The Football Fan's Manifesto (24 page)

Use Outside of Football:
No one knows why announcers use this odd construct, but a viewer would be hard-pressed not to hear it at least a half dozen times per game. Instead of saying “Romeo Crennel should be frustrated with the play of his team today,” they will say, “If you’re Romeo Crennel, you have just got to be utterly devastated with the results out here today.” If you find yourself inclined to use the third person in such awkward ways, you probably write legalese for a living.

“Running downhill”

How It Is Used:
To describe a ball carrier, most likely a running back, who runs directly toward an opponent’s end zone, as opposed to moving backward, laterally toward the sideline, or upward, as if taking an invisible elliptical to the heavens. Essentially the opposite of what Reggie Bush does.

The phrase is, of course, an idiotic misnomer because a football field is mostly flat, save a minor crown for water drainage, hence there are no hills to descend.

Use Outside of Football:
Use this phrase if you want
to provoke one of these pedantic taint-sniffers into a fight. Don’t worry, they’ll be too busy sweating minutiae to dodge your dick punch.

“Overpursue”

How It Is Used:
A defender who too aggressively goes after a running back, ignoring the possibility that the ball carrier could cut back and go in another direction, thus burning the defense for a huge gain.

Use Outside of Football:
It would make sense to apply this term to someone who pursues a perspective mate with reckless abandon. But then stalkers would lose their preferred verb, and they’re not people you want to screw with.

“Impose your will”

How It Is Used:
To be able to do what you want despite direct resistance from other parties. An offense will be said to be imposing its will on the defense when it is moving the ball easily even in the face of a well-prepared adversary.

Use Outside of Football:
Surely there are a number of occasions in life when one person is able to exert considerable force over another in getting them to do what they want. Lawful occasions, preferably.

“You play to win the game!”

How It Is Used:
Nothing less than a mission statement of life; once a mantra used by Herman Edwards to chew out a reporter at a postgame press conference.

Use Outside of Football:
In football, as in life, you always want to finish at the top. If you’re not winnin’, you’re dyin’! It’s important to remind people of that every once in a while. A belligerent tone and a wild-eyed expression works best.

“It looks like he’s just having fun out there”

How It Is Used:
A cloying observation in regard to the seemingly whimsical play of quarterback Brett Favre.

Whether it’s throwing a pick-six off his back foot or tossing the ball across the field into the welcoming chest of a linebacker playing zone coverage, announcers and analysts are enamored with the play of Brett Favre—so much so that they love to describe his every mannerism on the football field as positively childlike. While some other players have had this remark applied to them by the announcigensia, it is typically reserved for Favre. And it’s grating as all hell.

Use Outside of Football:
Now, you ask, how can I employ this very specific phrase to my own life? The answer is that you cannot. It is strictly verboten, on penalty of having your balls placed on Rob Bironas’s kicking tee. It’s the only way you’ll learn.

IX.8 Get Tat Up from the Mat Up

Getting tatted up, it’s not just for biker gangs, inmates, Marines, and coked-out songstresses anymore. Sports fans have embraced the art of the tattoo in all its even
tually regrettable majesty. It’s not a stretch to state that the majority of those who suit up on Sundays have some ink on them. But, unlike in the NBA, where old ladies sitting courtside can read off Delonte West’s legs as he’s throwing the ball in, football players’ bodies are better concealed, meaning the only tattoos that fans are usually aware of are the arm tat, the neck tat, and the occasional
Night of the Hunter
–esque knuckle tat. That is, until you catch the player on a blog boozing it up shirtless with two young coeds. You’ll be shocked to discover that T-Sizzle looks better in Ole English than you thought.

Among the more well-known tattoos in the NFL are those belonging to Jeremy Shockey (an eagle wrapped in the American flag appears on his right arm), JaMarcus Russell (the words “The Chosen One” are inked on his left arm; presumably “The Underthrowing One” is written on his right), Shawne Merriman (his right forearm bears a light switch in the off position, to signify his “Lights Out” nickname and as a reminder to only inject steroids under the cover of darkness), Kellen Winslow Jr. (a Frederick Douglass quote is inscribed on his left forearm, which no doubt fires up his fellow soldiers), Ray Lewis (has a panther on his right arm, for they prey on witnesses), and Laurence Maroney (has a tattoo of the Kool-Aid guy, which enables him to burst through walls unscathed. If only the same applied to a defense’s front seven).

As a fan, there’s no reason why you should confine your visual expressions of undying worship to mere trinkets, arti
cles of clothing, and car decals of Calvin pissing on thine enemies. The fan tattoo says a lot of positive things about you, chief among them your commitment and willingness to take pain for your team, both very critical come bar fight time. Believe it or not, the tats serve a pragmatic purpose as well. What would happen if you found yourself waking up naked in the streets without them? Chuckle if you will, but for a football fan, this is hardly a seldom occurrence. How then would freaked-out bystanders know which is your team?

Some may be deterred from getting a fan tattoo for any number of reasons, cop-outs, or bouts of penile inversion. Fear and indecision are the usual excuses. Pay them no mind. Those words are not in the football fan’s lexicon. If there’s an impulsive and potentially harmful act you could be committing, you’re duty-bound to do it.

Supposing it’s the day job that poses a problem, it may mean you’re in need of a new line of work. Or that you need to dig in your high heels, Nancy. If the boss is thinking there’s a conflict between your neck tattoo depicting a buccaneer garroting a saint and your job running a daycare service, let him know that if your rights as a fan are to be impinged upon, you can have a crowd of sixty Bucs fanatics out front within the hour. No way they’ll risk it.

On the whole, fan tattoos differ from those of players in several noteworthy ways: they don’t scare anybody, and they have a unhealthy store of flab undergirding them. Their purpose is to reflect the team’s glory, not to promote the individual’s. The athlete, through body art, is trying to tell his own story, and you’re turning that story into
Ron Howard–like hagiography. The athlete tats also have more room for idiosyncrasies, as with LaMarr Woodley’s large Woody Woodpecker image on his left bicep, while the menu of fan options is narrower, but not without character. For example, if you got a Woody tattoo, that bird better have the team’s helmet on it and it better be pecking the shit out some treelike representation of your rival.

X.1 Retirement, or “Which Team Do I Like, Again?”

Glorioski! Prolonging insanity long enough to reach retirement is no gimme achievement. Familial and work-place stressors work in tandem to grind every last shred of life force out of the tired bodylike husk you become by your fifties. To make it this far, you must have found your niche in the world, maybe even landed your dream job, unless that was playing in the NFL, in which case you almost certainly expired before the age of sixty-five.

Now that you’ve made it to your golden years, whiling away the remainder of your days focusing on what truly matters becomes a heavenly reality. One that is tempered by the rapid loss on your mental faculties. Surely by now that team has managed to secure at least one title for you. If so, a good chunk of your life has been spent basking in those glorious moments. With your mind swiftly deteriorating, you can safely block out the bad, while keeping the
broken record of highlights from the good times rolling. Perhaps even embellishing them a tad. You were, after all, having a threesome with two Japanese gravure idols when David Tyree made his helmet catch, right?

Time passes more quickly when you have little idea what is going on. That’s why Joe Gibbs’s second stint with the Redskins felt to him like a half hour. That’s detrimental for maintaining a normal social life, but that was never really a priority for you anyway. This way, though, off-seasons will pass like commercial breaks. March will melt into August like so much cheese on Taco Bell’s latest fully loaded heart-attack special. Before you know it, the regular season has rolled around again.

Better yet, free time and disposable income means complete devotion can be paid to your favorite team during the season. While other suckers, smug with full control of their bowels, must squander time carrying out a fully rounded life, you’re free to be as single-minded as you wish. What better way do you have to spend your time? Crocheting bath mats? Rewriting your will? Detaching and reattaching your colostomy bag? Surely you can do better.

For starters, securing a routine for the season needs to move to the top of your bucket list, right after punching anyone who has actually compiled a bucket list. Your kids are grown, your responsibilities are gone. If you haven’t made your way through the waiting list for season tickets by the time you’ve reached dotage, you’ve erred in life. Did you buy a boat? Bother to send your kids to college?
If those freeloaders can’t ball well enough to get a scholarship, you’d best cast them by the wayside before they become a further drain on your resources.

Tune the family out. Finesse that senility with signs of lucidity, or chances are you’ll be stuck in a home. Bear in mind that retirement homes, in addition to being brutal houses of death, don’t have NFL Sunday Ticket, much less liquor outside the administrator’s office. Any football discussion will be limited to nurses using football metaphors to get you to swallow pills. Do show at least enough coherence to remember family members’ names, maybe even a birthday or two. Try to combine your interests by letting them know you’re aware of which team they like, preferably by insulting that team. If you’ve succeeded in making them all follow the same team as you, demonstrate your cognizance by occasionally saying something derogatory about a rival team. If that comment is met with an attempt to make a high five, do your best to make contact. They won’t expect more than a timid effort on your part, so at least give them that much.

Failing that, at least keep your jersey on at all times. Your family can’t possibly put someone away with his game face on.

X.2 Your Team Relocated to Another City! Your Entire Life Was All For Naught!

Fans maintain a love-hate relationship with their team’s ownership—in turns irritated by personnel moves and
escalating ticket, parking, and concession prices—but in the end they somehow remain fiercely loyal to the miserly, unfeeling tycoon running the show. Love is an easily exploitable emotion like that.

But what happens when an owner pulls the rug out from under their fans by moving the team to another city? As those wronged by Robert Irsay, Art Modell, and Bud Adams can attest, a violent sense of betrayal capped by a bloodlust worthy of Patrick Bateman. And why not? This is the destruction of people’s livelihoods on a massive scale, usually for no other reason than a city not relenting on the owner’s demands for unnecessary new digs filled with luxury suites and cushy escape pods in the untimely event of a proletariat uprising.

Though franchises in large markets such as New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia are immune to this sort of exodus, it seems every other year at least one team is rumored to be on the move. Whenever this happens, Los Angeles is usually at or near the top of the list of likely destinations, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that L.A. is a horrible pro football town. Sure, L.A. has some great college and high school teams, but it also has a track record of two failed NFL franchises, coupled with no reason to believe one would work there now. Los Angeles remains a glorious mirage to the football owner, perhaps because of the City of Angels’ large population, its prestige, or its fans’ habits of showing up right before halftime and leaving midway through the fourth quarter. It’s the
ever-present holy grail for the disgruntled owner in search of new revenue, whereas somehow Las Vegas, one of the largest growing markets in the country, with its wondrous legalized gambling, merits only the occasional murmur.

A strange quirk of fandom is that it is inextricably linked to the city where the team is based. If a team skips town, it doesn’t take its fans with it, no matter how die-hard. In the era of free agency, where player turnover can overhaul a roster within the span of a few years, a team’s location is the only constant. Even if you didn’t grow up in the town where your team is based, so much of that team’s identity is anchored in that city. An essential component of trash-talk among fans is bashing the city a team calls home. Through years of defending the team in these verbal battles, you’ve learned to embrace the character of that town as a means of backing the team.

So when the team moves, it loses the soul that underpins it, even if it keeps the same name and uniforms. Can anyone honestly say the Indianapolis Colts evoke the same set of images that the Baltimore Colts do? Of course not. The only way the modern Colts could seem whiter is if they played in Utah.

X.3 Buying a Team Means Buying the Affections of Millions, Even as You Screw Them

Holy shit, you’ve struck it rich! How did you amass this fortune? Was it through grit, determination, hard work, and savvy decision-making? Fuck that. That’s for chumps. Most likely it was through questionable business practices and outright white-collar criminal behavior. Or maybe you just inherited it all. That’s how it’s done in this country.

But that’s not really important. What matters is if it’s enough to purchase an NFL team. To even have a shot at
that holy grail, you’ll be needing some serious fuck-you money. Enough to make the average CEO cry the tears of the most down-and-out pauper. Enough to have your face chiseled on the big Jesus statue in Rio de Janeiro. Basically, what Oprah’s got.

This is not an easy gravy train to board. In 2008, for the first time, the value of the average NFL franchise topped $1 billion, and it’s only going up, even in tough economic times. That’s even factoring in the thirteen thousand dollars the Texans are worth. Team ownership is a massive investment, but one that will pay mega dividends in the not too distant future. Indeed, once in the owner’s box, you’ll be fleecing your fans and local taxpayers in no time at all. Just make sure you get a controlling interest of the franchise. An owner with minority interest in a team is in no better position than your average Packer fan, as that franchise has been a publicly traded, nonprofit corporation since 1923. The day you find yourself no better than a Packer fan is the day you take a romantic bath with a plugged-in hairdryer. If you’re not going to be the one calling the shots, what’s the point? Sharing in the massive profits is all well and good, but it’s nothing more than obscene riches without the clout to back it up.

Billionaires don’t have as many lifestyle choices as conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Social pressures exist for them too. As people who’ve committed their whole life to superficial pleasures, they feel it more keenly than most. They must follow in lockstep the few paths
considered acceptable to someone of their outsize means, and they are as follows: owning a sports team, running for political office, or getting into philanthropy.

The first is for homespun narcissists. The second is for deluded self-righteous assholes. The last is for noble idiots. It should come as no surprise that George W. Bush is a few donations from pulling off the trifecta.

The downside to the process of bidding for a team is that it’s not merely a function of having the money, but also of having the connections that will get you considered as a candidate for ownership. First, there obviously has to be a team up for sale or an expansion franchise being proposed. And don’t think there aren’t handfuls of billionaires waiting in the wings to snatch the golden egg out from under you.

Like any collection of influential rich people, the old boys and girls club that constitutes NFL ownership likes to vet perspective buyers before they join the inner circle. They want to see if the business ties you have will reflect well on the league. They also need to make sure you’ve carried out the requisite slew of contract kills that forms initiation. They want to know that you’re one of them, that you’re not some Mark Cuban–esque gadfly who will challenge league orthodoxy and make fellow owners look out of touch. Most of all, they want to know that you’re not a minority.

So what kind of owner will you be? A benevolent champion of the fan who keeps in mind the true spirit of the
league? One who doesn’t emphasize making money first and offers former players generous post-career benefits? Well, you’d be the first. Except you’d never get awarded ownership rights in the first place, so leave those magnanimous leanings at the door. Those interested in joining this elite club must conform to one of the following personality types.

I
MPERIOUS
N
APOLEONIC
M
EGALOMANIAC

The NFL loves to exercise complete, almost suffocating control over how the media covers the league. Why else would it ban even mainstream media Web sites from posting footage of league action longer than thirty seconds? That’s why any owner who wants to buy up every media property in his market and punish the ones who cover his team unfavorably is ready to belong to this politburo.

Example:
Dan Snyder

O
VERWEENING
D
ISRUPTIVE
C
ARTOONISH
M
EGALOMANIAC

Every ownership group needs a brash character who thinks he’s a bigger star than the players he puts on the field. Hoping to win at any cost, this owner will offer a refuge to the most troubled athlete. Volatile situations are never in short supply when he welcomes the most uncoachable superstars and pairs them with meek, unassertive head coaches.

Example:
Jerry Jones

D
ECREPIT
D
ELUSIONAL
M
EGALOMANIAC

The most dysfunctional of the megalomaniacal subset, those representing this type were usually once savvy and hard-charging renegades who fell victim to old age and their overpowering sense of paranoia. They do make for good press-conference footage, though.