Sporting KC in 2024 - A Familiar Cycle
The 2024 Sporting KC Season Evokes Blurry Memories / The 2024 Sporting Sauce Diaries Entry #5
I would really like for Sporting Kansas City to succeed. I like the team, I like the players who make up the team, and I want them to do well. I try to gin up the righteous fury that other people feel about the team and I can’t do it. In fact (and I blame this on my proximity to the Charlie Weis/David Beaty era of Kansas Jayhawks football when I was in the marching band in college) I find myself even more endeared to the team in their suffering. I do not wish ill on these people and I do not resent these people. I want, more than anything, for this painful stretch to result in a player making the best of the chance that they get, or for something to just click into place for a struggling player. I would like to see Stephen Afrifa get an honest shot at MLS minutes now that he’s in his second year. I would like to see Khiry Shelton have a Steve Clark or Nick Hagglund-esque late-career swan song season with the time he gets in the next few months. I would like to see everything turn around and the team salvage something out of 2024 like they did in 2023.
The third thing does not appear to be in the cards. This is going to be a bad year. At this point, we’re hoping that Sporting outpaces San Jose for the 28th-place spot, maybe makes a run in the Open Cup, and I suppose gets out of the group stage in the Leagues Cup at least, and that at least a few of the players on Sporting Kansas City show promise for the future. This is eerily similar to the way that I approached KU Football during my time in college - Win multiple games, outpace Iowa State for 9th place in the conference, and hope that one of our standout players is able to work his way into a chance at an NFL training camp spot that eventually turns into a good career where he manages a punt return in the playoffs nearly a decade later.
Kansas Football and Sporting Kansas City have swapped places in my soul, a fact which has colored these sad Sporting matches with a sort of wistful, nostalgic tint, akin to how I fondly remember the awful Sodexho sheet pizzas we’d eat for lunch on the last days of each session at the summer camp where I worked as a teenager. Miserable, yes, but familiar.
I noticed another miserable, but familiar feeling rising back up surrounding the game against the Galaxy on Saturday. I spent the hours preceding the 9:30pm kickoff curious. What was I going to look for during this match? What was I showing up for tonight? What got me interested even if the dreams of a playoff spot, let alone a Cup run, let alone a Supporters Shield have been all but dashed in mid-June? I might not enjoy it, but I’d find a way to enjoy something about it, probably. This was to be a venture in solitude. I went out with friends to a bar to watch the season opener, back when we were all excited and optimistic, but I don’t want to put anyone else through the whole rigamarole here with me.
All of this - the solitude, the hedging, the intense wanting for this blue-colored entity to pull through and subsequent disappointment, it reminded of a recursive childhood experience: The Sonic Cycle.
I was born in 1995, which to some meant I never spent a day conscious during the golden era of Sonic the Hedgehog. I personally think there were some good outputs under his name up to about the mid-2000s (those Game Boy Advance games are perfectly good), but regardless, the era of my most intensive dedication to the little fellow coincided exactly with his darkest times.
But I wanted to see him (Sonic, I mean) succeed worse than anything. I would get on the GameFAQs message boards and trade posts with my fellow fans convincing ourselves that the next game was to be our boy’s return to the forefront of gaming. We’d read the magazine previews, send hate mail to the GamesRadar editor that inevitably dropped a 5/10 on the game, and, yes, I may have penned a little fanfiction about him.
My friend Rob has a theory that some kids attach themselves so intensely to Sonic because he's an easily digestible figure of both virtue (he cares about his friends, the environment, doing the right thing, et cetera) and rebellion against unjust authority in a fashion similar to another significant figure in the lives of many American children, but delivered to us in a fashion that required less reading and getting dressed up in stuffy clothing on Sunday mornings to appreciate. Despite being beset upon by reflections of the problems facing boys growing into adolescence, like rivalries (with allies such as Knuckles or mysterious figures like Shadow the Hedgehog), annoying girls (his arms-length, but respectful relationship with Amy Rose, who is a pink hedgehog who carries a big mallet everywhere), and automatonization (the existence of Metal Sonic, an evil robot version of the regular Sonic), Sonic takes everything in stride, with an admirable sense of aplomb and elan. He also taught us about bodily autonomy.
I so badly wanted him to do well. I wanted to take one of his games home, play it all the way through, and feel that the Hedgehog’s character was well-reflected by the product in which he starred. Yet, the cycle repeated about the same way every time. It happened at least once yearly, if not more - I’d save up allowance, I’d cajole one of my parents into driving me to a store that sold video games, in many cases I’d have to ask the clerk to get the new Sonic game out of a big glass case1, I’d hand over my $50, I’d spend the entire ride home reading that copy on the back of the case and try to convince myself it’d be different. He turns into a werewolf in this one. He has a sword in this one. He romances a human woman in this one. His heart’s constantly on fire in this one. It’ll be the one that the critics, the encroaching trolls from the other GameFAQs boards, the friends who had long abandoned the Sonic hype train, were all wrong about.
I’d then get home, I’d put the disc into the machine, and I’d get disappointed. The werewolf bits were tedious and poorly-built. He didn’t need a sword, his whole back was built out of little swords. You had to get through hours of running errands in a little town before you even met the human woman. The entirety of the game in which his heart was constantly on fire was an extended tech demo of what the then-new Nintendo Wii could theoretically do and even its best parts grew boring with repetition. I’d sit there, alone, on my couch, controller in hand, and think “Maybe the next one will be better,” knowing full well that love would draw me out to experience it, regardless of whether logic would accompany it in the thrust. This cycle drove many of us to hysterics.
—
Saturday evenings of 2024 evoke echoes of that emotional cycle – It’s miserable, but familiar.
This was different from place to place. The big box stores like Best Buy and Target kept games behind a big glass case, so I’d have to speak the name of the new game aloud, feeling how much of a mistake I was making with every syllable. There are layers of humiliation to a sentence like “I want Sonic Rivals 2” – I want, two words simply dictating that I was to use the limited agency that I could wield as a twelve year-old, lifting myself up so high as to make the tumble that the following three words brought all the worse. Sonic Rivals – not even one of the main-line games. One of the spin-off games, only available on the PSP. Then, probably worst, 2 – Which reflects that I apparently was so charmed by the original that I wanted to experience more of it. This was true! I enjoyed the bog-standard competence of the first game so much that I went after its sequel. The benefit to having to ask at one of the big box stores, though, was that there was a good chance the person unlocking the case didn’t know about games. The person could’ve taken a job at the Target electronics department because they wanted a discount on SD cards, if there was any real thrust behind them taking the job at all.
GameStop, though, I couldn’t escape. Their model involved less verbal self-effacement (one could simply find a game’s case on the shelf, take it up to the counter, and the worker would go to their back room and procure the accompanying disc or cartridge), but their staff all chose to seek employment at a video game retailer, and thus had some knowledge of the Hedgehog’s recent troubles quality-wise. They’d look at me with pity, and I don’t think they did it maliciously, I think they did it out of sympathy, many of them wanted to believe in the possibility of the Hedgehog’s return to prominence as much as I did, I’m sure, but they were wisened and experienced enough to know that it wouldn’t come from the one in which he turned into a werewolf, or the one in which he had a sword, or the one in which he romanced a human woman, or the one in which his heart was constantly on fire.