We Live in a Fantasy World

I consider myself a true and loyal sports fan. I love the competition on the field/court, reading the Washington Post about my local teams and last but not least rooting for my teams. Regardless of how bad my teams are I still have to root and follow them. Isn't that what sports is all about? Gotta ride em when they are high but love them when they are low. And trust me, I've been doing a lot of loving in the past 20 so years.

Anyways, where I'm going with this is what I hate the most about sports.....Fantasy. Fantasy Baseball, Hockey, Basketball, and especially Football have ruined sports for me. People now don't follow their teams anymore, they follow players, even if they are arch rivals. Can't people just watch sports because they like the competition regardless of monetary value? Fantasy football bothers me the most; it really got me fuming when I started seeing people bring their computers to the bars to follow their players stats. Awful. I saw one guy at the bar wearing a Broncos jersey cheering on the Chargers because he apparently he had Philip Rivers. That guy needed to be shot in the head. Football is getting so outta control I have really stopped caring. Not sure if its because of fantasy or just that the Redskins are terrible. (Side note- I have realized why I am such an avid Redskins fan. One word: Sue. My mother was such a die hard Redskins fan when I was growing up that one time I had a travel soccer tournament in Philly during the fall and our game was at 9am on Sunday. If we won we played in the finals at 2pm. If we lost, tootles, back home. Just so happened the Redskins were playing the Eagles at 1pm at the Vet. My mother was actually rooting for us to loose so we could get home in time to watch the game. Fortunately we lost, and Sue had a smiley little grin on her face. But instead of going home, fuck watching it on TV, Sue said lets go to the Vet and scalp tickets. That was the coolest thing ever! Just so happened I learned my first curse word that day also. I was ten.)

Now comes the interesting part. This year I took the dive into fantasy basketball. I thought it would be ok since the Wizards are terrible to watch and it's the one sport where you can root for individual players and it being ok. Only twenty bucks and only 8 people. No biggie. I still picked a ton of Wizards and Lakers. My two favorite teams. I promised myself I wouldn't get too involved and I didn't until the fantasy playoffs started. I started monitoring the games nightly and especially Sunday nights which were the last night of each playoff round. I miraculously won the first two rounds and headed to the final round which ends tonight. Either way I get my 20 bucks back or win a whooping 160 bucks. Thats like two nights out at Lavo! I've starting to think of money in Lavo terms. Instead of saying 20 bucks, I say "2 drinks at Lavo". If I ever get a job again, I'll say I need to make 10,000 Lavo vodka tonic drinks. What the hell did I just say? Why would I ever get a job again? "Hey, I'm retired at 28!"