The Phillies lost. Monaco might disappear.

I’m confused and…honestly, a little annoyed. I just watched my Phillies crash out of the playoffs again, and for third straight year I had to endure some version of the same season, only the ending somehow gets worse each time…another offseason wondering how a team this talented keeps ending up in the same fucking place.

Then I look overseas and watch entire clubs fucking evaporate. Teams with decades of history, rabid fan bases and people whose livelihoods depend on them suddenly fighting just to exist, and it makes my misery feel a little entitled. 

Monaco is the latest…but watching everything that has happened there makes me wonder how in the world one person can get enough control over something that belongs to so many people and nearly destroy the whole fucking thing.

In June, their fans were celebrating everything. By September, an organization that had just been sitting on top of French basketball was fighting for permission to exist at all because one owner’s problems had engulfed the entire club. 

 Any pro team is an entire living thing, yet one person can somehow hijack it, make it an extension of himself, and when his world falls apart everybody else gets buried underneath it.

Imagine being a Monaco fan through all of this. You have spent years caring about this team, probably way too much, because that is what sports fans do. You have memories inside that arena that have absolutely nothing to do with whoever currently signs the checks. You remember who took you to your first game. You remember the big wins. You remember some random player from fifteen years ago because he hit a shot against a team you hated, and for some reason that man now occupies permanent real estate in your brain.

Then somebody with enough money comes along and technically owns all of it. That has always been strange to me.

You can own the business, but you don’t own what the club means to people. You didn’t create every memory that existed before you walked through the door, and you don’t get to take all of those memories with you when you leave. The club was there before you. Hopefully it will be there after you.

The more I thought about that, the more I realized players should probably look at ourselves the same way.

Especially overseas players…because we are temporary.

I don’t think I fully understood that while I was playing. In my head every contract was another chapter of my career, so naturally I viewed the team through what it meant to me. I was moving to their city and learning their system while trying to convince everybody that using an import spot on me and my “particular brand of humor,” had been a sound business decision.

We also don’t get much of a transition. I would be sitting at home on Tuesday and by Thursday some guy I never met was holding a sign with my name on it at an airport six thousand miles away. A few days later I’m wearing a jersey people in that city have cared about longer than I’ve been alive.

At first, you feel like the new guy because…you are. Then somewhere along the way it changes. You know the drive to the gym without GPS and people start to recognize you. You have a favorite restaurant. The woman at the grocery store stops staring at you like a werewolf every time you walk in and the place that felt completely foreign starts becoming yours…or at least it feels like yours.

Then the season ends…

That was always a strange time for me. I spent eight months building this entire little life and then reduced it back down to a couple suitcases in one afternoon. The things I bought over the year got divided into what was important enough to drag through an airport and what some very confused future tenant was about to inherit.

Then I was gone…and the club kept playing basketball.

That took me a long time to understand emotionally. I knew how professional sports worked. I wasn’t under the impression they were going to shut down the league because Kevin Owens had moved on. I just don’t think I appreciated how temporary our place in these organizations really is.

Overseas pros usually don’t get the big return years later. Most of us are not getting invited back at halftime while the crowd rises and some beautiful tribute video plays on the scoreboard. Nobody is lowering my number from the rafters in Estonia. There probably isn’t a bronze statue being commissioned in Kosovo. If there is, please use the guy who made Ronaldo’s.

Most of us just leave, then somebody else arrives.

That realization can feel shitty if you look at it the wrong way. You can start wondering what any of it meant if the team moved on so easily. You can give everything you have to a place, play hurt, spend holidays away from your family and care way more about winning than is healthy, only to find out the following summer that they signed another guy.

I used to struggle with that, but now I think I had it backwards. Being temporary is exactly why it matters. For a small piece of that club’s history, they handed you the jersey. That’s pretty fucking cool when you think about it.

You don’t need the place to belong to you forever for your time there to mean something. I played for teams that existed long before anybody knew who the fuck I was. They had fans before I arrived, and most of those fans were still sitting in the same seats after I left. I simply got to step into that story for a little while.

So what did I leave behind?

That’s the question I probably should have asked myself more when I was playing. Did I leave the club a little better than I received it?

I like that idea much more than legacy…because legacy sounds way too important for a guy who spent a significant portion of his career trying to avoid getting replaced by another tall American with better hair and a slightly better jump shot.

When my time was over, I hope the people around that team were glad I had been there. I wanted the next guy to walk into a locker room where I had helped contribute something good. I wanted fans to remember that when I wore their city across my chest, I gave a shit.

I don’t need them telling their grandchildren about me…although that would be nice. Which is why watching an owner destroy a club bothers me so much. Ownership should be temporary too. Money can give someone control of an organization, but control and stewardship are very different things. If you are lucky enough to inherit something people already love, your responsibility should be to hand it to the next person in better shape than you found it.

Players should feel the same responsibility. We borrow these jerseys and the little piece of history we get to occupy for however long they let us stay. Then eventually somebody else walks in, hangs his clothes where mine used to be and starts his own chapter.

There is something humbling about that, but also something freeing as well.

You don’t have to spend your career trying to make every place yours forever. Just make your time there matter. Give a shit while you have the jersey. Understand what the club means to the people who will still be there when your flight leaves. Then hand it to the next guy in better condition than you got it.

Because we are temporary…the club shouldn’t be.