Exactly Whose Fantasy Is This?

It is difficult to pinpoint when fantasy football played on the Internet in a multitude of leagues on countless sites morphed from new frivolity in the late nineties to tiresome endeavor in the early aughts to mild annoyance in the late aughts to bane of one's life in this decade, surely anathema to more than just me. The breathless coverage on TV and the Web of the most trivial fantasy tidbit that created a gossamer of pseudo urgency is one jumping-off point. Cool became uncool, period. (I get my entire wardrobe from JCPenney, and have since birth, so believe me when I say I know the ins and outs of uncool.)

Note: For our purposes here, college and pro pick'em games fall outside quote-unquote fantasy football. At its core, pick'em is basic gambling sans bets, vigs, teasers, parlays, and 1-800-BETS-OFF.

As with many things—Facebook after unwanted friend requests from grandma and loser cousins, Huey Lewis and the News after Fore!, imbibing responsibly after college—when fantasy football became popular, okay, wildly popular, it immediately began to lose its cachet, payoff, and allure, at least it did for me, its significance fading like the forlorn hope of a Caucasian sprinter upon the firing of a starter pistol. It became a chore, not a hobby, labor, not leisure. How did fantasy football enrich life one iota in any way, shape, or form? Doing a cursory cost-benefit analysis, the costs (time, consternation, embarrassment) far outweighed the benefits (zilch). Money? Eh. Pride gained or burnished from beating contemporaries? Why is your pride manacled to the silly and the unimportant? I mean, why care? Deign to care? No. Just no.

Blues Traveler has a song called "The Hook," and the song's takeaway line is, "The hook brings you back." Eventually, you don't go back to fantasy football, because fantasy football has no hook.

Picking an imaginary football team and half caring how it performed was acceptable when I was fifteen. Back then, I was fanatical about not missing WCW Monday Nitro, a splendid chess player for a non-Russki, and rolling (hard) in an '88 Taurus with "187" on the license plate; obviously, there was a plethora of voids in my life, and fantasy football filled one, while tears filled the remainder nightly. But anyone thirty or older approaching fantasy football with a modicum of seriousness and diligence is categorically, manifestly _______. (Fill in the blank with your own adjective, and we'll see if we're on the same page, utilizing the idiom that every analyst is contractually obligated to force into any conversation about football, whether applicable or not.) The word ping-ponging in my brain is pathetic. Pathetic is the operative word.

Tainted and impure, in continuous decline, and overrun by fools and squatters, fantasy football as it is now is not my idea of a fantasy. It's safe to say that a wet dream shouldn't solely consist of the achievements and glory of others. That's not a wet dream—that's sleeping in someone else's rancid wet spot.

How did the toothpaste get out of the tube, becoming all crusty and unusable?

Allow me to throw a fistful of red challenge flags. The nadirs:

1. ESPN's insistence on pandering to fantasy players with Sunday morning shows wholly devoted to last-minute fantasy decisions. Whom to start, whom to sit, how to become the biggest pariah in the office. ESPN actually employs a fellow whose entire existential identity, worth, and niche are sadly tethered to fantasy football. The following is not a joke: His nickname is The Talented Mr. Roto. He should go by his birth name: I Will Always Pay For Sex.

2. "I have that guy on my fantasy team." "That dude's on my fantasy squad."

3. Another downward trend perpetrated by the Worldwide Leader is projecting a player's stats for the upcoming season. Example: So-and-so QB will throw for 2,711 yards, 23 TDs, 14 INTs, and rush for 2 TDs. What's so irksome and appreciably ridiculous about a stat line like this is the 2,711 yards. Just round it up, down, or off. 2,700 yards. Neat, even, sensible. 2,711 yards demonstrably says, "Hey, look, we're spitballing here. We're just making this horseshit up as we go."

4. The League, a laugh-free sitcom on FX about thirtysomethings in a fantasy football league who take it entirely too seriously. What a piece of dross. The feeble lady in the theater who uttered, "Well, that was a stinker," after No Country for Old Men abruptly cut to black actually intended her comment for this show—whose renewal for a second season in 2010 and a third season this fall are a mystery and subsequent investigation reserved for the Warren Commission. A limited premise, F-list actors, flat writing obsessed with the scatological and crude sexuality, and a brain-dead, pointless character drifting in and out of scenes named Taco make this a TV show to TiVo only when Extreme Couponing and Confessions: Animal Hoarding are in repeats.

5. Monitors monitoring message boards. The Internet was once a dreamy escape from the real world, a soothing retreat into the charm of total online lawlessness. Anything went. Anything. A death threat was but a few keystrokes away. You could say anything, defame anyone, threaten to destroy anyplace. It was sublime! Not only admissible, libel and intimidation were almost encouraged. Character assassination was done in the name of good, clean fun. And these posts on the message board in your respective fantasy league would remain there permanently. No trolls, no flagging, no blocking IP addresses. Time was when you could call someone, say, a spunk dumpster, in the spirit of competition, and a third party wouldn't lamely grouse, needlessly butt in, and intrusively remove the spunk dumpster in question. But everything changed. Now you can't even make a "He registered at Bed Bath & Rape" comment on a ESPN.com story about Ben Roethlisberger getting hitched before its prompt removal in less than three minutes.

Fifteen years ago, I caught a stark, numbing glimpse of my future if I continued taking fantasy football as humorlessly and deliberately as I was. In the fall of 1996, I started a fantasy football league with two classmates, my dad, and our neighbor Steve [the spelling of his surname escapes me; phonetically, it was mick-oh-la-check]. Steve was in his late thirties, single, a pharmaceutical sales rep, and too cheap to pay for cable. He would speak lovingly about the dozens of unopened Starting Lineups in boxes in his basement, as if they were his children. His pockmarked face had a conspicuous case of rosacea that would make Bobby Flay, well, blush, and his obnoxious, grating laugh sounded like a donkey violently vomiting. In 1998, he flirted with the idea of a mail-order bride after his first date with the widowed mother of two in the house on the other side of ours didn't lead to any stank on his crank, nor a second date. As for my classmates, one bought his grandma's beat-to-hell, beige Ford Tempo for $1,500 and then dropped two grand on alarm and sound systems, while the other had a "PIMPIN' AIN'T EASY" bumper sticker in the back window of his lemon, the very lemon that thieves would target years later, stealing a cache of guns, or so read the police-report blurb in the Grand Island Independent. But I digress.

So we held a draft. Ten bones was the buy-in, winner take all. Each person drafted two QBs, two RBs, three WRs, blah blah blah. Our only source material was a season-preview magazine that grew dog-eared faster than any non-pornographic published work since Gutenberg and the dawn of movable type. My long-term memory is foggy about the particulars of the draft. No recall of who drafted whom. Does it really matter? It'd be more than somewhat troubling if I did remember Beige Tempo drafting Herman Moore in the third round or ATF Scorn selecting Brett Favre first overall. I don't have any negative, painful memories of the draft so I assume the mental nothingness is there because the draft was light, fun, and uneventful, as fantasy football should be.

The season moved along. As there was no limit on the number and frequency of roster moves, my classmates and I formally announced the dropping and picking up of players in passing in the hallways at school, oftentimes revamping entire rosters weekly to go with the hottest players. This did not sit well with Doctor Mail Order after he tried to add a player only to learn that Beige Tempo or ATF Scorn had already acquired him days earlier in fourth-period social studies. That tightass ended our merry roster madness, capping roster movement at one player a week. The gall ....

Fast-forward. Starting Lineup won the league. No one paid at the beginning, so I collected a Hamilton from my dad and ATF Scorn, but Beige Tempo didn't have it on him that day at school. With my ten and their twenty, I presented No Stank with thirty dollars, saying I'd get him the other ten when I next saw Beige Tempo. No Stank said no. He demanded that I give him forty now and flatly said that it was my problem to get the other ten, not his. I was fifteen, he was thirty-whatever, and he was the one behaving like an eight-year-old whose copy of Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail! (for DOS) was lost in the mail. No understanding. Zero compassion. Just a glare. I begrudgingly forked over forty bucks as he looked on, impatience glinting in his eyes. Dick.

That's the anecdote, the experience, that slightly altered the trajectory of my life and obliterated the theretofore innocence and joyful wonder of fantasy football forever.

Later that year, I would get sweet, absolute-zero-cold revenge on Captain Rosacea during a game of Madden 96 on Sega Saturn when, in the fourth quarter and leading by three or four touchdowns, I called a timeout with a few seconds left, dialed up a Hail Mary, caught and ran it in for a touchdown, and Basic Cable Bozo angrily harangued me, a cherubic teenager who wore jorts and had no appreciation for anything, about sportsmanship and class, stormed out, and likely returned to the comfort of his lonely, dank basement to arrange his Starting Lineups for masturbatory target practice, his twisted, naked version of the run and shoot. Hurt me in fantasy football this week? I'll show you a Nigerian Nightmare, miniature Christian Okoye.

After The Whistle

My finest moments as a football player came in eighth grade in central Nebraska. During one game, as the first team was on the field, battling a rival school located twenty miles away, I was on the sidelines, bullshitting with other benchwarmers, when I noticed the rival cheerleaders behind me, cheering some inane chant in a fluty, ear-bleeding, Pillsbury Doughboy chorus. I ogled them for a time and then loudly blurted, "Their cheerleaders are fucking ugly." My pals and I had a hearty chuckle, my uniform was spotless, it was a bright, bright, bright, sunshiny day, as they say, and all was well with the world for about two seconds.

"Who the hell said that?" our head coach yelled, further wrecking a voice box already ravaged from decades of chain smoking and swallowing huge, rhombus-sized pieces of unchewed porterhouse. Whoops. My own embarrassingly high voice, like that of Peppermint Patty on quaaludes, amplified by irrational excitement that these pasty white teenagers were a cartwheeling gaggle of Medusas and Calamity Janes, carried in the zephyr, and suddenly my grasp of the third-team center position was awfully tenuous.

The veracity of such an astute observation was lost on him. He tore into me. "Get your head in the game." "You're going to run laps next practice." "Can I bum a smoke?" The complete disdain for me in his eyes was apparent even through his bifocals. I was never going to see the field, which was to my ultimate benefit, because if he really wanted to punish me, he would have sent me into the game where bigger and stronger players would've summarily whipped my ass. I picked up cones and hastily dumped them in a storage shed after the next practice as he looked on with feta cheese crumbs in his mustache and a fag in his mouth—he called cigarettes fags back then; it was the early nineties, a simpler time, a time when the sound of a modem dialing so you could log on to AOL to jump into a chat room to post lewd comments about god knows what and chronically harass a user named "LibbyLuvsU" was harmonious—in a scene that was downright Rockwellian. He fed me false wisdom, I pretended to care, and then he returned to offering mustache rides to strangers and I returned to the joys of digital harassment.

In 1993, I was out of shape, lazy, indifferent, absent-minded, a lousy 5'10", 170-lb. athlete with a penchant for playing dirty. Not only are kegs and minds terrible things to waste, but so are cheap shots. Not merely a cheap shot artist, I was a maestro of cheap shots, a cheap shot virtuoso. Others played to the whistle (or "through the whistle," as certain no-neck coaches invariably say). I started playing, that is cheap-shotting, after the whistle blew. I have deteriorating VHS tapes with grainy, shaky footage shot by my voluble parents of me on the kick return team, leisurely trotting about, not blocking or feigning an attempt to block any of the opposing players darting past me on both sides toward our kick returner, and then after said kick returner is tackled and the play is long over, I give a forearm shiver to the kidneys of their kicker and throw him to the ground, strutting away as if I'd just made a textbook tackle of Walter Payton in the open field.

In another game, when I was surprisingly in on a defensive series—I think it was late in the fourth quarter; de facto garbage time—I lined up as a standing left defensive end, their offense ran a running play (trap, dive, a quick hitter, something easy and fast) to their left, the right side defensively, I went unblocked, as there was no reason to block me, my teammates tackled the runner for a short gain, the refs tooted their discordant whistles for varying lengths, I kept jogging, and all of a sudden I found myself in the vicinity of their quarterback. Officially and/or unofficially, the play was over. But when you didn't play much, you had a hankering to hit just about anyone. He was impeding my path back to the bench, so I shoved him to the dirt and puffed my chest out. I listened to "Thuggish Ruggish Bone" before every game. I was one bad, tough SOB.

Three words can describe my football-playing days: forgettable, ephemeral, inglorious. However, I played. This brings me to the point of the foregoing: I read ESPN and SI.com religiously, but when you look at the pictures of the writers of the various conference football blogs, you get the distinct impression that these blokes never played a lick of football. I ran gassers. I dogged it more often than not but I ran them nevertheless. I've been on the sidelines. That's where I spent the bulk of each season. The uninspired, bland, lifeless prose that these goofy-looking, nonathletic dweebs spew out is nearly impossible to digest because I find that I question the source, and for good reason. You cannot truly know about something unless you're a part of it. Not apart from it. A part of it. As my fortysomething cousin said one Thanksgiving about ten years ago while listening to Pam Ward, a female play-by-play announcer who works for ESPN, call a college football game, "What the hell does she know?" What the hell do these guys know? If they were former players or coaches, I could possibly forgive the mediocre writing. They're not, so I can't.

Sidebar: I see Todd McShay on TV, sneer, say aloud to no one in particular, "What a clown," and wish I could repeatedly rabbit-punch him. This putz has no expertise, profound knowledge, or remarkable skills. His opinions are as picayune as his ratings of players are flaccid. I've been to clown college, and when you graduate from clown college, the dean personally hands you your diploma. The dean? One Todd McShay.

I'll pen columns on football, gambling lines, and whatnot and take a superabundance of cheap shots. Whistle blows. There is only one rule: Merril Hoge is and always will be a tool.