Sundays are the only day I even care about anymore. Seriously, I’ve been rushing through the week as quickly as possible just so I can get to that fateful day. I’ve even almost given up on partying so that I can go to sleep earlier and bring Sunday on faster.
Since this is the sports page, you’ve probably guessed that I’m referring to watching football on Sunday. You’re almost right, but with the Cincinnati Bengals failing miserably and no Chad Ocho Cinco jerseys to be released any time soon, I have only a passing interest in watching games or even rooting for teams. Nope. Instead I spend every Sunday with my face glued to my computer for eight hours, frantically hitting refresh on all of my fantasy football pages because any one of my players might have scored a point in the last five seconds. You never know, right?
Falling down the rabbit hole in the fantasy world until I crave stat updates like a Norwegian heroin addict didn’t happen overnight. In fact, I used to hate it. In fact, I could never understand why people would spend any time at all playing a jock version of Dungeons and Dragons. Basically, I just figured it took too much of my time, and I didn’t want to waste it. Now I’m at the point where I procrastinate on taking hungover beer shits because I don’t want to wait for more stat updates. I mean, halftime is usually only a few minutes away.
I have two true passions in life: talking as much shit as possible, and having said shit get flung back in my face when I can’t back it up. So when my pep-pep invited me to join his old man league, I immediately signed up as the “Crack Dealers” and flooded the message boards with a shit storm of insults. Newly reborn as the most hated man in the league, I had enough incentive to actually play. As of week four, the Crack Dealers are at the top, and every retiree in the league is shitting their Depends when they have to play me. Oh, and in case you were wondering if my dad was bothered by all of this, his team name is “HELL” and he has no problem drafting players based upon how many times they’ve been to jail. I guess psyching people out runs in the family.
If fantasy sports are for every un-athletic sports freak who wants to live out their dreams of being competitor in the sports world – but still manage to cram his colon with fried chicken and be unable to run 100 feet – then I suppose I take these leagues seriously to satisfy my inner hunger to be Rasheed Wallace.
In a world where anyone who follows sports used to play football or baseball for some community college, fantasy sports are not only a place to relive the glory years, but also the venue for the glory years to continue. These days, it’s not what you’ve done, but what you’re doing now. Sure, Chili Davis rocked the house along with Chuck Finley back in the day, but you can be sure that if I was playing in a fantasy horse racing league – yes, it exists – with them, I would be flooding their inboxes with angry messages, sending them ludicrous and insulting trades, and mostly drafting horses that had offensive names. If people are going to pretend that fantasy sports are real sports, then trash talking and rudeness has to be my game plan.
The true beauty of playing fantasy sports lies right in the middle of its stupidity: While it may be just a bunch of washed-up, adult babies playing, it still feels pretty damn good when you win, and it hurts just as much when you get fantasy face-fucked. Winning an intramural championship results in nothing, but when the Pub Scouts or FC FUPA wins, you can be damn well sure that I’m poppin’ some victory bottles. So next Sunday afternoon, if I’m passed out on my lawn with my laptop and a couple empty bottles of Andre, be sure that “Grill Vogel’s Brain Xxplosion” just took a shit on one of my roommate’s crappy teams.
