As he listens to old men who lament, “I’m never going to live to see a Super Bowl,” Bruce Graham, a playwright, has begun to wonder about himself.
“I’m making sure I take my anti-cholesterol medicine now,” Graham, 58, said with a laugh Wednesday, “so it will give me another year.”
The mediocre Philadelphia Eagles (6-9) have fired coach Chip Kelly ahead of Sunday’s finale against the New York Giants. All of Philadelphia’s pro teams could miss the playoffs for a second consecutive season. Defeat, so often excruciating here because the teams were good enough to break your heart, has lately become something else: grim and routine and fetid with historic ineptitude.
The Phillies needed a final-game victory to avoid 100 losses last season while posting the worst record in baseball. The tanking 76ers were 3-31 through Wednesday and threatening the NBA record for incompetence that they established by going 9-73 in 1972-73. At their current pace, the Flyers will miss the NHL playoffs for the third time in four seasons. The Union of Major League Soccer have also contracted ordinariness, as if it were contagious.
“You work hard all day so you can come home and watch a great game,” said Carmen Lerro, 54, whose family has been in the meat business here since 1885. “But they all stink. You want to change the channel and watch something else.”
Matt Butler, 29, sat at the Penrose Diner in South Philadelphia on Wednesday morning and said he had inoculated himself against despair. He simply chose not to root for any of the local teams.
“I know better,” he said. “They drive you to drink.”
At the same time, so much else about Philadelphia is upbeat, inviting. It is widely considered among the most livable cities in the country. It is a foodie capital. It is the first World Heritage City in the United States. Pope Francis visited in September, and the Democrats will nominate their 2016 presidential candidate here in July.
The celluloid “Rocky” franchise, too, has been revived with the warmly received “Creed.” But that is the movies. Lately, in the sports of real life, there have been no triumphal runs up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, only the stumbles and falls and numbing futility of defeat.
“In a way, isn’t that kind of typical Philly?” said Graham, whose play “The Philly Fan” knowingly depicts the proud and wounded nature of this sports-obsessed city. “It’s never going to go our way 100 percent on anything. We’re going up in one direction, down in another. When you look at the peak of our teams, in the ’70s, the early ’80s, the city was a dump. Some cities have it all; in Philly we’re lucky to take what we can get.”
Can more than three decades have passed since the glory days of 1980, when the Phillies, the Eagles, the Sixers and the Flyers all played for their league championships? Has it really been 30 years since Villanova played a nearly perfect game and won an unlikely NCAA basketball title over Georgetown?
Sure, the local teams have had their moments of brightness amid the frequent gloom. The Phillies won the World Series as recently as 2008. And a whole country was entranced in 2014 by Mo’ne Davis, a Philadelphian who became the first girl to pitch a shutout at the Little League World Series.
There was a hopeful moment, too, over Labor Day weekend, when Temple defeated Penn State in football for the first time in 74 years. During his brother’s wedding ceremony in the Bahamas, Patrick Oldham of suburban Merion Station, Pennsylvania, urgently checked his smartphone for updates.
“This is the greatest moment of my life,” Oldham, 33, a Temple graduate, told me when the score went final. He meant the game, not the wedding.
But that victory was a taunt, a tease, a mocking reminder that, in Philadelphia, winning too often signals that more losing is on the way. No U.S. professional team has lost more games than the Phillies, who crossed the 10,000-defeat barrier in 2007. The longest-tenured pro coach in Philadelphia is now Brett Brown of the inglorious Sixers, who, as of Wednesday, had won 39 games and lost 158 in two and a half seasons.
“This is the only city where, arguably, the two best franchises we ever had moved — the Athletics and the Warriors,” said Frank Fitzpatrick, 66, who writes a column about local sports history in The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Whatever the reason, the end result is, we’re all screwed up psychologically.”
The World Series parade for the Phillies in 2008 somehow felt peculiar, abnormal, Fitzpatrick said. The severe losing, the whining and pleading and complaining, that feels more natural.
“This is who we are,” Fitzpatrick, a native, said. “We don’t seem to have much mediocrity in sports. We’re either pretty good or terrible at historical levels.”
The Eagles have not won an NFL title since 1960, before there was a Super Bowl. Meanwhile, their NFC East brethren, the Cowboys, Giants and Redskins, have won 12 Super Bowl trophies among them. This presents a special kind of anguish, given that Philadelphia, once the financial and political capital of the United States, has ceded its primacy to its neighbors.
“There’s a tendency to think of ourselves as being in the shadow of New York and Washington,” said Edward G. Rendell, 71, a former mayor of Philadelphia and governor of Pennsylvania who sits on a television panel that critiques each Eagles’ game. “It convinces people that maybe we can’t do this or can’t do that.”
Still, loyalty will supersede misery, said Diane Razzano, 50, as she entered the Penrose Diner in a Flyers sweatshirt. “You love these teams unconditionally, like your children,” she said.
And a city’s psyche will continue to rise and fall with their success and failure. “It’s great that the pope came,” said Brian Pollock, 34, a steamfitter, “but personally I’d take the Eagles winning the Super Bowl.”
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