The Football Fan's Manifesto (20 page)

This unmitigated suffering is one reason why training camp should be appealing to the fan. Seeing incredibly wealthy people shunted into meager living conditions and put through the wringer in any other context would be a wonderful concept for a reality show, one that you would
gladly tune into each and every week. And certainly more tolerable than the ones Michael Irvin and T.O. have. That the millionaires in question are physically able to handle the rigors should only diminish the allure slightly.

Into the whole awkward adulation thing? There’s plenty of that too. Take the opportunity to shake players’ hands and exchange a few lines of stilted conversation. Well, at least that’s how it was back in the era when every team held camps open to the public. Nowadays, fewer than half the teams in the league hold training camps that are publicly accessible. Most have repaired to the antiseptic confines of team facilities, where coaches can berate players and run all the obscure situational bullshit they’ll never use in the regular season in complete seclusion. Which means you just know they’re all having coke-and-hookers parties after every practice. Quit hogging it all for yourself, NFL teams.

For all the tedium, there are still some folksy charming sights at training camp. For one, there are the players you know have no shot at making the roster. Look at them toil futilely. Let them know in advance how you’d like your groceries bagged and on which side of the doorstep to leave your FedEx deliveries. They’ll appreciate the heads-up.

Then there are moments of Norman Rockwell–like Americana that infuse the experience with something other than the corporate culture that has come to pervade the NFL experience at every level. The Packers, for
example, have players who ride children’s bikes pre-and post-practice with the kids riding on the handlebars. All right, that’s really the last vestige of hands-on down-home whimsy to be found at any of these glorified practices. Still, by the outset of summer, you’ve undergone what’s already been a six-month separation from your favorite team. By now, you’d sit in ninety-five degree heat just to watch them stand around and text their friends.

VIII.8 Observe
Madden
Day Like the National Holiday It Should Be

For the past twenty-plus years, video game publisher Electronic Arts Tiburon has brought gamers and football fans (these two categories have a bit of overlap) the premier console football simulator on the market. Of course, ever since EA was granted the exclusive NFL license in 2004, it’s the only one on the market, but y’know, details, details. What do you need competition for? Granting monopolies to large corporations is what America does best.

The game is named for the Hall of Fame coach and occasionally coherent grumbling recently retired broadcaster John Madden, who, in a way, is to video games what George Foreman is to electric grills: a sports celebrity who haphazardly picked something to which to attach his name. However, beginning last year, Madden stopped recording play-by-play audio for the game, thus reducing the number of times you’ll hear “Boom!” during game play by roughly 100 percent. He was replaced by the duo
of Tom Hammond and Cris Collinsworth, who have the collective personality of a Tim Robbins beer fart.

Each August, a teeming unwashed horde of single guys in authentic Mitchell & Ness jerseys queue up by the hundreds at the local Gamestop the night of the release to drop sixty dollars on a game that is little more than the previous year’s edition plus a roster update and a few new player animations. Yeah, I know. I love it too.

It’s a joyous occasion for no other reason than that it’s another signal, along with the arrival of training camp and the preseason, that the blessed NFL regular season is drawing near. When you’ve had to endure nothing but months of baseball, you’ll lap up anything resembling football like it’s mother’s milk. What’s more, you can play through an entire season with your favorite team before the actual season begins. You can tell yourself it’s your way of scouting the competition. Did you get the Eagles to finish 19-0 and win the Super Bowl 49–3? On the easiest difficulty setting? Well, surely that’s how it’s going to shake out in real life.

Unfortunately for we socially deficient freaks, this release falls on a Tuesday, smack in the middle of a work week. Just as the government denies fans a vacation day after the Super Bowl, our rights are trampled on with the refusal of time off for
Madden
Day. Now the drill goes: you get the game at midnight, only so you can go back home and hit the sack before work the next day? Maybe at best you can fit in a game or two, but that’s it. Oh,
nononono, my friends. That be some bullshit. Not only have you waited through a seemingly endless off-season, but also a couple hours of standing around in a sausage-fest in order to get this game, and now you can’t even play it? If you’re going to go to that much effort to procure
Madden,
you need to have a
Madden
Day Plan in place.

Because
Madden
sells approximately eleventy-seven trillion copies a year, many employers have now cottoned onto the fact that a metric shitload of people attempt to take off the day the game comes out and have implemented policies forbidding workers from using vacation on that date. Why? Because they’re rank assholes and assholes love nothing more than throwing around whatever meager power they have at their disposal. If you happen to be one of those supervisor humps, congrats. You can take the day off and leave the outraged underlings to choke on your hypocrisy. That was easy, huh?

For the rest of us, there are a number of options available. The simplest solution, of course, is to quit your job. Sure, slogging through med school was arduous and extremely expensive, but not letting you take a day off to play a video game just because you have a surgery scheduled is a crock. Besides, as a surgeon you’re already predisposed with the precise hand-eye coordination necessary to excel at
Madden.
All that remains is the capacity to yell sophomoric insults over a headset.

Having some foresight can be to your benefit. It’s probably unlikely that a relative will have the courtesy to die
around the release of
Madden
, which would give you an easy out. However, if one should pass away earlier in the year, say around April, prevail upon your family to consider the merits of a summer burial. The soil is less barren and there are more bugs to expediate decomposition. Stick the corpse on ice for a few months and convince the relatives it’s a farewell tour.

Whatever you do, don’t try to feign an illness. Most bosses reflexively won’t buy it, whether you’re actually sick or not, and will demand some sort of doctor’s note, and depending on your financial situation, a doctor’s visit might be a lot to sacrifice for a single day of gaming. Contracting a really serious illness in advance to seal the deal is an extra step worthy of admiration and a surefire way to score some playing time. The nurses can probably rig the game up on your hospital TV. If you can time your eventual passing with the clinching of a Super Bowl victory, you can go out a champion, and perhaps bequeath your screen name to a close relative. That is, until the coroner overwrites the file on your memory card hours later with an 8-8 season with the Chiefs. What a dick.

One thing to keep in mind once you fabricate an excuse valid-sounding enough to get the day off is that you shouldn’t load any
Madden
highlights you may have that day onto YouTube, not only because it’s an asinine practice in general, but because the time stamp on the videos will give away your ruse. Ridiculous as it sounds, you’d be surprised how Internet savvy employers have become.
Also, learning the profile name of the boss’s kid beforehand is a must. The last thing you want is to be playing some thirteen-year-old on Xbox Live and let it slip that you’re skipping work from your teller job at the bank just for the kid to recognize your name from one of his dad’s endless rants about work.

No matter how you go about securing yourself some glorious playing time with
Madden
, keep in mind that if you ever play the game using any team other than the one you root for in real life, you’re a gutless traitor fit for castration by a scythe. I don’t care if the Saints do only have a 75 rating in the game. If you play with the Patriots, even to beat a clearly superior opponent, you’ve lowered yourself to such an extent that even the most cogent of excuses cannot explain away your fanhood cowardice. Unless you have money on the game. That’s something anyone can understand.

VIII.9 Dupe Yourself into Thinking the Preseason Matters

It’s a well-known but somehow little-acknowledged fact that the NFL preseason is an empty spectacle possessed of a meaninglessness that exists only on par with award shows and philosophy classes. However, after six agonizing months of football deprivation you’d stick your dick in a hornet’s nest to get anything resembling the game you so sickeningly crave. And NFL teams know that. That’s why it’s a perfect opportunity for them to fleece fans with exorbitant prices for what amounts to maybe a quarter of actual football (if that).

In the best of circumstances, preseason games are where closely contested arcane position battles are settled (the battle for third-string tight end is on!). It’s also where a team decides whether or not to carry a fourth safety or a seventh linebacker on the final roster. Truly riveting stuff, I know. For everyone on the field whose job isn’t on the line, it’s a tedious dress rehearsal where coaches try not to reveal too much of their playbook and the main goal for players is not to get hurt. Donovan McNabb, especially, likes to save his injuries for the regular season.

But knowing it means nothing to the players themselves, how then can the preseason be more exciting for you? Yes, there’s beer. And whiskey. And tequila. And vodka. And paint thinner. All these intoxicants will be necessary in surviving this stolid ordeal. Just remind yourself that consequential football is drawing near. Drawing from your powers of extreme self-delusion, you’ll make it through this thing yet. Delude yourself enough and you might even learn to enjoy it in a Stockholm syndrome kind of way. Because, after all, in preseason games either team’s starters play anywhere between one drive and little over one half of the game. That’s a lot of empty time to fill with guys who are getting cut in a week. Your psychosis might as well pick up the slack.

Watching at home, this is no biggie. You could simply change the channel. Then again, it’s the summer, so nothing is on except baseball and second-rate shows networks haul out for the dry months. But that’s irrelevant. You’re
a real fan, one of the true believers who forked over fifty dollars (plus fifteen for parking) to see your favorite team take the field in a meaningless scrimmage. Because your season ticket package required you to. That expense has to be justified. Here’s where the self-delusion comes in handy.

As with any destructive habit, you must give yourself to it completely. In many ways, like the players, you too should approach the preseason as a dress rehearsal. Except, unlike those players, you should care. A lot. Like Ron Paul supporters a lot. Whipping yourself into a frenzy for the regular season isn’t a switch you can just flip on and off. Weeks of building up alcohol tolerance and ascertaining the best routes for eluding security will give you an edge many lesser fans will lack, thus landing them either passed out or in jail.

Having readied yourself for spectator misbehavior, you must now work your expectations for your team’s upcoming season into a fine, ranch-flavored froth. This means outrageous, even wholly insane pipe dreams with no basis in reason and without regard to past performance. Redskins fans have perfected this art. Because of the parity that has come through free agency and the salary cap, teams can swing between being dominant and dominated from year to year. For the majority of teams in the league (everybody except the Lions) there exist some faint glimmer of hope that this can be the year when it all comes together for a title run. Just look at the Falcons and Dol
phins in 2008. And nowhere are those delusions stoked more pathologically than during the preseason. Massage that faint glimmer until it become a powerful klieg light blinding to anyone foolish enough to question your team’s chances.

With so little exposure to the players that will be carrying the team throughout the regular season, every iota of playing time in the preseason must be overexamined and treated as though it’s indicative of the entire year to come. Did the starting quarterback go 5-for-5 with a touchdown in his only drive? FUCK YEAH! EMM VEE PEE! SUPER BOWL YEAR, BAY-BEE! Did the starting running back average under four yards a carry in his two touches? Wonder how he feels about a severed pig’s head in his mailbox? Similarly, the preseason can be a minefield for spiking the fantasy football value of some minor-role players, who end up racking up insane numbers against third-string defenses, only to return to being regular old Kevin Jones in the regular season. Don’t be fooled by these preseason stalwarts.

The presence of irrelevant players is no reason to stop caring about the outcome of the game, either. Just because your team was ahead 13–10 when the starters got pulled doesn’t mean victory has been attained. Do you want them to finish with a losing record in the preseason? That’s just the kind of weak momentum that can carry over into the regular season, dooming what would have surely been a memorable title run. Yes. That’s more like
it. Scream your lungs out at the sparsely filled stadium. You’ve already started to care about these meaningless second-half scrubs, haven’t you? So begins the descent into the fan madness.