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I'm sure that there would be a lot of happy pastors, priests, rabbis, imams and religious leaders whose names I don't know if more members of their flocks brought with them to their weekly services the passion that they reserve for their favorite sports teams. Of course, I don't mean to encourage face paint in houses of worship, and I certainly don't think that it would be a good idea to serve hot dogs or beer, the latter of which may be more responsible for our passion that we'd like to admit. On the other hand, they do serve wine in church.

But maybe it's better to keep religion and sports as separate as possible, though with seemingly every athlete these days thanking the Big Guy either explicitly or through on-field gestures that might be harder than it first appears.

At any rate, I'm sitting here thinking about religion and sports because I want to describe my indoctrination into the sports world and I can't do that without thinking about the very public and deeply significant milestones that one achieves as one grows older in faith. As a Catholic, I remember very clearly my First Communion (they told us to step on the diamonds on the floor as we walked up the aisles. This was the first I'd heard about there being diamonds and was excited to what I imagined to be hundreds of diamonds glittering on the floor. I was more than a little disappointed that there weren't, in fact, diamonds on the floor. The nuns were referring to the regular old linoleum squares on the floor), and my Confirmation (for a while after my confirmation, I used my confirmation name—Daniel, after my oldest brother—and my middle name—James—in that presumptuous way that only young teenagers can. This lasted until my mother saw a letter to a girlfriend that I'd put in the mail slot for the mailman to pick up. Instead of a full name in the return address, I wrote AJDS, which with my poor handwriting looked like AIDS. "Do you really have to write that on all of your letters?" my mother asked.) I got married in the Church and therefore had to do pre-Cana. (My then-future-wife and I moved into our house on a Friday and then got up early the next morning for an all-day, intensive pre-Cana program. Oh, and somehow on our first night in our new house, we got stuck dog-sitting for our new neighbors. "Don't worry," the owner said. "He's a puppy and he chews things, but only if they're left on the floor." We'd been in the house six hours—there was a lot of crap on the floor.)

Pre-Cana was interesting because we got to see the very public endings of more-than-a-couple of engagements. I guess they'd never had serious discussions about household chores before. But I digress.

The thing is, religion has got it down when it comes to marking milestones. The same can't be said for fandom. Sure, there are the same basic steps that we all go through with our kids, buying them that first team outfit, buying them the first hat. Watching that first game together. Going to that first game together. And while these are significant moments in the relationship between parent and child, they are not commemorated in the same way that, say, a child's thirteenth birthday is in Judaism. And I'm not suggesting that they should be commemorated that way, mind you, but it would make it easier when looking back to kind of point directly to the steps in the process you took to becoming a fan. Without those ceremony rich milestones, I'm left to guess a little bit here.

My first sports-related memory is when I was five or six years old. I'd just moved to New Jersey from Illinois and I can remember listening to my best friend and next-door neighbor John talking about his favorite baseball team. We may have even been looking at some of his baseball cards at the time. He told me that his favorite baseball team was the New York Yankees.

"What's your favorite baseball team," he asked. Not a surprising question, when you think about it. But I had no answer. Up until that moment, I can't remember sports—let alone professional sports—taking up any molecule of my brain matter. My oldest brother, who was 16 at the time, played football. And I think that my second-oldest brother wrestled and maybe played football, too. But that didn't really concern me, just like my riding my tricycle, or whatever it was I did to amuse myself back then, didn't really concern them. And our father wasn't the type of a guy who'd plop down in front of the television on the weekend to watch sports. And he certainly wasn't the type of a guy to make us watch sports with him if he were the type of a guy to sit down and watch sports. Now, it wasn't like my father wasn't into sports. He played football in high school and threw the put the shot as well. He was also an avid golfer. It's just that when I was growing up, he was much more likely to be puttering in the garage or working on his honey-do list than to be sitting and watching television. Plus, you have to keep in mind that this was the early 1970s, when black and white televisions were still being manufactured in the United States, remote controls were exotic playthings, and there were only a handful of channels broadcasting anything at all. In other words, we had to find something else to do because sports weren't being force-fed to us twenty four hours a day.

So, not having a stock answer for my favorite team, I fell back on what I knew: a little geography. "Well," I replied. "I like Chicago, I guess. 'Cause I'm from close to there."

My new friend nodded sagely and flipped through his stack of baseball cards. Then you must like the Cubs, he said, showing me a particular card: A Bill Madlock 1975 card, from his days on the Cubs.

"Yeah," I said. "That's right." I would have said anything to not look foolish, but in reality, I had no idea who the guy was. But the important thing was, I had a team to root for, an identity when it came to being a fan. I had an answer for anyone who'd ever ask me from that point on.

"Let's go play baseball now, okay?" I think I said to John to move away from the subject of teams and cards and onto something I felt more comfortable with: playing sports.

A few days later, I told my father that I was a Cubs fan. He gave a hearty laugh, probably because he knew the brutal truth of what it meant—and means—to be a Cubs fan. Then he looked at me with a serious face. "I have some bad news about that," he said. "The Cubs have moved from Chicago to Manila. They're not the Cubs any more."

"They're not?" I asked.
"Nope," he said, barely able to contain his laughter at his own joke now. "Now they're called the Manila folders!"

It was years before I finally got that joke.