DI Couches and the Utah Jazz: Life as a Tortured Fan

ICYMI: Read the Grades of Game Three by clicking here and review Larry Miller’s opinion of Sunday bball by clicking here.

Being a Tortured Fan, and a Jazz fan, is like DI couches.

Hear me out.

All your married life, you’ve had a futon. And the futon sucks. It’s so uncomfortable. It’s not padded. It’s hard and rocky and rough and you watched a million movies and a million sporting events and a million TV shows and you are pretty sure you have had a million back aches because of it. The futon is likened to the Ty Corbin and Trey Burke Jazz – it’s just the worst.

This image conjures up nightmares for days.

So you finally decide to give in and get a couch. Not a new couch, no, you can’t afford that, but something from the DI will be just fine. Then, your wife promises, we’ll upholster it and it’ll look amazing. You start getting excited, just like when Gordon Hayward and Quin Snyder started running the show.

You borrow your grandpa’s truck, grab a couch from the DI, and are all set to move it in. That’s when you remember you have stairs. Steep stairs, in an old, 1800s former mansion where you live in the upstairs apartment.

Three freaking flights of stairs.

But you have the couch. So you got to at least try. It’s after 10 PM and it’s just you and the Mrs. As you prepare to lift the couch, you realize for the first time that it has a hide-a-bed in it. You grunt, lift, and up you go. It’s a challenge, sure, but small ones like an injury to an important Jazz player and barely missing out on the playoffs.

You are up a flight of stairs, feeling real good and ready to keep going, and then you are stuck. The couch is stuck. Stuck. It won’t move another inch, but then it does move another inch, taking the paint and drywall with it. You rearrange. You try over the banister. You try vertically. You try for an hour. And it always ends up stuck. You were so close, and you tried so hard, and this sounds awfully familiar to the timeline of a Utah Jazz season or game, right?

So what do you do? You bring it back down the stairs, back into the truck, and back to the DI but now the DI is closed because it’s close to midnight and it’s one of those raining-buckets-in-Utah summer nights and you have no idea what to do with this darn couch so you drive around for awhile, calling people to see if you can put it in their garage but you aren’t making any progress and now you are hungry and wishing you didn’t have a stupid couch in the bed of your grandpa’s truck that you have to return that night.

So you end up back at the DI, driving to the side where you can drop stuff off, and you just leave it. Yup, you just leave it. In the rain. Letting it soak up the rain.

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We spent $29.00 a ticket to sit on the highest row of the upper bowl. At 5 PM, we left our home, dropped The Baby off to family to babysit, grabbed Cafe Rio to eat with Family, left their place at 7 PM, paid $10 to park in a muddy field, and walked, with Stockton/Malone socks on proud display, with thousands with a buzz ringing in our ears for our Utah Jazz in a home playoff game.

We watched as they unveiled a #TakeNote banner across three lower bowl sections. We sang to the beautiful, slow rendition of the national anthem, and then got chills when our starting five was announced.

Let’s go!!! #TakeNote pic.twitter.com/3OsbYzpmce

— Utah Jazz (@utahjazz) April 22, 2017

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It’s pathetic, sure, but more emotions than ever before in your life bubbled as the game was about to start because of the beautiful atmosphere created. Who cares if you got teary-eyed; the blood that pumps the Utah Jazz runs through us.

And the first quarter was everything you could hope for, plus more. We didn’t sit down until we nailed our first bucket. We screamed with each Hayward three and freaked out when we realized he had 21 points, a franchise playoff record, and was single-handily tied with the Clippers after one quarter of play.

We got nervous as the Clippers chipped away. We got frustrated when calls didn’t go our way. We stood and screamed and yelled for an entire fourth quarter. We were stunned when the Clippers took a late lead. We faked our way to believe we still had a chance and chanted De-Fense when no one else would and tried to positively will the team to the improbable. And then we walked back to our car, in silence, after a wasted night.

We know that feeling too well; the walk in defeat is sobering. You know the feeling too. You are shocked, disappointed, saddened, heartbroken, angry. One boy kept asking his dad how it happened. And even more crushing, why? I heard a group of college students behind us bemoaning how they had saved up all season so they could get great playoff seats. One girl behind us was trying to be positive and reprimanded her date for being a “Negative Nancy.” Someone was talking about the free shirts they gave to all 19,911 in the arena. They read Take Note, but Take Note of what, the boy asked, a loss? A lot of people grumbled with their shuffled steps, heads down and down trodden. That’s when conversation turned to the chores we needed to accomplish this weekend, which leads to thinking about the upcoming work week, and our shoulders dropped even further.

We got in the car, sat in silence for thirty minutes as we waited to get out of the mudbath parking lot. Once we hit the road, we finally let it all pour out and rehashed the highest of highs and the lowest of lows that game provided. We voiced our frustrations, said mean things about the refs and Clips, and wished for different outcomes. But no bad words could be spoken about our team. It didn’t matter that we’d gone six minutes in the fourth quarter without a basket, the refs blew this game and Chris Paul is like a spoiled child that gets away with anything he wants. Finally we picked up the Baby Boy and got home right before the clock struck 1 AM.

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This is the diary entry of A Tortured Fan, who lives this outcome far more often than the opposite. After such an emotional night and an emotional game, The Tortured Fan has to come back to earth, gather their emotions, only to get the emotions back out there a day later for another game.

After the frustrations spill out, what happens? You start looking for another couch. News spread that Blake Griffin will be out the rest of the playoffs, which creates another dose of optimism to get you through it again. Rudy might return soon. You read about how the technology let a blind boy see the Jazz for the first time Friday night. And then you think, we have been in both losses, having chances to win just not being able to execute. We’re close. We’re not stuck. We can do it.

We haven’t taken off our Jazz socks yet, even slept in them. We put out our Jazz flag to get geared up for another go at this wonderful life called fanhood.

And we get to do it all over again on Sunday.