Published: October 04, 2008 11:56 pm         

Some days, it’s enough to outrun the other guy

Some of my friends who remember the way West Virginia manhandled Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl are growing restless because of the Mountaineers’ lackluster performance so far this football season.

Not me. They’re still good, but are adjusting a bit more each week to a new coaching staff and a new system. For another, I turned 60 the same month WVU blasted the Sooners (who are now ranked No. 1) and am not exactly new to this sort of thing.

After the Mountaineers lost to Colorado, I told another of the faithful that, “Every time they get beat, I tell myself the same thing I do each time I get dumped by a girlfriend: It’s happened before, and I imagine it will happen again. The only question is when.” (I’m presently 0 for 8 ... 2008, that is.)

I went to Keyser High School, and rooting for the Golden Tornado is about like rooting for the Mountaineers. Anybody can cheer for teams that win most of the time, and where’s the challenge in that? It was easy to be a New York Yankees fan, but it took guts and a lot of heart to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Keyser’s football team has now beaten both Allegany and Fort Hill in the same year, and the odds against that are about the same as the odds against Heather Locklear and Cheryl Tiegs inviting me to spend the weekend with them at Aspen.

One of my co-workers said that if Allegany hadn’t made so many mistakes and Keyser hadn’t made so many good plays, Allegany would have won.

I told him that was about like saying I’d have gotten a lot less sleep over the years if girls had liked me better (or words to that effect).

Since being introduced to TV and radio in the early 1950s, I’ve watched or listened while the Mountaineers, the Washington Redskins and the Pittsburgh Pirates have lost with greater regularity than Snoopy has to the Red Baron. That each has periodic bouts with success serves only to get my hopes up.

I also was a fan of the late Washington Senators back in the days when Washington was said to be “first in war, first in peace and last in the American League.” It is a tossup as to whether their most recent successors, the Washington Nationals, are worse than the Pirates have become.

Thanks to the television and the Senators, my father and I shared the experience of learning to hate the Yankees.

Dad would watch the Senators lose on one TV while he was watching the Pirates lose on another, and I don’t know how he was able to stand it ... especially when the last part of baseball season coincided with the beginning of college football, and he could turn on the radio at the same time and listen to West Virginia lose to whoever it was playing.

I have not only watched, but also have played for, teams that routinely got hammered in baseball, basketball, softball, golf and bowling. (I was too scrawny to play high school football, although most folks look at me today and don’t believe that.)

My church league basketball team lost every game for eight years until one glorious Saturday when it beat the best team in the league. That was the day I began learning how to win, and I’ve hated to lose ever since — although that hasn’t kept me from rooting for teams that frequently lose. Having been an underdog myself, I tend to sympathize with them.

Anyone who doesn’t hate losing probably is a loser, and one of the ways I deal with losing is to be pragmatic about it. Maybe I wasn’t on the winning foursome in the scrambler at the golf course, but those guys only won $15 each. I had the closest to the pin on two par threes, and that’s $40.

These days, when one of my teams has its lunch eaten, I usually shrug and say, “So much for that idea,” and get on with life. I’m more concerned about things like whether my friends’ son and his fiancee will come home safely from their tours in Iraq.

The Mountaineers, the Redskins, the Pirates, the Senators, the Golden Tornado and I all have had our successes.

My father lived long enough for both of us to see West Virginia beat Penn State (something Maryland has never done) and Keyser beat Fort Hill in football on the same weekend, and I’ve now seen West Virginia kick Oklahoma’s (beast of burden) twice.

I’ve watched the Redskins win three Super Bowls (and beat the Dallas Cowboys in the last game ever to be played at Texas Stadium), and Maz’s home run to win the 1960 World Series for the Pirates was satisfying on more than one level because it beat the Yankees.

I was the junior sportswriter for the Keyser High team that won the 1962 state football championship, and that got me into the KHS Athletic Hall of Fame as a team member. I also was the anchorman on several championship bowling teams.

Sometimes, life is very, very good.

There’s also an old saying which holds that, “Some days you get the bear, and some days the bear gets you,” but it’s also true that some days, it’s enough just to outrun the other guy that the bear is chasing.

Consider this: Before the Mountaineers beat Marshall, they got two votes for the Top 25. After they beat Marshall, they got no votes at all. If I were a Marshall fan, I would be horribly insulted by that.

And there’s this item on the Internet:

Go to Google. Type in “French Military Victories.” Hit the “I Feel Lucky” tab.

The answer comes back: “Did you mean French military defeats? Your search — French military victories — did not match any documents.”

For as bad as the Pirates may be, their current losing streak goes back only 16 years.