perhaps there's something you can explain to me.
you see, i had heard of fantasy football somewhat, and i had heard reports of the strange fetishistic list-keeping, and the grids and the drafts and the stats, and even to some extent, the solipsistic orgies surrounding the matches of the real footballers themselves. but i guess i had never put it in perspective before last night, when hunger drove me from the basement of the billiard hall into the phalanx of television monitors that dominate the placeholder pub.
now i knew that place as a sort of conventional football fan guy's hang out from the frat boys in law school; i even went there once for birthday drinks for some guy i didn't like. so i knew going in, that there'd be sports there. but i was surprised, after sitting at the bar and ordering some food and sipping a coke, to look around and notice that seven of the eight televisions in that little room were tuned to the same channel, and later that all the guys i took for typical monday-night-football-at-the-local-watering-hole jocks, were not only that, but weirdly tricked-out jocks: jocks with lists, and markers and chits, and spreadsheets.
they looked like rotarians who don't give a damn about the township's commerce, but about . . . well, here's the difficulty:
these people were the people who beat up the people who tried to do their science projects well and who played dungeons and dragons, or similarly obsessive-compulsive fantasy games with magical pitfalls and twenty-sided dice, who beat up the D&D players, mashing their tolkien books in the mud, and twisting their nipples purple for playing games with charts and tables.
give me the good honesty of tight pants and the pigskin, the yes-men in the group would say, punching shoulders while the leaders wiped the nerd from their hands, and mangled a pewter figurine.
so what's up? have the D&D players been corrupted by professional sports so that they're now indistinguishable from the other fans? have the urban football fans been co-opted by the formerly-D&D-playing ad-men, like their masculinity has been by the gay fashion advertisers, so that now they're really doing nothing more by trying to amaffe-ye enyffe pointef that ye fhalt caste offe the dreaded defenfive line of thefe foef, and fmite-thee theyre rouine mightylie in thyne enemief deftruction threw oute the accurfed AFC!?!
and how did you end up on both sides of the equation?