Read The Football Fan's Manifesto Online
Authors: Michael Tunison
The Football Fan's Manifesto (15 page)
Try mailing any of the following sample threats to fellow owners in your league once one of your trades has been submitted for their approval. Be sure to cut all the ill-fitting letters out of various magazines, not so much to conceal the source of the letters (everyone knows they’re from you) but because it makes you look cinematically deranged. And everyone knows actual crazy people love to copy the tactics of crazy people from movies.
- “Approve my fucking trade of Greg Camarillo for Brandon Marshall or I’ll bayonet you in the nuts. My antique weapons collection has been itching for some use. If I forgot to get the rust off first, what’s the difference?”
- “You know that scene in s?
Fargo
where the dude gets fed into the wood chipper? Well, approve my trade or I’ll kick the shit out of you and then go watch that movie and laugh about what I’ve done.” - “Do you like pits of serpents? Shit, you weren’t supposed to say yes. Well, once I find out what animal you’re deathly afraid of, I fill the pit with that. And in you’ll go!”
- “I’ll chain you to a radiator and force-feed you Grady Jackson FUPA sweat.”
- “Tank Johnson lent me his weapons cache and I’ve only gone through a couple dozen grenades. That still leaves thousands more, fuckstick.”
- “Only interested in keeping things fair, you say? Well, I’m only interested in jamming a scalding fire poker in your eye.”
- “Five words: live wire in your urethra.”
- “Once I’m done with you, they’ll never find the body. Unless investigators follow the lengthy list of obvious clues I leave in my wake.”
- “If you don’t think I can transfer flesh-eating bacteria over an Internet chat, you aren’t paying attention to your rapidly disappearing midsection.”
- “You know that Wu-Tang track where Method Man says he’s gonna staple your asshole shut and keep feeding you? Well, I’ll do the same thing, except I’ll be feeding you gasoline.”
- “Ever had your lower lip nailed to a railroad track? Well, it’ll stay that way so long as you’re smart enough to keep your trap shut about my acquisition of DeAngelo Williams for Drew Bennett.”
- “I think a daytrip to the mountains could help us clear our heads and settle our differences. Sucks for you that I’ll be dragging you from the back of my truck on the way there.”
- “Ever had your head slammed in a car door? Well, I don’t have a car, so you’ll have to settle for a regular door.”
A few of these and you’ll have your trade clear with no fuss at all. Sure, you’ll get booted out of the league for improper conduct, but if you were in a league that doesn’t permit wanton threats of violence, you weren’t doing the fantasy experience justice in the first place. Also, don’t include threats over e-mail. The less evidence to present to the cops, the better. It’s just common sense.
“I think a daytrip to the mountains could help us clear our heads and settle our differences. Sucks for you that I’ll be dragging you from the back of my truck on the way there.”
“Ever had your head slammed in a car door?
VII.1 Seventeen Weeks of Sweet Delusion
For most fans, the football season is an endless stream of gut-punches and curb-stompings, interspersed with the odd moment of deceptive euphoria. But in the heady days of early September before that first kickoff, all is still joy and wonder. Now is time for the airing of the unreasonably bold prognostications! 19-0! 19-0! After all, there is parity in the league. Sweet, sweet parity. Which means any team that builds chemistry, stays healthy, and gets a lucky bounce here and there can go from 6-10 one year to 13-3 the next, no sweat. Will this necessarily occur? Probably not. But what’s important is that it has the potential to occur. And that’s the sad hope you’ll stubbornly cling to like Tony Sparrano does to the Wildcat Formation.
Week 1
—The opening game of the NFL season is exponentially more important than that of any other professional sport. The sixteen-game schedule ampli
fies the significance of any regular season contest compared to an eighty-two or, god forbid, a 162-game season. In the NFL, careers can be made and undone in single weeks. A Week 1 win can be the springboard to the top of the heap. Or it can be a misleading precursor to a horrible joke of a season. Either way, everybody wants to start the year on a positive note.
Week 2
—Oh, no, your team lost on Kickoff Weekend! You’re already in the hole after one game. The club is tied for last place in the division, for Pete Rozelle’s sake! Breathe deep. Give your balls a reassuring pat. One loss isn’t going to screw the season. In fact, sometimes teams need to lose to expose fixable flaws in the game plan and to keep players humble. There are good types of losses, or so you repeat to your bloodshot eyes in the mirror at 3 a.m.
Week 3
—Analysts begin ticking off the short list of teams that have made the Super Bowl following an 0-2 start. The recitation of this fact scares you to the sphincter. A must-win game in September? Here goes…
Week 4
—“Oh, God, oh, shit, the team is 0-3. All is lost. All. Is. Fucking. Lost. The plane has flown into the mountain! Someone direct me to the tallest building with a street-level awning unlikely to cushion my fall. But, wait, what? The 1998 Buffalo Bills made the playoffs after an 0-3 start? So…there’s
still hope? Yeah! You’re right. I mean, sure they’ve lost all their games, but they were all closely contested. They can right this ship!”
Week 5
—Doom and gloom falls heavy on fans of the 0-4 team. By now, you’ve put up Craigslist ads shopping your tickets for the rest of the season and considered developing a second drinking problem. What’s more, the team becomes the butt of every gag on the pregame shows. Wearing your team’s jersey in public is suddenly a more daunting prospect. As is listening to the haunting voices in your head.
Week 6
—Hey, your team got its first victory of the season. Happy day! You get to show your face in public again. Vegas still has your guys as a touchdown underdog next week at home, so you know it’s a tough road ahead, but there’s a sign of life. Might want to power down the suicide machine for a spell.
Week 7
—Back-to-back wins piques your delusional demons. For the time being, it’s also sharply reduced the amount of the furniture you’ve ripped up around the house in fits of frustration. The thought, just maybe, that the team has turned it around creeps into your head.
Week 8
—Another win and now the team has reached the bye week. After enduring a painful start at the beginning of the year, you’ve become very guarded with your optimism. You don’t know if you’re ready to commit to that kind of fever pitch again so soon. You
promise to sleep under your team comforter one night just to see how it goes. Nothing serious.
Week 9
—You’re geared up for a second-half-of-the-season stretch run. This is the time of year that the great teams get it together and start owning shit. Meanwhile, your spirits are building, your ulcer has gone away, and the wife and kids are relieved enough by your calmer demeanor to move back into the house.
Week 10
—The team has scaled its way out of the hole and back to a .500 record. They’re right in the hunt. This season could go either way. Which is doing wonders for your chemical imbalance.
Week 11
—ZOMFG! Five wins in row! The team has a winning record. Fire up the bandwagon. Start looking into making reservations at the Super Bowl host city. Flood online sports message board with trash-talk. Any small talk you enter into with strangers or store clerks should be about the team and its turn of good fortune. Let the karma gods know you appreciate their work.
Week 12
—And just like that, all that good energy goes to shit as the team snaps its five-game win streak, taking all the wind out of its sails and the record back to .500. They’ll have to run the table at this point. Right about now, “poison the drinking water” doesn’t sound like the worst idea your grief-stricken mind has fed you all day.
Week 13
—Yet another loss and the season is of
ficially coming undone, as are the lingering threads of your sanity. The wife has gone back to sleeping at her sister’s place. Meanwhile, you stare dead-eyed at the television while consuming bag after bag of bacon dust. Over the span of four days, you have three lengthy conversations about cosmology with your DVD remote.
Week 14
—The team ekes out a win just to toy with you. Feeling emotionally spent at this point, you’re too numb to notice you haven’t left the house in three weeks. To your credit, you have been showering, even if that has consisted of standing in an ice-cold shower stream while crying for an hour. Clean is clean.
Week 15
—What’s this? Another win? For us? Huzzah! At 7-6, your team has put a decent enough season together to be on the outer reaches of the playoff hunt. And, if only they can win their final three games, and maybe get a little help, they’ll squeeze into that last Wild Card spot! Maybe it’s not too early to start lining up for the post–Super Bowl parade.
Week 16
—Well, damn it all to fucking hell. Faced with the gauntlet and the team couldn’t even win the first game of the final stretch. Now, with two weeks remaining, the team has already been eliminated from playoff contention. At this point, the question becomes whether it’s acceptable to root for your team to lose so that it improves the team’s draft order. It’s a thorny question. If, say, the pick in question is first pick of the draft and the team has only won one game
all year, it’s fine to root against them, if only for the added comedic effect of total ineptitude. However, if you’re only talking about the difference between the fifteenth and twelfth pick, that’s not worth a dive against a hated division rival that’s fighting for its own playoff life. You’ve got to ruin their shit.
Week 17
—Few things are more depressing to the sports fan than the beginning of a postseason in which your team is not involved. It’s a soul-flattening sensation of inconsequence. You get to watch all of these teams who, even if they lose, get to matter on the big stage. You’d much rather your team have a chance to go down fighting, or choking, as the case would be for Dallas.
The year ends on a dispiriting note. On the plus side, your team’s coach will soon be fired (if he hasn’t been already) and the search for his successor will take most of the next few weeks, leaving the eventual replacement not enough time to install his system, dooming him for obvious failure. Good times!
But if your team did, in fact, make the playoffs, well then calloo callay for you, dickface. Everything must be all smiles and cheeseburgers in the land of happy, you gloating sack of shit. Real fans are always fans! Even when the team indicates through years of inaction on the free-agent market that it isn’t serious about winning but still wants a new stadium funded by public money, we’ll be there for them. That’s what fans do! And besides, we’ll get to you front-runners soon enough.
VII.2 Strategies for a Losing Season: Blame All Parties Involved
Jilted lovers, grieving families, dispossessed monsoon victims, quadruple amputees—tragic cases, all. But we can all agree these sob stories pale in comparison to the plight of the sports fan who cheers on a loser. Every day this wretched creature is buffeted by trash-talk from the fans of thriving teams and the expectation of another wrenching loss coming down the pike. The abject agony he must endure is tantamount to no other form of grief in the human condition. Save the blue balls, maybe.
What relief has he, this depantsed and downtrodden fan of the fallen? Some console themselves with the far-off promise of the hardly guaranteed glory of high draft choices. Others turn to the bottle, the needle, the bong, the moonshine jug, or the contents of a broken-into CVS pharmacy.
At best, those are short-term fixes, and they are ultimately placebos when compared to the real cure, that being the identifying and demonizing of a scapegoat. Though most bad teams have deficiencies at several key positions, it is the fan’s job to distill the blame and fire it with a laserlike precision and a neutron-bomb-level intensity at one culpable individual. Is it fair? Hardly. But I’ll be damned if it isn’t reassuring to gang up on somebody.
The scapegoat can be any member of the team, though it usually falls on the shoulders of a high-profile individual, whether it be the starting quarterback, the head coach, the offensive or defensive coordinator, or the general manager. For another figure to get the glare of blame
flashed on them, they must really, really turn on the suck. Adam Archuleta and Brian Russell are shining beacons in that respect.
Once labeled a scapegoat, it’s next to impossible for that impression to be overturned. Lions fans, expert losers that they are, for years laid the blame for their franchise’s string of failures at the feet of general manager Matt Millen. Some observers would describe their animosity as misplaced. All Millen did was hire inept coaches, sign mediocre players, squander first-round picks drafting bust receiver after bust receiver, and generally infect every level of the organization with the distinct aroma of disgrace and festering llama shit. But c’mon, what do you want from the guy? Competence?
Though the scapegoat deserves hate, fueled with the energy of a thousand suns, stay away from the personal when lashing out. Such attacks do nothing but make you look petty and unhinged, when you only mean to be petty and vengeful. Take, for example, the years when Steelers fans, disgusted with the erratic play of Kordell Stewart, circulated rumors that the quarterback was gay. Which is silly, because all quarterbacks are at least a little gay.
Once the scapegoat is identified, the fan’s job is to make his life a living hell. The slightest misstep by the scapegoat is to be greeted with a heinous chorus of boos so vicious it could cripple the emotions of the most steeled individual. The scapegoat should be made to fear showing his face in public, more so than any other famous athlete already
does. Call-in radio shows, blog entries, and comment sections on online newspaper articles should be flooded with invective against this cretin. Ignore pleas from the punditry for reason or temperance. Remind them that it is you, the fan, who pays this player’s or coach’s salary, and that this gives you the right to inflict undue misery.
To further the effect on the scapegoat, organize protests outside the stadium for his immediate benching or outright release. Be sure to alert the media and make costumes so wild and elaborate they put IMF protesters to shame. If your demands are still not heeded, coordinate mass walkouts during games. Sure, the ownership is still getting your money, but you’re totally sticking it to them. Symbolism means more to billionaires slavishly monitoring the bottom line than you might think.
When the scapegoat is finally cut loose, celebrate wildly as though an albatross has finally been removed from your shoulder and a wondrous new era is being ushered in. Watch as the team loses a few more games, then find another scapegoat and repeat as necessary until a championship is won.
VII.3 Drink Deep of the Haterade, That Cool, Refreshing Drink
When you find yourself in the throes of an abortive season, there is nothing that can console you quite like the sweet succor of pure, unvarnished hatred. Hatred for your rivals. Hatred for the teams that are true contenders.
Hatred for the same passel of commercials that have been running all season long. It is this hatred that will sustain you through times of extreme fanial strife. Antipathy is top-shelf booze for the psyche.
In the years when your team is getting taken to the woodshed on a weekly basis, by mid-September you will already have it in your head that once again this isn’t your season. Try not to take it too hard. But do take it hard on those who have it good. This is the way most seasons will work themselves out. The sooner you adjust yourself to failure, the sooner you can start focusing on discrediting the accomplishments of others.
Hatred gets a bad rap from those sportsmanship hucksters, but it is really nothing to fear. Without this eminently vital emotion, we’d be inclined to respect and honor the deeds of those we heartily dislike. I’m not sure that’s a world any of us want to live in. Football is not built on mutual respect. Honor is shared among thieves. Fans deal in contempt and spite.
Hatred is stoked by the consumption of haterade, a potent elixir that is equal parts bile and spleen. Lucky for you haterade is a naturally occurring part of alcoholic drinks, and can easily be consumed alongside your usual drinking regiment.
Supping from the font of haterade, you will learn that there is not a great performance that you cannot undermine. If a team you dislike happens to benefit from a critical penalty that springs it to victory, you’re more than
entitled to harp on how lucky that team was to be the beneficiary of that bit of officiating. If a freakish bounce goes their way, never let that team’s fan base believe for a second that their team earned that victory. When they do reach a title game, carp that the Super Bowl is boring and that no one wants to watch them, causing ratings to plummet. Even if the team wins decisively, there are useful outs for the hater. For instance, say the team you hate fails to cover a huge line they are given against an overmatched opponent. That only serves to show that they are hopelessly overrated. Even in victory you’ve got them feeling like shit.