Heartbreak Ridge

The Future's Nothing New - The Alternate Routes (mp3)
A Circus - Army Navy (mp3)

Last week, one of the founding members of our fantasy football league announced his intentions to retire. This announcement -- which in the world of rational and reasonable thought should be about as significant as him saying he got new glasses -- was significant on several levels.

First, this owner claimed it was just time, that he was getting too old for it, that the experience was played out. Why? What’s wrong with him? How dare he desert us in this, our time of desperate need?? Is this some kind of Fantasy Football Owner Lockout, and we didn’t get the memo? Here I thought we were all, like, Al Davis, that the only way you could take our team ownership away was from our cold, dead hands.

The second level was even more disconcerting. Was this merely the first defection? Was the entire league either doomed or irreparably altered?

My thoughts then drifted to this blog. Even as we approach 1,000 posts and soon after that the completion of our fourth year (if it survives to March), death is on my mind. How old is a 4-year-old blog? It’s gotta be like dog years, except more like goldfish years, right? How long do we go until this has become a hobby that merely keeps us from trying other ways of exorcising our creative demons?

Things. Must. Change.
(Psst. this will be a running theme, off and on for the remainder of the year, possibly for eternity. It started with “William 4.0” and even showed up in my Oasis post yesterday.)

Must. It is inevitable. It is fact. The challenge for the wise, it would seem, is not to cling desperately to everything in our lives in some nutty attempt to prevent or dodge change. The challenge is to identify what we most value, what we hold most precious, and to figure out whether honoring and protecting those things requires holding fast to them or finding ways to adapt and evolve them.

I cannot be a good parent if I insist on treating my 11-year-old daughter the same as when she was six. I can’t be a good employee if I’m still sending snow alerts to radio stations as our sole advisory.

Oh crap. Know what I just realized? Maybe schools can’t be very good schools if we’re still doing 95% of everything we did back when my mother was 12. Maybe we’re clinging a little bit too tightly to too much? Ya think?

So maybe fantasy football and blogs -- and office environments and job descriptions and schools -- aren’t in and of themselves what I fear losing. Maybe it’s not about Calvin Johnson and shoddy opinionating. The challenge is figuring out what I need from these outlets, why they mean something to me, why my soul aches a little at the thought of losing them, and what I need to do to hold onto what’s important about them. In all likelihood, with just a little contemplation, I can find other ways to feed those parts of me currently fed by those pursuits.

When the day comes to say goodbye to fantasy football, were I wise, I would already know what my next step would be. I would know what it is I love about the experience, and I would already have plans to funnel that energy into some new endeavor.

Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. These are the words of the new normal and the essential. They are the words of the wise. They are the future, and we will be.

(I just made a reference to Prince/Batman AND a Clint Eastwood movie in the same paragraph! WOOOT!)

Men Will Be Boys

Maurice Jones-Drew, star running back of the Jacksonville Jaguars, also has a team in a Fantasy Football League. He had first pick in his league's draft. He chose himself.

Hubris, you say? I don't think so. Any self-respecting fantasy league owner with the first pick is going to choose the player that gives him the best chance to win. The fact that Jones-Drew chose himself may be a bit of a longshot, but you've got to take those kinds of chances if you're going to win, and a veteran owner like Jones-Drew knows that. Besides, he knows what condition his knee is in better than anyone else. He must like his chances and his team's schedule.

You may remember that Jones-Drew wisely took a knee instead of scoring a touchdown last year in order to run out the clock and beat the Jets; then he apologized to Fantasy owners. So, yes, the two worlds are forever inextricably linked.

Let's review. A professional football player, certainly one of the top players in the world at his position, not only plays a game for a living, but is completely caught up in a game based on that game. That's fantasy, baby! Even someone who is living the reality is indulging in the fantasy.

If you think all of this is pretty silly, I'm not going to argue with you. I'm just going to embrace that silliness. Call it immaturity, if you like. But also call it big business, a factor in the GDP, and relatively-harmless fun.

"It gives you something to talk about on Mondays," said a Fantasy owner yesterday. As if that were all of it.


What male, given the chance to call the shots, be the big dog, get in the game, live vicariously through the actions of superstar athletes, wouldn't do so? I mean, why is Madden Football so popular year after year after year?

Fantasy Football's continuing growth in popularity should not be a surprise to anyone.

What does surprise me, however, is that Fantasy Football has been allowed, by the women in our lives, to assume a kind of legitimate quasi-importance. Certainly, we never expected that. Yes, Women In Our Lives, we are pinching ourselves all the time to make sure that we are awake! Amazingly, statements like "I can't, I've got the Fantasy Draft tonight" or "I'm one of the commissioners of the league, so I've got to be there," have credibility in a relationship. We are constantly stunned that those excuses don't simply receive looks of blank incredulousness.

And we know we are boys. What pleasantly shocks us is that we aren't told what boys we are more often.

My wife chewed me out on Sunday because she thought I was in a bad mood over our high school team's loss on Friday, the Vols' loss on Saturday, the Mocs' loss on Saturday, and the close Steeler game I was watching at the time, or some combination thereof. Wrong, honey. I had already weathered most of those storms. I was just worrying about my Fantasy team.

It's funny how often we men feel like boys or realize we're headed that way. With our music and our beer and our toys and games, we cling, not even desperately, but societally, to our youth.

But do we ever tell a woman that she's being a girl? Not really. Not too often that I'm aware of. It doesn't even make sense, does it? Men tell each other that they are being girls, but tell that to a woman? No. It doesn't fit.

Because women, whether they have children or not, become moms, and I mean moms in the sense of caretakers, moms in the sense of "what kind of crazy shennanigans have our boys gotten into now?" Women have allowed themselves to be willingly co-opted into supporting our games. If they don't, I guess, they run the risk of their men running around in bars with a million televisions and waitresses in tight referee's outfits and piles of unhealthy foods and other, looser women and all of that. "I've got to go, honey, it's Fantasy Football," we say. So they figure they'd better become a part of it. Men are so easily distracted.

NOTE: My team, Po-Boy, faces off against John's team, My Nascar Ex, in a Billy Division showdown this weekend. My opponent is favored by three, but I'm working feverishly on tooling and readjusting my line-up to try to get the edge.