Yet, oddly enough, neither is the National Football League.
Always a leader in the area of sports labor relations, the NFL has opened the season with "replacement" referees.
That's "scabs" in the language of a more enlightened, proud, and self-assertive labor movement.
From SI's write-up on the team:
Watching the Bears practice this preseason, you think, They've finally joined the NFL mainstream! They got big at receiver, and they made peace with the running back they have to have—and have to have happy—in order to stand a chance of unseating the Packers atop the NFC North.
Sometimes there's a thin line between cheering and hate.
I was reminded of this last Saturday night, when I watched what passed for the Michigan-Alabama game with some Michigan State fans who claimed they were rooting for the Wolverines. You know—Big Ten pride and all.
But if they were, they weren't putting much into it. As one of the Spartans explained to me: "If they get creamed, I won't cry about it."
Michigan got creamed. My friend didn't cry about it.
I'm a Duck. And save for a few curious offshoots, so is the rest of my family, which means that for as long as I can remember, college football has been an integral part of my life. I resisted it for a while—most of my high school years were spent wearing dark clothing and vehemently claiming to not give a flying fuck about sports—but I eventually grew to love it. (I've even managed to convert a few friends into joining my hysteria).
Son of the much-revered, country-music artist Hank Williams, Junior had been linked to Monday Night Football since 1989 when the think tank at ABC joined forces with the outlaw country caricature, airing a reworked version of the 1984 single "All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight" into the opening of its weekly football game. "All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night" was featured on Monday nights for over 20 years—the last five of which were on ESPN—and was undoubtedly one of the easiest gigs in sports. Each new rendition was only a slightly tweaked version from the week before, altering a few lame rhymes to sync up with the teams competing that night.
Just so.
So why all the love for the Bears and the football season? I'm a sports fan, but most of all I'm a baseball fan.
And it's baseball season. Football season doesn't begin until the last out of the World Series.
Still, there's no denying this is a Bears town. And there's nothing more aggravating about Chicago—not waiting for CTA buses, not pie crusts stuffed with cheese and called "pizza," not the nonexistent spring that goes straight from winter to summer, not even "fall-off-the-bone" ribs that have been boiled and slathered with sauce so that they're indistinguishable from meat-flavored Jell-O.
All the love for the Bears—perhaps the least worthy and certainly the most overblown sports franchise in town—drives me crazy.
Welcome to the party, all my rowdy friends,
A Monday night bash on ESPN!
The game of the week, is about to ignite
Time to kick it off under the lights
The pressure is rising, strap in and hold tight
We're gonna blow the roof off this place tonight
Ready!
C'mon and get ready
I mean really ready
Are you ready for some football?
Well, are you? Because for this week's Variations on a Theme, Reader staff will be writing about all things football (the North American kind, that is). So pull up a Barcalounger, crack open a beer, and sit back while you . . . read a bunch of blog posts on the Internet.
And in case you missed it, here's Back to School Week, last week's Variations on a Theme.