Perhaps this should come with a yellow, diamond-shaped warning sign: Contradiction Ahead.
 
Sports fans have to be the most forgiving, most longsuffering, most charitable, most tolerant group on Earth. The majority of athletes avoid or ignore them, figuring that simply meeting them is in the same category as stepping on wet chewing gum. Most athletes don't like signing autographs for them -- unless the fans pay for the privilege. Few athletes recognize or care that the fans who underwrite their salaries never will make in a lifetime what they make in a year. Athletes seldom understand that a fan might -- might -- get his name in the newspaper once in 50 years, if he writes a letter to the editor or miraculously bowls a 300 game or gets a hole-in-one or dies.
 
Yet fans still stand at the fence or shout from the stands, hoping their favorite athlete will take notice and sign a ball or a picture or scrap of paper. They wear the jock's jersey or hockey sweater or some T-shirt proclaiming superhero status for this mere mortal who has been over-marketed. They buy merchandise and claim to be "the biggest fan ever." They  listen faithfully to games or matches or races on the radio, event after event, day after day, season after season, knowing they never will meet their heroes. They're grade-school kids, working moms, trapped-in-the-mundane middle managers, retirees.

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