The New York Mets, Jets and Knicks: Futility for a Fan

It's the New York Mets, New York Jets, and New York Knicks. It's a familiar refrain in New York. It's the Mets, Jets, and Knicks. What is the question, you ask, that would generate such a response? The question concerns the most frustrating teams in the country. If you ask the thousands of fans who place their allegiance with these three franchises, the rapid-fire response is... It's the Mets, Jets, and Knicks.

There is no more futile feeling than to live in one of the greatest cities in the world, and root for the Mets, Jets, and Knicks. No triumvirate cumulatively represents more frustration. Why arbitrarily select those three teams? The sports fans in New York are divided fairly systemically. Fans seem to line up in baseball and football for either the more traditional Yankees and Giants, or the less historical and traditional Mets and Jets. In basketball, the New Jersey Nets arrived too late on the scene in the metropolitan area to threaten the Knicks fan base. And hockey in New York is sometimes popular, but appeals to a smaller hardcore group. Hence the Mets, Jets, and Knicks trying triumvirate.

Let's be arbitrary once again and go back 30 years. For most ardent sports fans, the age of ten is a nice round number for escalating interest in sports. If you're not interested by then, you probably won't be rabid. Before ten? Who can remember that far back? So then, for a 40-year old fan of these three squalid squads, you have exactly one championship in 90 cumulative seasons to celebrate. Here's a bonus. You haven't gone broke buying "Championship Season" DVD's or other commemorative tidbits since 1986 when the New York Mets last won. The Knicks, famously, haven't won since 1973...that's 35 years ago. You know it's bad news when your heroes from that last championship season are passing away regularly. The Jets find new ways annually to be disappointing, frustrating, agonizing, and absolutely clueless. They haven't won since 1969...going on 40 years now, and continue to pay for the one miracle they had bestowed upon them.

All three have had their moments, which many fans claim only sharpens the pain. The Knicks figured a good time to challenge for a championship, and the only time in the last three and a half decades, was during an era when the best player who ever lived was collecting trophies for the Chicago Bulls. The year the Knicks finally had a chance without Michael Jordan in the way, they lost to the Houston Rockets...a team not to be confused with, well, any team that was really, really talented. The Jets? The Jets are an enigma of science fiction proportions. So not only are Jet fans consistently pained, they are confused and often frightened. They've been close several times, but manage to package everything one could do wrong into a handful of plays that gift wrap games for opponents. The Mets have squandered a litany of seasons, the last two most agonizingly, coughing up big leads both times, while spewing the implausible "we know what we have to do" quote over and over. That sound from Met fans was a collective "well, then, what exactly is holding you up?"

There is no sympathy, either, for the Met-Jet-Knick fan. Most people around the country will scoff at the notion of fan hardship in New York, what with the Yankees' history and the Giants' three Super Bowls. The Philadephia native will tell you that before last year, the Phillies, Eagles, 76ers, and Flyers combined for 100 futile attempts at glory in a row...25 each from 1983.

So as the calendar rolls toward spring and a new baseball season emerges, it's time for fans of all major league teams to allow their insecurities and frustrations to surface again. Once more, you'll hear Chicago Cubs fans lament a century of futility. You'll hear Cleveland Indian fans bemoan their collective fates as the Tribe seemingly last won a championship when real Indians roamed the plains. There are others with less drought, but still painful gaps since champions rode in a parade...the San Francisco Giants, the Texas Rangers, the Milwaukee Brewers.

Met-Jet-Knick fans will tell you, however, that the Chicago had the Bulls, San Francisco had Joe Montana, Milwaukee has beer, and Cleveland is, well, Cleveland.