After threatening for several years I've finally dragooned several of my excellent friends into forming a fantasy football league, the Vermont League of Excellence. While I've been a member of a fantasy baseball league, the Cincinnati-based Irrational league, for almost two decades, this will be our first foray into fantasy football. While it is easy to mock fantasy league - and certainly many people take them way too seriously - I'm excited because it provides another opportunity to spend time with my extraordinary friends. As one grows older it is natural that we appreciate the tremendous gift that our friends give us every day simply by being in our lives. The Irrational League has forced me to keep in contact with friends from Cincinnati who might have faded away without this inspiration. As you can see from the following logo from my friend Bob Mayer, obviously some of my friends share my enthusiasm. I think my friends are mainly excited my decision to stay in Vermont because I'm the one who initiates this type of tomfoolery.
I'm including a great essay about fantasy football, written by Tony Gervino, that appeared in the New York Times, that nicely sums up the allure of the activity. Thanks to the excellent Cinse Bonino for sending it along.
"Since 1991 I've competed in a fantasy football league with my college buddies, most of whom hail from the great state of New Jersey. Fantasy football leagues typically draft online, but we still conduct our business face to face, convening once a year, in late August, at a faded South Jersey hotel, thick with cigarette smoke. It's a weekend filled with steaks, beer, Bruce Springsteen bootlegs and affectionately toothless insults; a weird alternate universe where I wash down Cool Ranch Doritos with Mountain Dew and occasionally sleep in my clothes.
For the uninitiated, fantasy football is a statistical competition in which participants draft real-life N.F.L. players to fill imaginary teams. And when the real play scores, so does the imaginary team. The payoff at the end of the playoffs as a combination of money, bragging rights and, sometimes, a trophy.
It's not as exciting as it sounds.
Yet every Sunday in the fall, millions of participants like my friends and me surreptitiously track the performance of the Redskins quarterback - or some other player we'd normally have no interest in - while brunching with our wives' friends; we scrutinize weather forecasts and scour injury reports. You can begin to lose your marbles. There was an occasion, in a London hotel years ago, when I actually asked my late father for guidance on my lineup. To his credit, he was unforthcoming.
Over the years, my friends and I have all married; some guys have divorced, married again, divorced again. Many have kids, and most have lost their jobs at some point. A majority of us have gained weight, and some of us have become both hairier and balder. Only our enthusiasm for these imaginary teams and for the draft has remained constant.
A few years ago, I offered to host the draft on my Greenwich Village terrace, but apparently I failed the most important criterion. "Do you have a pool?" a league member asked. "Because the hotel has a pool." I confessed that while I could have almost anything their hearts desired delivered to my apartment, day or night, I did not, in fact, have a pool.
It has been widely assumed for some time now that I would eventually quit our league. No one has said as much, but I'm not an idiot. I'm the only one who lives in New York City. I don't play golf or smoke cigarettes. I'm childless and devour The Paris Review. And my team moniker, The Fifty-Pound Head, is derived from he dark British comedy "Withnail & I." I'm closer in species to a unicorn than I am to some of my friends. Yet I am also resolutely unwilling to surrender one of the few uncomplicated pleasures in what has become an increasingly complicated life - and the tether it provides to friends I might otherwise fall out of touch with.
I arrived at last year's draft an hour early and sat on a park bench in downtown Red Bank, N.J. with my friend Sean Roane, a managing editor at The Tribune-Democrat in Johnstown, Pa. We updated each other on our lives and our emotional commitment to the league, which has increased in depth as years have gone by, as it turned from a mere hobby to the very adhesive holding our social circle together.
I reminded him of the season when I covertly drafted my team over the telephone during my 10th wedding anniversary and how the team I drafted performed abysmally. We shared a laugh.
That Saturday night, while we waited for our friends to finish playing golf, we talked about how we considered the league a lifetime commitment. For him it certainly was.
Sean died in May from cancer that had spread to his bones and lungs. It was eating away at him the very night we were chatting. His newspaper ran an obituary, which contained the line "One of his other passions was fantasy football, winning the championship trophy multiple times."
His wife, Bonnie, asked to have our championship trophy, a replica (in the loosest sense of the word) of the Lombardi Trophy, as his memorial service while people paid their respects to Sean, who, as far as bragging rights go, was exceptionally talented at managing a fantasy football team.
Sean's title win in 2011 was the most recent engraving we had made on the trophy, so we gave it to Bonnie. We've ordered a new trophy. It should be ready in time for the draft."
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| Fear the Poodles! |
I'm including a great essay about fantasy football, written by Tony Gervino, that appeared in the New York Times, that nicely sums up the allure of the activity. Thanks to the excellent Cinse Bonino for sending it along.
"Since 1991 I've competed in a fantasy football league with my college buddies, most of whom hail from the great state of New Jersey. Fantasy football leagues typically draft online, but we still conduct our business face to face, convening once a year, in late August, at a faded South Jersey hotel, thick with cigarette smoke. It's a weekend filled with steaks, beer, Bruce Springsteen bootlegs and affectionately toothless insults; a weird alternate universe where I wash down Cool Ranch Doritos with Mountain Dew and occasionally sleep in my clothes.
For the uninitiated, fantasy football is a statistical competition in which participants draft real-life N.F.L. players to fill imaginary teams. And when the real play scores, so does the imaginary team. The payoff at the end of the playoffs as a combination of money, bragging rights and, sometimes, a trophy.
It's not as exciting as it sounds.
Yet every Sunday in the fall, millions of participants like my friends and me surreptitiously track the performance of the Redskins quarterback - or some other player we'd normally have no interest in - while brunching with our wives' friends; we scrutinize weather forecasts and scour injury reports. You can begin to lose your marbles. There was an occasion, in a London hotel years ago, when I actually asked my late father for guidance on my lineup. To his credit, he was unforthcoming.
Over the years, my friends and I have all married; some guys have divorced, married again, divorced again. Many have kids, and most have lost their jobs at some point. A majority of us have gained weight, and some of us have become both hairier and balder. Only our enthusiasm for these imaginary teams and for the draft has remained constant.
A few years ago, I offered to host the draft on my Greenwich Village terrace, but apparently I failed the most important criterion. "Do you have a pool?" a league member asked. "Because the hotel has a pool." I confessed that while I could have almost anything their hearts desired delivered to my apartment, day or night, I did not, in fact, have a pool.
It has been widely assumed for some time now that I would eventually quit our league. No one has said as much, but I'm not an idiot. I'm the only one who lives in New York City. I don't play golf or smoke cigarettes. I'm childless and devour The Paris Review. And my team moniker, The Fifty-Pound Head, is derived from he dark British comedy "Withnail & I." I'm closer in species to a unicorn than I am to some of my friends. Yet I am also resolutely unwilling to surrender one of the few uncomplicated pleasures in what has become an increasingly complicated life - and the tether it provides to friends I might otherwise fall out of touch with.
I arrived at last year's draft an hour early and sat on a park bench in downtown Red Bank, N.J. with my friend Sean Roane, a managing editor at The Tribune-Democrat in Johnstown, Pa. We updated each other on our lives and our emotional commitment to the league, which has increased in depth as years have gone by, as it turned from a mere hobby to the very adhesive holding our social circle together.
I reminded him of the season when I covertly drafted my team over the telephone during my 10th wedding anniversary and how the team I drafted performed abysmally. We shared a laugh.
That Saturday night, while we waited for our friends to finish playing golf, we talked about how we considered the league a lifetime commitment. For him it certainly was.
Sean died in May from cancer that had spread to his bones and lungs. It was eating away at him the very night we were chatting. His newspaper ran an obituary, which contained the line "One of his other passions was fantasy football, winning the championship trophy multiple times."
His wife, Bonnie, asked to have our championship trophy, a replica (in the loosest sense of the word) of the Lombardi Trophy, as his memorial service while people paid their respects to Sean, who, as far as bragging rights go, was exceptionally talented at managing a fantasy football team.
Sean's title win in 2011 was the most recent engraving we had made on the trophy, so we gave it to Bonnie. We've ordered a new trophy. It should be ready in time for the draft."
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