ROWDY TIME SPORTS

When did the term “suck” become such a casual term that it can be used to describe anything that’s not perfect?

In the wake of the end of the World Series and the Boston Red Sox winning it all for the third time in 10 years, so many Rangers fans just had to take to the Twitterverse and likely other forums to lament about 2011 and how this team has still never reached the mountaintop. And it too often resulted in one term that grinds my gears: Despite all the winning they have done since 2012, the Rangers suck.

Now, keep two things in mind. First, we are not exactly talking about a word here that, when used in this particular context, has a flat out definition that we can go to Webster’s to look up.

Also, I myself have not been averse to using the word myself – especially in my other job reviewing bad TV shows in comedic online videos. Another online reviewer that I love watching, Lewis “Linkara” Lovhaug, does a show about bad comic books where his trademark line at the end of each review is “This comic sucks!” So don’t think I’m a prude in this area.

Keep in mind that we both play caricatures of ourselves, but still, we use that term to describe something that is absolutely flat out terrible, like the Spider-Man “One More Day” story or that godawful “Allen Gregory” animated series.

One particular “fan” on twitter, however, kept going on that the Rangers absolutely “suck” because they still have never won any world championships. I took great offense to this, I needed to stop being such a drama queen that this person still loves the Rangers but is only admitting that “they’re not very good.” Again, a team that made the World Series twice since the turn of the decade and has at least been in contention for the postseason every year since is “not a good team,” according to this “fan” that claims to still love them.

Sorry if I don’t agree with this person’s take. The term “suck” does not just mean “not very good” in my view; it is something much stronger, along the lines of “you are absolutely terrible, worthless and not worth anybody’s time.”

I can’t help but remember a scene from the remake of “The Bad News Bears,” when, after the team’s second loss in as many games, one player calculates that at least they didn’t make as many mistakes as they did in the previous game, at which point another kid says, “So we went from suck to stink!”

In other words, there’s a scale of judging good or bad performance, even when using colloquial terms, and “suck” is pretty much at the bottom. Or rather, it used to be, and now too many people just throw it out at any time.

Apparently now there are only two possibilities. You’re either a champion or you suck. By that logic, “Citizen Kane” sucks as a movie because it didn’t win the Best Picture Oscar.

Why am I writing about all this? Maybe just because it’s cathartic for me to vent my frustration about a fan base that continues to see the glass half empty no matter what. A fan base that continues to act like the team they supposedly love has been intentionally ruining THEIR lives by not having gotten that final out, like the people on the field somehow don’t want that championship as much as the people drinking beer in the stands do.

How would you like it if your kid and his/her Little League team was constantly berated by other kids and even parents with cries of “you suck” because they didn’t win a championship?

Does it make sense to be frustrated that we haven’t yet seen the ultimate prize for the Rangers? Of course it does.

But this team does NOT suck, and I will say it’s a sign of elitism and arrogance to say they do. Ask the people down in Houston just how bad our team “sucks” right now.

I dealt with too many years the previous decade of bad baseball, and bad Mavericks basketball the decade before that, to believe I know what “suck” looks like.

And maybe we all need to think twice before using that or other such derogatory terms.

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