach who started his startlingly ugly son at point guard; beneficiary of biased officiating in any close game. Fortunately, they too have been mediocre (at least comparatively so) recently, and no threat to win it all. I'm no fan of Duke or Carolina either, but even if Duke were the #1 team in the nation and Kentucky were 0-20, I'd rather Duke won.

So as not to make this completely one-sided, my question is this: everyone has (or I think should have) one team in a given sport that they hate above all others. Which are these teams for you, and can you recall specific things that pointed you there, or did you just seem to end up feeling that way over the years?