The Football Fan's Manifesto (21 page)

After each contest, be sure to call in to local radio shows to express your overzealous observations of these pointless affairs. It may not seem so, but coaches regularly tune in to these programs before making important roster moves and playbook alternations. Generally they only heed the loudest, most deranged testimonials, so keep that in mind if you get on the air.

IX.1: Fandom on the Intarwebz!!11!

Finding that your manic pleas for the fullback to get a few more touches per game have fallen on deaf ears? You’ve tried writing four-page profanity-laced screeds to the local newspaper columnist. You’ve kidnapped the pets of the area sports radio call-in show. You’ve yelled vehemently at anyone on the street wearing your team’s colors. You’ve run cars off the road bearing a team logo bumper sticker, then proceeded to berate and frighten the driver as he reaches for a cell phone to call the cops. In a final fit of pique, you even stood outside the team’s headquarters dressed in animal pelts with a bullhorn and poorly edited signage. What’s a monomaniacal true football fan to do?

Lucky for you, you live in the age of the Internet, which was created primarily to give people with singular obsessions and foot fetishes a venue in which their vices can fester and grow larger from finding other like-minded and
like-perverted freaks, most of whom have the spelling ability of Terry Bradshaw. Utilizing this wondrous medium, you can air your views on any and all subjects, no matter how ill-informed and laden with obscure
Simpsons
references your commentary, to an audience of potentially dozens. From now on, no one will be able to ignore your calls to bench the starting quarterback after Week 2 or trade for a star receiver, even though the team has neither the trade collateral nor the cap room. That’s the beauty of it. Anything goes! Even the asinine. Even gratuitous pictures of cheerleaders. Especially gratuitous pictures of cheerleaders!

Despite what clueless old dipshits like Michael Wilbon will tell you, the Internet is not a monolithic entity. There are, in fact, a very large swath of worthless places for you to visit online while being unproductive at work.

Mainstream Media Sites

The MSM presence online is largely composed of reprinted content that originally appeared in your daily newspaper, weekly newsmagazine, or up-to-the-second cable news network broadcast, most of which is just rewritten Associated Press stories. The material typically strives to be balanced and dispassionate, though it favors the East Coast, liberal values, Disney’s financial interests, scrappy (white) players, and athletes who don’t reflexively hate reporters. Because its sports coverage depends greatly on the privileged access to athletes and league officials that
media professionals can’t afford to lose, the MSM tone is by nature antiseptic and inoffensive, and therefore painfully, painfully boring.

In terms of utility to the modern fan, these are good places to get immediate news alerts, scores, the recap of a game you already saw the highlights from seven hours ago, injury reports, and canned quotes from stars. Keenly sensing their own obsolescence, many MSM outlets have tried to incorporate elements of new media, such as blogs and comment sections (which are mysteriously closed for some more high-profile writers), into their sites. However, as these features are subject to the same standards of decency as their parent companies—no swearing, no overt misogyny, no trash-talk, no threatening statements—they are of little use to actual fans.

Message Boards

Message boards are visually Spartan and aggressively unedited forums where groups of anonymous mouth-breathers bandy petty insults, usually in a tone marked by misanthropy, profanity, and casual racism (though not in the excusably clever way sports satirists employ these ills to hilarious effect). All this putative discussion is done in the context of discussing a subject in the news. Message board commenters are of the opinion that the Internet peaked with the advent of the Drudge Report’s siren GIFs.

As a rule, the titular subject in any message board thread is discussed rationally for an average duration of
two or three comments, at which point it veers wildly off course as someone’s mom is compared to Hitler and chaos breaks out in a flurry of LOLspeak and run-on insults. Of course, the first casualties of any Internet flame war are proper syntax and the ability to make moderate use of capital letters. JUST LIKE THIS! DOESN’T IT MAKE MY WORDS SEEM STENTORIAN AND DIM-WITTED AT THE SAME TIME? Someone will spell “bitch” with a percentage sign. Don’t be alarmed. That’s just sort of how it goes on messages boards.

Though the level of discourse contained within message boards hovers somewhere around “shit you’ll hear in a mall Lids store,” these forums offer the closest approximation of the drunken trash-talking that goes on during tailgating most Sundays. The difference being that, while it’s an often innocent and amusing way of provoking knife fights in the parking lot, it’s suddenly unbelievably dorky when you do it on the Net.

Blogs

Though MSM writers continue to propagate the thread-bare, wildly inaccurate stereotype that bloggers are unemployed losers sitting in their parents’ basements pissing away their pathetic lives spreading unsubstantiated rumors about public figures, most bloggers actually work in their parents’ living room, thus granting themselves easier access to the kitchen and its multitudes of Supreme Pizza Hot Pockets and Shasta Cola. Successful blogs, by and large, com
bine the qualities of mainstream media sites and message boards in a crude, tantalizing admixture that requires of their authors shrewd news judgment, a lapidary wit, a taste for vulgarity, and deep cache of Erin Andrews pictures.

Unlike message boards, with their armies of subliterate posters, blogs are typically written by an individual or a small group of authors who are for the most part capable of stringing together complete sentences, if not always coherent thoughts. The writing style is often lazily referred to as snarky, though it has yet to be proven that the fictional snark created by Lewis Carroll ever wrote for a Gawker site. Often, authors of blogs have at least some minor background in writing (composing fake Craigslist ads does count as writing experience), a boring office job, a boring spouse, and lofty career goals they would strive toward if only they weren’t spending the time blogging.

Blogs can be many different things, all of them as frightening to Bob Costas as the ghastly practice of gambling on sports. The route a blog can go is entirely up to the author. It can be something as basic and innocent as a personal diary (of sex), a journal of someone’s vacation (sex cruise), or even quick ruminations on topics of the day (sex advice). Accordingly, they can be broadly thematic, narrowly focused, or just a collection of images of awkward-looking people with superimposed LOLCats-inspired captions. With eleventy million blogs forming every hour, you have to do something to be distinctive and build a readership. That way, you feel like people are tuning in for your views,
when really they want to jerk it to the Keeley Hazell photo you posted. Either way, the delusion is intoxicating.

An important lesson to remember when trying to establish yourself in the blogosphere is to befriend your fellow bloggers. They can assist with driving traffic to your site, promoting your blog, helping you refine your voice, and offering interesting content to steal. Remember, though, that if you comment on a news story or a viral video you have to credit whichever blog had it first, even if the subject is a news story posted on ESPN.com that a million people will read whether or not blogs write about it. It’s an incredibly lame practice, but you must abide by this item of blog decorum or an disturbing lifelike effigy of you will be burned in
Second Life
.

Once you’re ready to begin, you can use any number of free blogging programs to get up and running. Try to give it a clever name, preferably something that pokes fun at Travis Henry’s penchant for unprotected sex (at press time, he’s sired eleven kids by ten different woman). Or, failing that, something randomly vulgar. Might I recommend Cris Collinsworth’s Appalling Girth?

If your soul-crushing, non-football-related job places you in an organization run by humorless tightasses, like, say, the
Washington Post
, you will need to adopt a blogging pseudonym, lest your boss Google your real name, discover your ramblings, and take issue with the post where you called Mark Sanchez a cockharvester seven hundred times in three paragraphs. But what should you call
yourself in the blogosphere? There are no ironclad rules, though this is the rare case where something homerific like bearsfn6832 probably won’t hack it. (Unless you’re a woman, then feel free to call yourself something perfectly insipid like Diamondbacks Chick. Sure, it’s a lazy name, but it sends an unmistakable message to the preponderence of single men in the blogosphere that you are receptive to their awkward overtures.) People respect something funny and eye-catching. Or at least an
Arrested Development
reference. Failing that, just be extraordinarily crude and cruel. To bloggers, they’re the same thing!

If you stick with the blogging game long enough, eventually advertisers will offer you piddling sums to place banner ads that cover half the top page of your blog. And you’ll take it without thinking twice. Because that sum, however miniscule, represents money you made being a fan. And though that amount is far outstripped by the value of the hundreds of hours you spent blogging when you could have been trying to get your masters, it offers a handy excuse to loved ones who allege your blogging is useless. “No,” you’ll say, shoving into their faces the $112 check that represents three months of revenue from the site. “This be a cash-flow machine, motherfucker.”

IX.2: Heed the Officially Licensed Section on NFL Apparel and Merchandise

To fully live the football dream, you must make yourself a walking billboard for your team by covering yourself and
your meager possessions in branded gear. Whether that means team bumper stickers dotting your car, sporting teamware head-to-toe, or team-colored tackling dummies in your yard, no one will ever mistake you for a person of rounded interests. Or, worse still, a follower of a rival team.

NFL teams have succeeded in merchandizing every conceivable consumer product on the market, and even a few of the basic elements of the universe. If you look at the periodic table, you’ll notice that the
G
in the
Ga
representing gallium is really the Packers’ logo. Be advised to keep it away from the Bears’ logo in cerium.

This army of products is mostly stocked with items lacking in even the most tenuous relation to the sport itself. In most cases, they come in the form of regular household objects like, say, vacuum cleaner bags, a GPS machine, or an inhaler. Naturally, it’s your duty as a fan to fill your home to the point of overflow with these team-themed gadgets. If the team alters its logo or color scheme, unload half of it. Gotta stay current with some of your possessions. The rest maintains your vintage credentials. Sure, usually such changes are a transparent attempt by the team to churn up some quick revenue, but are you really going to deny them that? Without the cash influx, they might not be able to stay competitive! They’ll be forced to sign second-tier free agents. Your team might even end up with Gus Frerotte!

If you follow the trademark rules of the NFL, only officially licensed goods are approved for purchase, but
no one without a luxury box has the dispensable income to invest in that much overpriced love. Fortunately, all manner of chintzy crap (sorry, beautiful and imaginative crap) with your team’s logo on it can be found at craft fairs, yard sales, or from shady merchants outside the stadium on gameday. Just because it was made with without a trademark hologram sticker doesn’t mean it wasn’t made with love.

For the handyman, the fun doesn’t stop. In 2006, Home Depot and Glidden began offering a line of team paints that exactly matched the colors of every franchise in the league. Now you can rest easy knowing that the color of your walls and the pants of a bunch of dudes you cheer on once a week are in perfect aesthetic harmony. Now, if you could only find team hair dye to match that of the starting quarterback, you’d be all set. Just kidding. That would be deeply unsettling. I mean, except when
you
do it.

Your house, your person, your pets: It’s all a blank, beautiful canvas stretching out before you, begging to be splayed over with merch. Look at the options before you for personal adornment: hats, wacky glasses, earrings, watches, shirts, jerseys, wristbands, helmets, foam fingers, hoodies, Mardi Gras beads, socks, sweatpants, belt buckles, fanny packs, concealable bludgeons for beating people with fanny packs, wigs, condoms, prescription soles, hearing aids, license-plate frames, gangsta grills, cock rings, nipple clamps, creepy contact lenses, home pregnancy tests, and ties for your dad. The possibilities
are only constrained by your imagination. And the extent to which you have access to drugs potent enough to make you buy this much stuff.

Of all the fan accessories out there, Fatheads are an especially curious case. They are life-size stickers of players that are intended to be placed on your wall. Now, I understand player adulation as well as the next fan, but having a realistic likeness of a guy on your wall, regardless of how great a player he is, is about a step away of having a blow-up doll of him. You might as well go the whole hog at that point.

NFL teams are helpful in that they enjoy shaping your consuming habits for you. Enterprising retailers can enter into sponsorship agreements with teams to have themselves designated the official something or other of an NFL team. For example, Harris Teeter is the official grocery store of the Washington Redskins and the Carolina Panthers (two-timers!). That way, if you’re a Redskins or a Panthers fan and you purchase your frozen pizzas or toilet paper from another store, it’s like you’re aiding and abetting the enemy. I hope that TP you got chafes your asshole, traitor.

If all that’s not enough, there are always credit card companies that offer team-themed cards with predatory interest rates. Yes, indeed: the reputation of sports fans is that of being so blindly devoted that they’ll enter into any deal, no matter how inane, so long as the team’s logo appears somewhere on the object of their fleecing.