Quote, unquote: On pulling for the underdog

“As a kid I was like the patron saint of lost causes in sports. I cheered for the Whalers, the Seattle Mariners, and the New Orleans Saints when they were the worst franchise in football. I think about that a lot because the passion of sports fans is more emotional than rational. It’s about appealing to peoples’ hearts as much as their heads. These were teams that rarely won, but there was something in the struggle of an underdog that appealed to me, even as a kid. So while other kids were putting up posters of George Brett and Wayne Gretzky, I was asking my mom to find me posters of Mark Langston and Ron Francis.”

-- Steve Maich, publisher and editor of the forthcoming Sportsnet magazine from Rogers, quoted in an article in the current issue (August 29) of Marketing magazine, out today.