The Football Fan's Manifesto (10 page)

If you need a player comparison, think of yourself as an impressive-looking but ultimately useless decoy, sort of like Reggie Bush, only you’re not banging Kim Kardashian. Though it’s possible you may already have.

Your primary objective for the next few years is to coax your child into adopting your favorite team. It’s the only shot you’ll have at developing any affection for the little soul sucker. To accomplish this goal, no means should be considered off-limits. Blackmail, psychological programming, idle threats, real threats, locking him or her in the towel closet for weeks at a time. Don’t consider yourself a parent. You’re officially an envoy working on behalf of the team. Any failure on your part will be the gain of a competing team. Then you’re only empowering the enemy, making yourself not only a weakness but a liability.

With the kid on your side, expensing those season tickets
becomes significantly easier. Yes, you have loads of other expenses that go unaddressed, but you’re not being selfish by spending inordinate amounts of money on a needless hobby, you’re bringing a hint of joy to your child’s otherwise drab existence. Which makes you immune from spousal grief. And one day that child will grow up and become your designated driver. Or, if you push them obsessively enough, a crazed professional football player incapable of emotional connection. But one that will make you fabulously wealthy. That almost sounds like a plan.

IV.8 Acceptable Levels of Involvement in Your Kid’s Pop Warner League

Not having risen to achieve athletic stardom never caused you much distress. You knew you had neither the skill, the determination, nor the freakish genetics necessary to make a push at a pro career. Sure, you dabbled with high school ball a little, but it wasn’t much more than an attempt to appease your blowhard of a father, who demanded you strive for the heights that he himself could never reach. That, and if you didn’t join the team there was more than a fair chance you wouldn’t have gotten laid until midway through college. Girls aside, you vowed never to be like the overbearing father figure who forced that grueling game upon you. You were going to be a cool parent who allowed his kids to make their own decisions and host parties and smoke cigarettes and even join the goddamn forensics team if that’s what they wanted.

But that was until you had a son of your own and that open mindedness went the way of your hairline and youthful whimsy. Now you stare at that amorphous blob of afterbirth and wonder if he will ever amount to anything more than an Xbox savant who weighs three hundred pounds at age fourteen. That little shit can bring you a reflected form of the gridiron glory you never got on your own. Did you see the way he leveled that kid at daycare? He’s the next Justin Tuck.

The warning signs of the pushy sports dad are obvious. Leave them unchecked and soon you’ll be the next Marv Marinovich, the former NFL player whose hard-line parenting tactics raised a failed robotic first-round pick quarterback of a son. Marv went as far as having a football in Todd’s crib from the day he was born and having him teething on a frozen kidney.

Maybe you won’t be so extreme. Still, you must exercise restraint. Do you find yourself forcing a macrobiotic diet on the kid once he gets off the bottle? “Candy only gets him off his regimen of pain!” Step the fuck off, buddy. What you think is instilling an early sense of discipline is only building resentment of you. With those tactics, you have a better chance of turning the tyke into a serial killer than a football player. And Dexter’s dad already made the blueprint for that.

What if the kid decides to play of his own accord? Don’t take this as a sign to go batshit crazy and run wild with your obsession. Stick with restraint. Act like this is just
another passing interest he’s chosen to take up before shucking it all off in favor of heavy narcotics. Your job is to show up at the games, voice support when appropriate, and otherwise keep your fucking yap shut. And for crap’s sake, don’t try to coach the team or give the coach advice about getting your kid into the game.

Your children will find myriad ways to disappoint you that have nothing to do with sports. Leave it to them to decide what those towering embarrassments will be. Given some space, there’s less chance they’ll freak out and become members of the American Taliban pushed into domestic terrorism because they were forced to pore over playbooks instead of watching cartoons like a normal seven-year-old.

And, hey, if you strike the offspring lottery and your kid does wind up an NFL superstar, you’re going to get credit whether you compulsively impelled them toward it or not. So sit back and roll the die. At least that way you can spend more time boozing.

IV.9 Scenes from a Broken Fan Marriage

You really think you know somebody. Years of Sundays spent together glued to the couch in matching Elway jerseys watching the Broncos do battle. She’d even wear the white horsehair wig to complete the look. It one was of the few moments of honest kinship you ever felt with another person. Two souls, joined forever in marriage and fandom. And afterward joined again for some postgame play. It was a beautiful thing.

Wasn’t it just a few months ago that you got her a new authentic Kyle Orton jersey for her birthday? It was a message to her that, in addition to being the foundation of your past, she represented the reality of the present and the promise of the future. The mother of your children, the source of all ardor, the chick who didn’t mind when you ralphed in her hair when you first met. It was a gesture pregnant with symbolism. It was a present that cost three hundred goddamn dollars.

Of course, she took it to mean that you thought she, like Orton, had a neckbeard.

Bitch.

It was then you should have figured it out, but you remained willfully blinkered to the truth, to her conniving nature. The morning your buddy Nick took you aside and said he had spotted the wife in a Darren McFadden jersey in a bar with another Raiders fan, you refused to believe it. You even lashed out at Nick, saying that was a vicious canard that only a Cowboys fan could spread. What a fool you were. He was only looking out for you.

You wouldn’t even address the allegations. You didn’t ask her. Then she came to you and said she had to go out of town the weekend of the Broncos-Raiders game in Denver to attend the wedding of one of her work friends. Since when would she put anything above a rivalry game? Fishy as it was, you let it go.

But then you noticed she didn’t pack any of her Broncos jerseys for the trip. Surely, even at a wedding, she could slip out come kickoff and find a place to get rowdy and
watch the game. There were no two ways about that with her.

When she got back from the trip, you asked about the jerseys, trying not to sound too leery. She laughed it off as a freak mental lapse, maybe in a little too facile a manner. Shouldn’t she be more frustrated about that? The woman you’d always known, always loved, would have been. That more than anything piqued your suspicions.

It wasn’t many weeks or many more attempts at subterfuge before you finally cottoned onto her game. The tips from friends became more frequent, more detailed, more embarrassing. She became more brazen about it, not even bothering to say why she was heading out on gamedays.

You’d had enough. Cobbling together the info your friends gave you, you found their bar. Less than two miles from your home.
Your
fucking home. There, planted right in front of the TV showing the Raiders-Chiefs game, was the wife. She was looking every bit like a one-woman Black Hole. She saw you as soon as you walked in the door and shot you a wry little smirk, like you finding out didn’t mean shit to her. It probably didn’t.

It was just then that her newfound guy made his way back from the bathroom. You could tell he recognized you, seeing the flash of fear register in his eyes. Maybe she showed him a photo. Maybe it was ’cause you were wearing the Elway jersey. You didn’t even ask the guy’s name, but man, you beat that silver-and-black ass like you were Steve Atwater.

’Course, with your brutal outburst, there was no way you were getting sole custody of the kids. Oh, your darling son Terrell Davis Henderson and your radiant daughter Shannon Sharpe Henderson. How you’d give up anything for them. Well, anything non-Broncos-related.

The split custody couldn’t have worked out any more in your favor. You got Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays of your choosing. You’d never miss a single game while she’d get stuck babysitting on every day the NFL’s active. More than a little poetic justice in that.

Not as much as the fact that the kids stay true to Broncos Nation. They do their daddy proud.

IV.10 Lord Your Personal Success Over Baseball Fans Be cause You Don’t Spend All Your Time Watching Baseball

A key advantage to football fandom, one that has no doubt helped spur its proliferation to world conquering levels, is that it’s not that huge a drain on the viewer’s time. Suppose that you watch no sporting event other than your favorite NFL team’s games. That’s a commitment of a mere three hours per week during the season. Assuming they don’t make the playoffs, that’s only forty-eight hours per year. Two measly calendar days. The average guy spends more of his time going to town on his crotchular regions.

Meanwhile, the baseball fan commits ten times as much of his life annually to following his beloved stickballers. Five times if it’s basketball or hockey. I can’t speak to the time commitment to the lesser sports, though I would peg
each hour spent with them to be the visceral-thrill equivalent of a clock-killing kneel-down in the NFL.

Followers of these sports would argue that this indicates that the football fan is less dedicated than they, that ours is a fandom of convenience. The football fan should not be guilted into the Sisyphean nightmare that is perpetually following a grueling sport that breeds only boredom and softies. Simplicity is an ideal to aspire to. That football fans can spend less time on their sport and be relatively slaked in their thirst for competitions means they are achieving satisfaction with an economy of effort. As people who eat low-fat food have to consume more to fill themselves up, so too do baseball fans have to fritter away greater portions of their lives to achieve a minimum of excitement.

Not that the football fan wouldn’t take more time with his favorite sport if he could, but the sad fact is that it simply isn’t feasible. As we’ve seen, entrepreneurial spirits have tried to fill the empty months with Arena Leagues, CFLs, and XFLs (and soon the UFL) and immediate families, but it’s not good enough to maintain our attention.

With the free time that football fans are given, they are primed to lead rounder, more successful lives than their lesser sport counterparts. Sure, market research indicates that on average NHL fans make more than NFL fans, but that’s only because one of the two hockey fans in the country is exponentially wealthy. The other is Elisha Cuthbert, who is hot, so we cut her a break.

Free time is one thing when you’re young with time to burn, but as a married man, you’re lucky if you can squeeze in a few sanity-sparing moments to yourself. Football in these years is the respite that keeps you from walking out on your family. There’s no chance you could, with wife and kids, maintain a hard-core never-miss-a-game fanhood with a baseball team even if you wanted to. Which is probably why those whom you spy as regulars in MLB parks are fellows who look as though they make love to their scorecards.

Football is the sport for adjusted people with real priorities, like taking kids to soccer practice and a host of other shit people don’t really want to be doing. Football understands the strictures of modern life and doesn’t impose excessive time commitments on its fans. If inclined, you can blow just about all the time you want during the season on following all the up-to-date news on your team and the rest of the league, but football gives its casual fans the opportunity to keep up without sacrificing their entire lives. Even when that’s exactly what we wish we could have, year-round and without commercial break.

V.1 Flout the Fan Conduct Policy

In a ham-fisted response to recent negative press reports detailing the nasty, horrible, no good, very bad behavior by fans at NFL games, league commissioner Fidel Goodell last year spelled out a brand-new fan code of conduct policy that forbids just about anything that makes unruly fandom worthwhile, such as drunk-and-disorderly behavior, the use of abusive language, or even lighting shit on fire. Why not just take our grilled meats while you’re at it?

This is a disgusting overreach of authority by a still relatively new commissioner trying to consolidate his power. First Goodell made a statement with his severe disciplinary rulings against ne’er-do-drive-sobers such as Chris Henry and Adam Jones, but now he’s overstepped his bounds by messing with the very lifeblood of his league:
its fans. A word of advice: Don’t poke the bear, rich fortunate son of a senator.

Some aspects of the policy make sense. Any fan already knows not to interfere with the progress of the game without someone having to put it in writing. Trying to conflate that general guideline with the act of throwing objects on the field is where it really starts to get sticky. That’s just misleading. You can totally bombard players and coaches on the sideline with objects without it affecting anything on the field of play. Browns fans do it all the time!

Naturally, the league seeks to engender a more family-friendly environment to further spur revenue gains by getting more kids and uptight morally righteous asshats in the gates. But maybe it’s not the league’s fans who need to change. Maybe it’s families that need to sack up. When was football ever intended for them? You know what, families? Everything in our cultures feels the need to cozy up to your inoffensive, anodyne standards, but some of us want cringe-worthy violence, unprintable language, and nudity for miles. Football is something cathartic and restorative for people forced to be polite and civilized against their will 340 days a year. We need an outlet for low-grade anarchy, lest it spill over into society at large. Deprive us of that and suffer the consequences.

Because the NFL conveniently leaves the enforcing of its draconian fan rules up to each team, there are a few interesting wrinkles around the league. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers, for example, instituted a program whereby
thin-skinned dickbags could tattle on people having a good time by texting stadium officials to report supposed wrongdoing. While you may think taking advantage of this feature makes you in compliance with the fan conduct policy, it also puts you in direct violation of the fan misconduct policy against snitching laid forth in this book, making the violator subject to a prompt sewing up of their butthole. The NFL cannot possibly enforce these restrictions without fan cooperation, and it’s our job to ensure that that never happens.

Enforcement of stadium behavioral policies is nothing new, which makes this policy all the more infuriating. The Eagles have, for years, had a jail cell and a judge inside their stadium for severe transgressors, which creates a curious dichotomy with all the amateur executioner fans they have. But this new policy is a blatant attempt to create positive spin for the league, which was never exactly struggling to get people in the stands. So why fix what ain’t broke? Because monkeying with effective practices is one of the more unfortunate traits that runs through the NFL. Just look at how Brad Childress refuses to use the run effectively.

If the No Fun League wants to bite the hand that feeds it, it’s time for that hand to bitch-slap the league right back in its dirty whore mouth. How’s about this: fans as citizens rise up and support measures banning owners from bilking states and municipalities out of public funds for stadia. Does that sound good, you billionaire cheesedicks?
You pay your own way for the fucking stadium your team plays in eight times a year, and we’ll make sure to behave appropriately in it. Until then, choke on our dicks.

Having said that, there’s not a hot dog’s chance on Wade Phillip’s plate that that will ever happen. So perhaps the way fans can have their voice heard is by just buying fewer tickets. Considering how much greedy owners want to charge season-ticket holders for personal seat licenses, this may not be the worst thing in the world. And you know what? You can pretty much be as verbally abusive and blitzed as you want at the local team bar. Why, with the way the NFL wants to hem in the ways fans can enjoy the stadium experience, with its overpriced beers, poor sightlines, and heinous traffic, the dirty secret about NFL fandom needs to be definitively put forward: that it’s much better to watch the games on TV anyway.

V.2 Personal Seat Licenses Are a Bigger Rip-off than Buying a Home

Now that the housing market is dicked and the nation’s economy is in the crapper, at what other moment could fans be more receptive to forking over more cash for the right to purchase tickets? I write in reference to the ever-infuriating phenomenon of the personal seat license, a one-time cost, usually in the thousands, which entitles the owner to the right to continue paying for season tickets each year until another stadium is opened and the cost is charged again.

PSLs aren’t a new phenomenon, as they’re believed to have been around for about twenty years, but they’ve been brought to the fore with their ever escalating costs. The reason cited by sports organizations as to why they impose these outrageous fees on consumers is that PSLs supposedly offset the expense of constructing stadia, many of which are already paid for in large part by taxpayer dollars. Are fans demanding venues that cost squillions of dollars? Not really, but that doesn’t stop owners from launching into a space race against each other for bigger and higher capacity venues. The owners opt for these leviathans then pass the cost on to the fans. The gall is as astounding as it is predictable.

When the Giants and the Jets move into their new $1.3 billion shared stadium in the Meadowlands in 2010, every seat will require a PSL for the Giants and nearly every one for the Jets, with the PSL fee for a few thousand spots in the lower bowl of the stadium reaching as much as $25,000 per seat. The Jets auctioned off 620 PSLs of choice seats in the new stadium and drew more than $16 million for the winning bids. Of course, a fair percentage of those bidding for seats are companies in the business of reselling tickets, which only extends the daily chain of corporate fleecing of the average fan.

About half the teams in the league have policies that require PSLs. That’s half a league ready to dry-hump their fans for the sweet release of the green. Why anyone would allow themselves to be fleeced by these organizations, no
matter how much you may love their product on the field, is beyond the bounds of reason. Fandom knows no quit, but it does know a shit deal when it sees one.

Imagine the hubris that gives rise to these policies. In what other business can companies force a membership fee on customers only for the right to purchase their product? Demand for the NFL product being what it is, the owners think they’re insulated from the cost of alienating a wide swath of their fans, but there’s only so long, especially with the looming threat of uncapped player salaries, that these practices can continue without it starting to chip into the all-important bottom line.

The fan experience in the live event is increasingly becoming the providence of the superwealthy and the super-profligate. The new generation of stadia that’s been built in the past decade crams more seats in and, with prohibitive prices, marshals loud die-hard fans further from the field. Watching the game on TV is not without its flaws (e.g., Phil Simms, Chris Berman, Tony Kornheiser), but it is certainly a much better value than paying through the nose for attending a game where fans are fleeced on concessions, limited by infantilizing fan conduct policies, and generally treated like unwelcome houseguests in overbuilt plutocrat strongholds.

The practice is an insidious money grab devised by billionaires looking for bailouts on their own risky business endeavors. If some fans are economically secure enough that it isn’t a bother for them, great for them. But the
owners may find that, in tougher economic straits, there will not be as many people comfortable doling out tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being bilked on an annual basis. We may love our teams, but that doesn’t mean we need to love their scams.

V.3 Your New Pair of Underwear Is to Blame for a Ten-Loss Season

Though a great many hard-core fans insist on using the pronouns “we” and “us” when discussing their favorite team—as though they too suited up and helped block for extra point attempts on gameday—their influence on what occurs on the playing field is limited to little more than the occasional false-start penalty.

This, of course, is one of great fallacies of spectatorship (right along with the notion that analysts’ power rankings actually mean anything at all). Fans have everything in their lives arranged in accordance with a set of rigorous conditions that they believe promotes success, which, in other words, equals whatever happened the last time the team won a game. This micromanaging, though off-putting to outsiders, can be the difference between a win and a loss.

Unfortunately, there are no hard-and-fast rules to go by in establishing a proper set of superstitions, such as genuflecting at doorknobs while wearing your Tom Brady Underoos. You have to work through some trial and error before stumbling on the perfectly orchestrated pregame routine that works best for you.

Once you discover your winning formula of OCD-esque ticks to perform before each game, you must never deviate from it. Everything you do is part of a karmic and behavioral pattern that determines who wins on Sunday. It’s your duty to your team to obsessively re-create the conditions of whatever happened during your team’s last win. And not just on gameday. It extends for the full week prior to gameday. Week 1 is particularly difficult, as its run-up begins when schedules are released in the spring. That’s an entire summer of preparation for one game. No wonder that opener is so fraught with tension.

But what happens when you remain completely faithful to your superstitions and your team still loses? This leads to a moment of wrenching soul-searching on the part of the obsessed fan. Indeed, you must examine which of your rituals have lost their luck-inducing qualities and must be jettisoned immediately. Do you need a wholesale change or slight tinkering? All will be revealed the next time your team produces a win. But with each loss comes more and more indecision until running stark naked through traffic to the stadium sounds like a good idea. You’ll see that a lot at 49ers games. The best solution is just to label other people in your personal life as bad luck.

The Jinx

The same energy you reserve for adhering to your arsenal of effective superstitions should be applied to avoiding the dreaded jinx. You cannot jinx a rival team, but you can
hurt the fate of your own by doing little more than forgetting to use “if” as a preface before discussing the consequences of your team winning its next game. That’s all it takes. Jinxes take root in the fertile soil of hubris.

It gets worse; jinxes can originate from forces extraneous to the fan base, leaving fans scurrying to counterbalance the bad energy with forced humility. For example, a prominent columnist or network football analyst, someone who doesn’t have any direct involvement with the game, can jinx a team by assuring the public that there is absolutely no chance that it can lose. And, being the fools they sometimes are, members of your team can, by appearing on or sponsoring certain products, create a jinx that morphs into a curse. These are the most notorious:

The
Sports Illustrated
Cover Curse

The
Sports Illustrated
Curse condemns players or teams that appear on the magazine’s cover to immediate failure or disgrace. Most likely both. Though it is the most infamous and longstanding of product-related curses, it has lost some of its potency in recent years. This is due in part to the fact that
Sports Illustrated
is a shell of its former self, meaning the curse could still be intact but, because no one bothers to read the thing, few people notice.

The
Madden
Curse

The gold standard in modern individual curse-inducement. Look at some of the players who have graced the
cover of this video game franchise that sells annually in the millions: Michael Vick (went to prison), Daunte Culpepper (career ruined by knee injury), Shaun Alexander (career ruined by sucking), Donovan McNabb (suffered a sports hernia the season that he appeared on the cover—I hear that causes pain in your sports back), Ray Lewis (failure to meet murdering quotas in three of the following four years), Vince Young (fell into depression because he couldn’t spend all his time hanging out shirtless with dudes). And most recently Brett Favre (who led the league in interceptions and missed the playoffs, despite extensive media fellatio). Frankly, it’s unclear why any NFL player would subject himself to such highly jinxable conditions. Unless the rumors are true that these people do really enjoy large sacks of money.

The Chunky Soup Curse

Less celebrated than the
SI
and
Madden
curses, but no less debilitating. Like the
SI
curse, it results in failure on the field or personal injury. For instance, Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger appeared in an ad for the soup and won a Super Bowl, but months later made Chunky Soup of his face in a motorcycle crash. A Chunky Soup sponsorship also oversaw the rapid decline of once-elite running back LaDainian Tomlinson, forever casting into doubt the healthy properties of lean meat protein. Chunky Soup ads are also to blame for bringing Donovan McNabb’s mother into national prominence, which isn’t so much a jinx as a
pox on all of us. Also, McNabb lost a Super Bowl in which he famously puked at the end. I bet if you analyzed that vomit that…yup, Chunky.