I’ve never been into sports; I’ve never played many sports, I’ve never watched many sports, I hardly ever talk about sports. As a kid, I was harangued by other kids in the neighborhood to play sports but I never enjoyed it. I got into street hockey for a while but the enthusiasm for that fizzled out flatter than old soda. In middle school and high school, I ran track and cross country, and I also played lacrosse. I was okay at all of them but I can’t say that I was ever exactly passionate about (or pretty good at) any of them. Not sure what it is about sports that I can’t get into. Maybe I’m not competitive enough to enjoy ’em. Maybe I can’t get into them because, on a subconcious level, I figure what the fuck is the point of being into a game that just goes on and on; there’s always a different winner, nobody ever plays for keeps. Maybe it’s because sports seem too fucking mundane to me. I don’t know, I just don’t dig sports. Conversely, I’ve always been something of a geek; I’m way into comic books, Star Wars, and I’ve seen every episode of Battlestar Galactica (the new version). That being said, it’s no surprise that I think fantasy sports are, for lack of a better term, fucking mind-boggling and, when it comes down to it, quite hypocritical. I might be reaching but stay with me on this one.
Fantasy sports leagues are HUGE these days. Whether it’s fantasy baseball or fantasy football (what I think of as “The Big Two” when it comes to fantasy sports), fantasy hockey or fantasy basketball, fantasy golf or fantasy auto racing (yep, they have those too), fantasy sports have a grotesquely large, intense following. Why? Because everybody who’s into fantasy sports is harboring the soul of a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast.
That’s right. I don’t care how goddamn manly or “cool” you think you are, if you participate in fantasy sports, you’re a biscuit away from rolling a pair of 8-sided dice and having Reckdor the Ruthless don his cape of invisibility to defeat the Orcs of Verdom. I can hear you now. You’re saying, “Oh but it’s different, it’s grounded in reality.” You’re right, but you’re still no better than a D&D nerd.
See, everybody probably thinks that since fantasy sports are based on real sports and work in tandem with them, that makes it different, and thus much cooler, than D&D. As a geek who can sniff out his own, I can say with 100% certainty that you are dead fucking wrong. Fantasy sports are grounded in reality but let’s not forget that they’re fantasy sports; every time you have a fantasy draft, every time you arrange your fantasy team just so, every time you wheel and deal with a fellow fantasy league participant to trade a player, you’re entering a glorious little fantasy land where you control how things are done. Just like people who play D&D. Actually, those who participate in fantasy sports are, in my opinion, more over-the-top than D&D nerds because D&D nerds, I’m guessing 75% of the time, grow out of D&D. Full-grown men (and some women, let’s be fair) all over the fucking place participate in fantasy leagues.
When it comes right down to it, nerds don’t always stay nerds. Some do, sure, but most of the time the nerds come out of the basement, make a ton of dough in something that probably involves computers, and end up banging the hottest chicks on earth, thus leaving no time for D&D. Fantasy leaguers, on the other hand, are usually adults (usually men but some women) who are completely immersed in that world and participate in it whenever they have a spare minute in order to escape the humdrum that is ordinary life. Now, I know it sounds like I’m just hating on fantasy leaguers but I’m really not. Everbody has his or her own thing that they “geek out” over; if you’re intensely into something (read: ANYTHING), you eventually geek out over it. And that’s cool, it’s awesome to be passionate about something. It seems to me, though, that the D&D nerds get a less-than-desirable rap whereas the fantasy leaguers are embraced without a thought and that’s a crock of horseshit. Why? Because, really, it can all be traced back to adolescence, the root of all things ridiculous.
Growing up, jocks pick on the nerds; the strong fuck with the weak. It’s Darwinism at its finest and, other than in the wild, purest. In the case of jocks v. nerds, however, something was always lingering in the background. Jocks, it would seem, were probably somewhat jealous of the nerds. The nerds, although seemingly weak and certainly vulnerable, were usually much smarter than the jocks. The nerds didn’t have to use their physical abilities or muscles to have fun, they just had to use their minds. On some subconscious level, this probably drove the jocks nuts. More than likely, they wanted to enter a fantasy world too; they, too, wanted to geek out over something. They just had a problem with the word “geek”. They wanted to geek out over something that didn’t obviously seem “traditionally” geeky. Thus, fantasy sports were born.
You’d think that fantasy leaguers would realize this connection. You’d think. Honestly though, I don’t think fantasy leaguers deserve that much credit. After all, they (most of them, more often than not) have that jock “I’m better than the lowly nerds” mentality. And, like I said, this is biggest load of monkey shit ever; it’s pure, unadulterated hypocrisy.
Could I be wrong? Sure. Could I be stereotyping and basing my opinions on those stereotypes? Certainly. Am I onto something? Bet your ass I am. After all, I’m a geek, I can read between the lines. And I’ve never even played Dungeons & Dragons. I mean, c’mon, comic books and Star Wars are so much cooler than D&D.
See? I’m a hypocrite too. So, from one hypocrite to another, let’s cut the shit. We’re all sailing on the U.S.S. Nerd.