Raising sports fans: Nurture vs. nature

As a proud Twin Cities native and father of two young boys, I feel it is my duty to bestow upon my sons a blue-collar work ethic; the ability to think (not spend) their way out of trouble, and incredible patience.

That's right: I have raised them as Minnesota sports fans, even though they were born and bred here in California, where my family resides.

For years I've beamed with pride as my kids strutted into classrooms in their Adrian Peterson and Justin Morneau jerseys, and as they learned to boo the Yankees before they could spell their own names. When they get a bit older, make no mistake about it, they will learn who Norm Green is, and why he still sucks.

I have happily signed over a portion of my kids' college fund every year to DirecTV for the rights to watch the Vikings every Sunday, and for Dick and Bert to baby-sit the kids from the television many nights in the summer. Yearly pilgrimages home to Target Field and The Barn are as required as trips to the dentist.

But speaking of pulling teeth -- given the events of the past year or two, a haunting worry has been keeping me up nights. Has raising two California kids as Minnesota sports fans become a form of child abuse?

I don't know that I can do it anymore. I don't know that they should have to suffer like this. They don't have 1987 and 1991 to recall as their beloved Twins get clobbered every night. They never knew the halcyon days of Kevin Garnett, as they watch today's Timberwolves depend on a Spaniard's wounded knee just to get them back to .500.

And now, I am really starting to see signs I don't like. When my preschooler wears his Ralph Sampson Gophers basketball jersey, despite being plenty tall, he gets jostled a little too easily away from the cookie basket at snack time. Recently, the kids demanded that my wife and I pay for a new covered fort for them to play in, or they will run away from home.

When we lived in Los Angeles, until last year, it was easy to preserve the Minnesota loyalty. Tinseltown is quite certainly the worst sports town in the country, as people are too busy putting plastic surgeon's kids through college and washing their cars every night (OK, paying someone to wash their cars every night) to bother with un-chic things like sports. Until the playoffs, anyway -- then everyone is a lifelong fan.

But since we moved to the Bay Area, my task has gotten trickier. There are real fans here.

The Oakland A's invented Moneyball (which the Twins will be returning to any day now). The San Francisco Giants play in a beautiful stadium, and are a regular contender based on great pitching and defense, just as the all-knowing Tom Kelly once ordained.

And this season the 49ers were a silly mistake away from the Super Bowl, like our purple just a few years ago, though San Francisco's opponent was not being bribed to maim them, so far as we know.

So I write to my beloved hometown paper from half a nation away with a simple plea to our sports teams: help. I am petrified of losing my kids. I need a team -- any team -- to pull itself out of this morass.

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