9-21-03

By EDWARD CONE
News & Record

Have I told you lately how much I love my division-leading Carolina Panthers? 

Probably not, since I haven’t been loving them very long. But love them I do, and not just because they beat the defending Super Bowl champs last week and are guaranteed, by virtue of not playing today, to remain undefeated at least until next Sunday.

The Panthers have endeared themselves to me less by their fast start than the years of futility that preceded it. Sure, I’m enjoying the fresh bloom of fandom, but that bloom has been nourished by many seasons when the team played like fertilizer.

Real fans suffer with their teams. Delayed gratification builds loyalty, with the thrill of victory more thrilling when it follows the agony of defeat. There are few words in sports more compelling than “wait til next year,” and true fans always do. That’s why supporters of the New York Giants, who ached for a generation, are morally superior to those of the Dallas Cowboys, who were born with a silver spoon in their souvenir ice-cream cups.

People understand this in New England, where the Red Sox always find a way to lose, and in Chicago, where the Cubs and the White Sox provide twice the misery (it could be that clubs named for hosiery and baby animals are somehow destined to disappoint). With all three teams contending this fall, the imminent collective heartbreak could inspire fatalistic barroom conversations for many long northern winters to come.

My favorite team in all of sports, UNC basketball, tortured its fans for years with consistent excellence that led to ultimate failure. My earliest sports memories are of the Tar Heels losing in the Final Four. In my teens, a frustrating time under the best of circumstances, they lost twice in the national championship game. By the time Dean Smith got his first title, the Tar Heel faithful were tempered by experience, making the character-building exercise of the last two seasons superfluous but probably healthy nonetheless.

When the Panthers started out nine seasons ago, I refused to be seduced by mere geography, and specious geography at that. The marketing gurus may have thought they were appealing to everyone in two states when they revived the regional name “Carolina” for the first time since 1729, and they were onto something, in that Charlotte is in North Carolina but not strictly of North Carolina, but Charlotte’s team did not automatically become my team.  

The quick success of the franchise, which went to the NFC title game in its second year, made me even less interested in the blue-shirted upstarts. With their free agents and expansion draftees, the Panthers seemed nouveau riche and just a little tacky – very Charlotte, indeed. They represented something I don’t like about modern sports, buying wins instead of earning them.

Then, just as they descended into agreeable mediocrity, the Panthers began to behave badly in other modern ways. There was the cocky quarterback who put his cleated foot in his mouth, and the receiver who put a contract out on his wife and tried to escape in the trunk of a car. It was not an easy bunch to love.  

But Kerry Collins left for New York, and Rae Carruth left for prison, and the Panthers began to grow on me. Two years ago, they went 1-15 and managed to lose every home game. They stunk. I was intrigued.

Last year, they started beating bad teams, which is how franchises turn around, and their defense began to scare people, which is a reliable sign of an emerging contender. They employ the awesomely talented Julius Peppers, the NFL’s next superstar, and Ricky Proehl, a class act and Greensboro resident. Thanks to the realignment of the league, the Panthers even have divisional rivalries that make sense, trading home games with Atlanta and Tampa Bay instead of San Francisco and St. Louis. 

The Panthers – it still feels unnatural to call them “Carolina” -- are a long way from the Super Bowl, and their fans probably have some suffering yet to do. It’s a price I am happy to pay, because at long last, that’s my team.

Ed Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.

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