I was born a poor baseball fan in rural Georgia. My dad raised me on the Braves with some football thrown in for good measure - Falcons and Dawgs. When I got old enough to pay my own bills and make my own decisions I naturally gravitated to rotisserie baseball. However, before computers all that fantasy stuff was too much work and took too much time. Fast forward a few years later, after Al Gore invented the internet and some guys at work ( not real good friends, mainly bosses) asked me to join a fantasy football league. I did. The internet made it easy. Then the stuff hit the fan .
I didn't know how popular FF had become. My close friends at work wanted to play too but there were no more spots in the Senior League (as it became known). So Spanky decided to start his own league, the Junior League (as it became known). I joined that one too. As we were scraping around for owners on a short time frame someone suggested that my son (age 16) could play. One problem, the league was named "The Alcoholics" and we were all going to name our teams after a beer brand. So "Will and The Alcoholics" was born. Will could play under the condition that he name his team the Oduols until he was legal. After all it is important to be good role models for the young ones.
We have some rules. We have a party every year. We always use a draft board. We have a trophy with the winner's name engraved with the year he/she won, a la Stanley Cup. My name is on it once. No politics at the party. That's getting harder to enforce. FF rules to live by, it makes us get together every year at least once. I prefer one FF party to a whole year of Facebook posts.
I think that was 2001. And the rest is history. Tomorrow we make more history as the most of the same group of guys will get together and do it again. There have been changes; people come and go, marriages, divorces, births, illnesses. My son joined the navy and had to leave the league. After he got out of the navy he joined the league again. Now our conversations are more mundane. No more keggers, we don't drink as much as we used to, thank goodness. Through it all we hung together. About 7 or 8 of the original 12 are still in the league. And I am now the commish.
We have stories as you can imagine. Some I can tell, other I can't. There was that time I drafted a dead guy. In my defense I needed a tight end reeeeal bad. There was the time Spanky drafted 3 tight ends in the first 10 rounds because the software he was using told him too. There was the time when Beegle had a little too much to drink and thought a little too much of his team and spent two hours explaining to everyone what MONSTERRRRRRR team he had. I don't think he has won a championship since. Then there was the time G-Bone decided to rank all the teams from best to worst. It's a tradition for him to do it now and we all watch and heckle while he is making his decisions. It stuck with us because the team he picked as the worst that first year won it all. So of course its a badge of honor to be considered the worst. There are more. We will tell them all again tomorrow.
I have to thank my dad for my love of sports. He passed away almost for years ago. Whenever we got together which wasn't enough because I was always too busy, we would spend a couple of minutes on pleasantries and family then move quickly to the Braves and the Dawgs. We never argued but we didn't see the world the same way. Now I can't watch a game without thinking about him. I often wonder what he would say about something that happened in the game or off the field. Although he was a dawg he was a big Tebow fan. I wish he could have seen the big game last year. I glad he doesn't have to watch them kneel. I know what he would say about that. I miss him and I think about him often. Such is life. His and all of ours.
Tomorrow I am sure he will flicker across my thoughts many times. Especially when I am ribbing my son about some homer FSU pick he made.
That's why I love fantasy football.
*The nicknames are real to embarrass the guilty.
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