Why do we hate that teams that we hate?

It may seem like a simple question. They usually are rivals of our favorite team or they win too much.

I understand not liking a team because they are rivals with your team. More often than not, you and your rival are fighting for a division title or a championship. Rivals that are competitive on the field are the best kind.

On the other hand, there are those that don’t like teams because they are good. I like to call this jealous hatred. We all wish that our teams could be as successful as the Yankees or the Lakers or the Celtics have been. We all hope that our team could make the championship round of their sport and consider any result other than a win to be disappointing.

However, there is another category of why we hate teams and this goes beyond the field of play. The sleazebag category.

This group consists of the scum of the earth that also happens to play professional sports.

Your alleged murderers/killers, (Ray Lewis, Notre Dame football), rapists (Ben Roethlisberger, Kobe Bryant, Duke Lacrosse) and me-first players (Terrell Owens, Chad Johnson, Manny Ramirez).

You may not even dislike the teams that they play for, but by association, you can’t make yourself root for the same team that one of these guys play for.

With the first two categories, you can at least respect the team and players. But with this third category, you hope for failure, injury and overall unhappiness in their life.

Some may think that is going too far, but for those first two groups in the sleazebag department, it is not.

You may just watch sports for entertainment purposes and once the game are done, you tune out. But then these guys go out and are in the news for all of the wrong reasons. They give sports a bad name/image and are used for ammunition in any argument on why all athletes are given a free pass for behavior that would have any one of us locked up for a long time.

The argument can be made that you should root for the team or the name on the front of the jersey, not the back. But in these special cases, one man’s actions reflect badly on his team’s name and his teammates.