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The NFL and the TV networks have my old buddy Jason to thank, because quite possibly the only reason I’m still a fan of pro football is the fantasy football league that he brought me into a few years back. I’m grateful to J for this as well (see also his picture in the sidebar of this blog’s home page), because I had meandered away from sports fandom at the time, and hadn’t realized that I missed the catharsis that it provides. Obviously actual participation in athletic competition generally benefits one’s personal health in a way that vicarious participation does not; indeed, the manner of vicarious engagement with sports practiced by many these days is, conversely, a health liability. Versions of this observation are often expressed by those who disdain sports fans, generally because they envy the fan’s enjoyment of something which they themselves haven’t bothered to understand.

For men, myself most definitely included, there is perhaps no more reliable trigger for juvenile recidivism than football. The brilliance of fantasy football is that it capitalizes upon this behavioral rewind. Love it though I do, I’ll be the first to admit that there is something fundamentally laughable about a group of ten grown men (or in the case of our league, nine men and one woman) selecting our own “teams” of actual NFL players and then pitting them against one another in weekly contests, with points awarded on the basis of the players’ real-life statistics. “Fantasy” is the operative word here – football is made into a fantasy role-playing game, and its participants into a sports version of D&D nerds. We fantasize that these players are our team, of which we are the head coaches and general managers. Although many fantasy footballers would bristle at being compared to Dungeons & Dragons aficionados, I imagine they would prefer this connotation of the word “fantasy” over its other most common usage: sexual fantasy, with which I’m sure you’re all familiar. If you’re not, you really need to stay home more often.

We in the Whiplash League leaven the essential absurdity of fantasy football with a healthy dose of self-mockery. For example, consider some of the names we’ve given our teams and the stories behind them:

My team is the E.J. Junior, Sr. Junior High Grumpy Hippos. The “hippos” portion was because it seemed wrong that the big game animal that consistently kills more people than any other has never been respected as a suitably badass mascot. The inspiration for the first part of the team name came from Roy Blount, Jr. during one of his frequent stints as a panelist on NPR’s comedic news show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!: [audio:ejjr-wwdtm-20050709.mp3]

A jocular Floridian named Greg manages a team currently known as the Ottawa Modified Death. It works because it sounds suitably threatening but is actually kind of New Age-y, as explained in the online comic strip Achewood, from which it originated. Thus is also explained its beer-label logo, except perhaps for his use of the techy slang term “root.” He is an imaginative trash talker, and one not averse to typing under the influence of… well, various things. When I joined the league in 2001 his team was called the Battle Creek Brickbats; he then passed a few seasons as the Swannanoa Anonymous before becoming the OMD.

The Howey-in-the-Hills Hall Monitors are a fantasy football anomaly by virtue of their being helmed by the aforementioned Greg’s wife, Donna. When she took ownership of the former Deerfield Dogboys in 2003, her introductory email wasted no time in establishing their new identity, saying, “…I look forward to leaving the Dogboy legacy behind and beginning my dynasty anew! For starters… I would like to formally announce my team’s new name. Anyone driving north on I-95 on Florida has seen signs for a sleepy little town know as Howey-in-the-Hills. Nothing much happened in this fair city, until a band of rogue hall monitors took control of it and have subjugated all townspeople to a life of Hall passes and wedgie patrols, in a reign of terror at times horrific yet simultaneously erotic. In their honor, my team shall now be called the Howey-in-the-Hills Hall Monitors. None shall pass!”

The Arkansas Rabid Sasquatch are guided by the hand of Johnny G, an actor, musician, and native of that southern state. He has expressed his preoccupation with Bigfoot quite lyrically in “Arkansas,” which is track 4 on the self-titled debut CD by his band Good Ol’ Country Railroad, which I enthusiastically recommend. His emails within the league, however, take on a brutish, cro-magnon voice, and often culminate with the rallying cry “UP COME THE ‘SQUATCH!!!” He sometimes even forms doggerel-type verse, like when another owner challenged him by saying that their upcoming match would take place in the Ozark burg of Booger Holler, “where we shall meet and settle our split so far this season, if you dare!?!” The Squatch answered, “Dare!? Are kiddin’ me?! SASQUATCH LIVES IN BOOGER HOLLAR! …Here we come clumpity clump / Crack your bones humpity hump / Shake the tree clumpity clump / Break yer knee humpity hump / Up we come thumpity thump / Kick your rump rumpity rump / To Smoke your weed puffity puff / To make off with your stuffity stuff!… UP COME THE SQUATCH BABY! UP WE COME!”

The owner of the Opa Locka Bowlsnappers, an actor named Heath, has of late justified his team’s name thoroughly. The Whiplash championship game at the end of each season is called the Snap da Bowl, invoking the image of what a hungry dog does to his dish when he’s done eating (appropriately, the 3rd-place game is called the Scrape da Bowl). Although the host of our league’s site is down at the moment, I believe that Heath has snapped the bowl two of the last three years, thanks in no small part to my ineptitude in the 2002 draft. Not yet understanding the superior fantasy value of running backs over all other player positions, I used my first pick in the draft on rookie quarterback Michael Vick, who was never a reliable fantasy-points producer and is now, for well-known reasons, dead to me. Heath, with the second pick of the draft, was thereby free to take a rookie running back named… LaDanian Tomlinson. As for Opa Locka, I only recently learned that it is an actual town in Florida and not some jokey contrivance. Heath originally proposed the name in an email that read, “You might as well put me in the ghetto and call my team the Opa Locka Bowlsnappers. That’s where all the funky snappy comes from anyway. And Dan, can we please not abbreviate to Snappers on the website? I like the Supersonics that way too, not the sonics. If the site won’t let you do it, then I’ll just have to eat it. And by the way, thank you in advance for putting up with me being a little bitch. I got sand in my pussy and [Jason] won’t trade me Shaun Alexander, so there it is.”

This has gotten long. I’ll have to save the other five teams for another post.