My Sports Life

I love this time of year. It’s absolutely insane – for some reason life heats up to a crazy pace on October 1, but it’s worth it. Not only is does the weather improve (although I admit that I am not looking forward to the cold winter temps), but fall is the apex of the sports year.

I love sports. Not all of them equally, but I will watch just about anything on TV. It’s amazing too, when you consider the recent and not-too-recent track records of some of my favorite teams. I’ve been a Royals fan ever since I went to college – I’m dating myself, but it was 1985 and the Royals were at their peak. It’s been a long painful slide since then.

My two NFL teams are the Carolina Panthers and the Kansas City Chiefs. The Chiefs are actually showing a glimmer of respectability this year, but it’s going to be a long cold winter in Charlotte.

The Charlotte Bobcats are (still) an expansion team – not much else to say about that.

I’ve had more luck with college sports…my beloved Jayhawks won the NCAA Division I Basketball Championship two years ago. They also won in ’88 when I was in college – it’s a feeling that is beyond description. The football team won the Orange Bowl in 2008. If you know anything about the history of football at Kansas, you know what an accomplishment that was. I’m not even going to talk about this year’s football team.

And then there’s NASCAR. It’s never been a sport that I followed or watched and when I started at Press Pass, I had to take a crash course in drivers, sponsors and fans. In my almost nine years here, I have come to appreciate, not just the skill and talent of the drivers, but the passion and enthusiasm of the fans. I believe that the people who buy our NASCAR trading cards are more than collectors – they are true fans of the sport and the drivers they follow.

I think that’s the best part about what we do. We help people who are already fans become even bigger fans of their sport. It’s why we have (sometimes) heated discussions in our office about who attends the National and other opportunities to talk to fans – it is an incredible feeling to find out how excited people are about the product we produce. It’s not an opportunity many companies have. Of course, the downside is when people are not happy about an experience with our product, but that is also part of the job. You listen, you learn and you make the next product better.

We love hearing from you. Keep the comments and thoughts coming – through phone calls, email, Facebook, etc. Good and bad, we want to hear from you.

Terri Rehkop

A Football Fan from the Beginning

Let me start off by saying that I love sports – all sports. I grew up in the country, and playing sports on the weekends or watching them on network television (we didn’t have cable in my community when I was a kid) was the way you filled your time. I really didn’t have much of a preference, either; baseball and basketball were my favorites, but I also enjoyed football and soccer immensely.

When I was 10 years old, my dad took me on the 30-minute drive to Knoxville, TN, and I attended my first real football game at Neyland Stadium. I’d been to see the Pittsburgh Steelers play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in a preseason game in the same stadium when I was 4, but that doesn’t really count. I was too young to know what was going on and it was only an exhibition.

That Saturday, everything changed for me. As much as I enjoyed watching and playing the other sports, the electricity of the crowd that day, coupled with the speed and power of the game, led to football becoming my favorite sport to watch going forward, hands down.

As I began to follow the sport more closely, I realized how important every game was in college if you were going to have a shot at the national title, or at least a New Year’s Day bowl game. We also landed cable shortly thereafter and I began to follow my Dad’s beloved Steelers more closely and recognized again how important each win was in terms of playoff and Super Bowl aspirations at the pro level.

On top of the impressive athletes and enormous collisions, the importance of each weekend’s game was incredibly appealing to me, and that was the issue that further separated football from the other sports – where any single game was inconsequential – in my eyes.

Fast forward to today, and nothing has changed for me. I go into a funk after the Super Bowl ends, realizing that while I still have basketball and hockey to watch and although baseball is about to crank up shortly thereafter, my weekends will have a huge void for the next seven months.

I geek out over the draft in April, watch OTAs with bated breath through May and June and become giddy when training camps kick off in late July. Still, there is nothing quite like the feeling I get in early September when football returns to dominate the sports landscape. I love waking up on the Saturday before Labor Day to watch Herbie, Corso and the rest of the “GameDay” crew dissect the weekend’s games and, if possible (like last weekend), I’ll head into Knoxville and watch my Vols roll some undeserving opponent in the greatest college stadium in the country.

That’s just the appetizer, though. When the NFL returns the second weekend of September, things really get going. I’ve already made plans to watch the Steelers this Sunday, even though I’ve got some trepidation about how they’re going to perform while Dennis Dixon is under center. Every game is so important that the team has to play well over the next month – while Big Ben Roethlisberger is sidelined – if they’re going to have a shot at the postseason.

Between the college games on Saturday and the pro games on Sunday, I find it difficult to get much done this time of year. Heck, I’m having a hard time sitting here writing this. I’m ready to head to the house and get things ready for the Vikings/Saints kickoff game tonight.

That I have this much excitement and energy about a game featuring two teams in which I’m not emotionally invested just goes to show how passionate I am about this sport. It’s almost like . . . a sickness.

Yeah, a sickness! One that requires me to take the rest of the day off to, you know, “get better.”

Tailgating starts in 30 minutes. I’m outta here…

Nick Matijevich