The Football Fan's Manifesto (18 page)

With so much elation, you’d think there wouldn’t be a possibility of the downside. Oh, how wrong you are. Stuck in blissful intoxication, you didn’t happen to notice the mounting collection of douches surrounding you to watch your team’s games. You never bothered to notice them before, but they arrived in greater and greater numbers as the team crept toward greatness. Now that they’re there, there’s no getting rid of them. Your worst fears have been confirmed: your world championship team fan base has been overrun by bandwagon fans. Break out the flamethrower.

VIII.1 Your End of the Year Denial Is So Strong You’ll Actually Watch a Part of the Pro Bowl

The dust has settled on the Super Bowl. The victory parade course has been traversed. The Super Bowl champion shirts premade for the team that lost have been shipped to Nicaragua. The Raiders have fired another coach. So concludes another glorious NFL season. This is when panic sets in. Seven whole months of football-less existence stares you dead in the face, like Shawne Merriman in mid-’roid rampage.

Being that it’s the Al Davis–like death rattle of the NFL season, you’d think you would quaff down every moment of the Pro Bowl as if it were Marisa Miller’s bath water, making certain not to squander the final vestiges of the game you will very soon be bereft of. But have you ever tried to do it? You can’t. Not possible. For even the most rock-ribbed of football fans can’t bring themselves to sit
through this entire perfunctory spectacle. And with good reason. It’s about as unwatchable as the People’s Choice Awards, a Uwe Boll movie, and anything starring Eva Longoria wrapped in a box of suck.

Don’t get me wrong. Many fans will give the Pro Bowl a shot. They’ll tune in for about an offensive drive or two, hoping to spot one of their favorite players in the game. After all, it’s usually a high-scoring affair and, hey, all the premiere stars are involved. Except the dozen or so who opted not to play because they’re nursing phantom injuries or getting a jump start on their sex cruise through Asia. But that’s it. You can’t make it through any more than that. I challenge you to try. You’d fare better trying to keep a pack of Jets fans away from an exposed pair of tits.

The Pro Bowl is agonizing because it’s so inconsequential. But that’s no different from the all-star games in any other sport, even baseball with its pathetic attempt to inject significance into its All-Star Game by putting home field advantage in the World Series on the line. The NFL shows mercy (the league does not usually make a practice of this) by placing the Pro Bowl after the conclusion of the season. Why break up a riveting regular season with an empty exhibition smack dab in the middle, when no one wants to be part of it? Not that NFL players hate to be selected, mind you. They love the trip to Hawaii and the clause in their contract that triggers a huge pay day when they do get picked. It’s the whole “exposing themselves to
pointless injury” thing that possibly dampens their competitive fire for the Post–Super Bowl Classic.

Take the cautionary tale of Robert Edwards. He rushed for 1,115 yards as a rookie for the New England Patriots in 1998. (Note to Patriots fans: this is three years before you realized the team existed.) After the season, the running back blew out his knee and nearly bled to death in an all-rookie flag football game played on the beach at Waikiki days before the Pro Bowl. Edwards didn’t play in the league again for another three years, playing one more season in the NFL in 2002 with the Dolphins before spending the rest of his professional career in the CFL. Yes, the CFL, a fate even worse than the Bengals. They might as well have put him down. Taking that in mind, can you blame the players for being a little less than amped to expose themselves to cataclysmic injury, even at the end of the year? Of course you can. Being blindly and unctuously judgmental is the right of every fan. But it’s still something to consider.

Really, the only time the Pro Bowl is even halfway relevant is two months before the game is actually played, that is, when the rosters are officially released. This announcement gives pundits and talking heads a solid week of “Who got snubbed?” grist for the horseshit mill. Zealous homers get worked up over so-and-so not getting the nod and over which team got the most representatives. It’s all eventually rendered pointless because, by the time the game rolls around, most of the players originally selected
have pulled out and half the league ends up in Honolulu. Heck, play your cards right and you might even get an invite.

The Pro Bowl isn’t without its draws. For one, you get to see the coaches of the teams that lost in conference title games suffer the humiliation of halfheartedly leading a squad of stars into pointless battle. The axiom is that no one remembers the loser of the Super Bowl, but that’s not necessarily true. There have been several memorable Super Bowl meltdowns, not the least of which was Bill Belichick storming off the field with a second left in Super Bowl XLII. You can see the deep sea of dejection in their eyes. In HD it’s quite compelling.

Then there’s the custom of the Pro Bowl quarterbacks paying the way for their entire offensive line to go to Hawaii along with them. A heartwarming gesture, to be sure, but just think what a squandered opportunity that is. Why not the entire cheerleading squad? With the number of QBs each conference carries for the Pro Bowl, there could be any many as seven or eight squads on the premises during the game. That would provide for an ample number of cutaway shots to make the telecast palatable for perverted minds.

Though it’s a deeply flawed and eminently irrelevant tradition, the Pro Bowl is all that stands between you and full-on football withdrawal, which begins to kick in sometime around 1 p.m. the following Sunday, when you shatter the phalanges in your hand mashing the buttons on the
remote control in search of a game, any game. Alas, there are none to be found. You, sir, abject victim of the linear nature of time, are tragically ensconced in the void of the off-season. May God have mercy on your soul.

VIII.2 Feign an Interest in Other Sports and Other People

Learning to endure things you can’t stand: it’s one of the most vital skills any person can learn. And it’s the only realistic shot the football fan has to outlast the gauntlet of unspeakable suffering that is the off-season. As smokers try to break the habit by turning to chewing gun, the football fan has to find wholly inadequate substitutes that only serve to remind how great football is. It’s a bottomless stoma in the throat of suckage.

The temptation to turn inward and hibernate away this fallow period will be strong. But this is not a time to be alone. Seek the company of others. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to shun them during football season. After all, companionship is a must when one feels bereft, mostly because they’ll keep you from cutting yourself.

To be sure, it’s a long slog, this off-season, a journey fraught with boredom, rife with sober thought, and sickeningly teeming with pointless conjecture about football with no action to refute or support it. A good time to get married, have children, do some work at the office. For the first few weeks, you will be haunted by the phantom pains of a Sunday without football, akin to what an amputee feels for a lost limb. Waking up hungover from a
Saturday night of hard-core liver poisoning, the grogginess becomes that much more uncomfortable and the Fatty Lumpkins waking up next to you that much uglier if football isn’t fitting into the plans of the day.

Something then has to fill the void. Really, anything vaguely athletic and competitive will do. As flawed as all these alterna-sports can be, you’ll just have to swallow them and find appealing aspects about their being. There’s only so long you can watch replays of NFL games from the previous season before you’re drooling half-naked on the basement floor banging Starting Lineup figures into one another and making Chris Berman–like spit-laden football onomatopoeias.

One of the knottier questions about watching other sports is how to divide your allegiances. Ideally, you would proceed with rooting for all the teams in the same city as your favorite football team, as well as those of the nearest university with a prominent athletic program. But what if it’s a city that doesn’t have representation in other, lesser sports? For example, Seattle no longer has an NBA team, Baltimore has no NHL franchise, and Green Bay is lucky to have an Applebee’s as a distraction outside the Packers.

Being a bandwagon fan in a lesser sport is no more tolerable than one in the football world. In fact, anyone who pulls for the rare combination of Yankees–Lakers–Cowboys–USC Trojans–Duke Blue Devils–Detroit Red Wings–Manchester United–Tiger Woods merits a flaming arrow in the rectum. Any two of that permutation entitles the banner chaser to a swift cattle prodding.

If you follow an NFL team located in a city where you don’t live, adopting the other teams in that city prevents
the unforgivable awkwardness that comes with explaining factitious rooting interests. Say that city lacks a franchise in a given sport. Then you have free rein to choose as you wish. Glomming onto the one located closest to your present residence is the classy way to go, though if you move you must definitively drop one team before selecting another. No cross-pollination of fandom will do. It’s very absolutist that way. College sports can be determined at a young age, with cheering preference being given to a parent’s alma mater or to the college you end up attending. Either way, liking Notre Dame makes you a fucktaster.

VIII.3 Oh, No! Your Favorite Player Left in Free Agency! Disown Him at Once!

That ungrateful cocksnot! How dare he accept a more generous contract from another franchise, just because it was a longer term deal than the one your team offered, with more guaranteed money and a clause that entitles him to two coke-caked strippers for every touchdown reception. Does loyalty toward an organization that drafted him and would cut him as soon as his production slipped mean nothing? Apparently not. Try not to let the disillusionment harsh your buzz.

The start of the free agency period is the first of the off-season pseudo-events, during which there is no football action but instead granules of news that give obsessives cause to breathlessly speculate about the impact of these transactions on a season that is still practically a lifetime
away. The free agency period typically begins the first week of March, and stays remotely interesting for about two weeks until all the players of even marginal consequence have been signed to ludicrously bloated deals and the Raiders have offered a six-year, $50 million contract to a line cook at a Mexican restaurant. The Redskins, too, will reach terms with a player four years past his prime, goading their fans to pronounce the upcoming season yet another in which the Burgundy and Gold will stride effortlessly into Super Bowl lore—just like the past seventeen years.

Traditionalists contend that free agency robs fans of any emotional connection to their favorite team because the rate of turnover is so high that, with the exception of a few marquee players, the entire roster is usually overhauled every couple of years. With so few familiar faces, how could anyone really get attached to a team over the years? It’s theory based in logic, but one that doesn’t hold up well in the face of history, kind of like that communism thing. In the nearly two decades since the NFL instituted unrestricted free agency, fandom hasn’t gotten any less intense. For the most part, fans would like their favorite players to be sympathetic, fully formed personalities they feel like they can get to know over the years, but failing that, they’re more than willing to settle for interchangeable stat machines.

You should have seen this coming, of course. Few free agent departures are a shock to those who keep close tabs
on the business end of football. A team will make overtures to sign any player of value to a long-term extension long before his contract expires. If that offer isn’t to the player’s liking, there will commence a great deal of sulking and holding out and everything else Terrell Owens does twice a week.

So by the time the player does finally leave, the fans are well prepared for it, having watched the player’s final embittered season with the team, during which he put up big stats but interacted with no one on the sidelines. Forewarning does not necessarily ease the sense of loss or betrayal. Coping with loss is always a struggle, even when it was a player you were kind of glad to see go, like DeAngelo Hall or Rex Grossman. Grief can work itself out in familiar patterns, and if you’re prepared for them, it should really lessen the blow of losing favor for that athlete you never met.

VIII.3. A THE FIVE STAGES OF FREE AGENT DEJECTION

• 1. Run the Player’s Name Through the Mud on the Internet
  —Rant incessantly about what a clubhouse cancer the guy was and how the team is prepared to skyrocket to greatness without the burden of his negative presence. Lay out statistically tedious and unconvincing arguments against him that no one wants to hear. “Did you know his yard-per-catch average deceased 15 percent in 4 p.m. games played in the snow? An
  unmistakable sign that he’s soft if there ever was one! That reserve taking his place so should’ve had his job years ago anyway. So what if he only had twelve catches in four seasons!? Those were big-time snags. You wouldn’t know unless you watched the team on a regular basis!”
  
• 2. Burn the Bum’s Jersey
  —The most destructive, and therefore more cathartic, of the stages. Be sure to get good video of that puppy going up in flames and get it on YouTube, preferably with a death metal track as an overlay. Nothing else quite adds that vital touch of ridiculously tortured melancholy.
  
• 3. Blame Drew Rosenhaus
  —Even if the departing player isn’t one of his clients. Like you need an excuse to hate on that slimy bag of goat afterbirth. Just don’t let him know. He feeds his young with your regurgitated contempt like a mother bird.
  
• 4. Accept It—and for God’s Sake, Do Not Continue Liking the Traitor on His New Team
  —That means you, Brett Favre and Joe Montana fans.
  “But, but, he was real good for us for a long time! I’d follow him to the ends of the earth!! I can’t turn my back on him now. In fact, I think I’ll buy his jersey on the new team.”
  Die in a jersey bonfire. Team allegiance always supersedes your man-crush, unless you’re part of his family. Even then it’s dicey.
  
• 5. Get Ready to Shout Hateful Epithets Like You’ve Never Shouted Hateful Epithets Before When the Player Returns
  to Play His Old, and Your Favorite, Team
  —You’ve been wronged and now’s your chance for revenge. Boo that asshole like the greedy slut he is. Jeer him mercilessly for every mistake he commits, even to the point that you scare yourself. Maybe get some people in the crowd to help you tear apart an effigy of him. Eat a little of it for added effect. Nothing like the image of blood-thirsty mob violence to get in his head.