Fantasy Football Anonymous

Greetings friends, I stand before you here, in a place without judgment. Hello. My name is Rob Hill, and I am a sports fan. No, make that a sports fanatic. Not like you people. Many of you are probably sports fans. Football, baseball, basketball, maybe even some of those little foreign sports. Most of you enjoy watching a good game, perhaps with an adult beverage in hand. Not I. I keep my mind at its sharpest. The better to cut you with, my dear. Some of the more devoted of you might even have a jersey or two in support of your favorite athletes. Not I. My loyalties have been bled too dry by the fickle winds of fantasy and the drought of the Raiders these five long years. Additionally, killers don't wear uniforms.

No matter how desperate the status of your fandom, don't worry. You don't have problems. Not like I do anyway. I have issues. Real ones. Scary ones. Darkest of all, I have fantasy football ones.

I have to slow down. Back it up. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Yesterday at work, my senior coworker says "Ro-obbb" in an "uh-oh" kind of voice, and my heart starts pounding. Oh, God. What could she be calling to me for? Please no. I nearly have a heart attack thinking something happened to my running back at practice.

That honestly was my first thought. Not a problem with my job, not extra work to do, not anything from real life at all, even during these dire economic straits. I was worried L-T was hurt. This might be a problem. I'll let you all decide. Let's go back further, to the start of it all.

1: In the Beginning,

It all started innocently enough. A friend of mine was in a league at his college, and they had an odd number of teams. I just wanted to be the nice guy who rounded off the schedule. I was killing bye weeks. I was a humanitarian. I deserve a medal.

It was love at first sight, and I never had a chance after that. I didn't win the title that year. Actually, in a 12 team league I only managed 5th place. But I got a taste of blood. "Hey Mikey, he likes it!" Indeed I did.

The next year I was invited back, and I wanted more than just a few drops of that sweet plasma of life. I wanted the jugular. In a further attempt to satisfy my male needs to kill and to win, I launched a small league for my friends. From these humble beginnings were the days of darkness ushered in.

2) The Dark Ages.

In one of my leagues, I had first pick in the draft, granting me rights to the league's premier running back, LaDainian Tomlinson. L-T, an honest-to-God fantasy football legend. My team, The 300, is incredibly stacked for being in a 16 team league. I am easily the prohibitive favorite. People are scared, and they should be, as I'm still undefeated. Fortunately it's 2008, and a kinder, gentler Rob is playing. A year or two ago, I would have simply started running my mouth so fast that Jamaican sprinter Bolt would have had no chance of catching it.

That was when my competitive edge got out of control. You're all about to lose whatever respect you might actually have for me. In a league for my fraternity, I am two time defending champion. And every one of my competitors knows it. I make sure they do. Every week I considered my opponent to be the scourge of humanity. The houses of Capulet and Montague never knew such enmity. The breadth of these insults was nearly beyond comprehension, from attacks on their questionable ancestry to boastful odes to my incredible masculinity. All this while spending hundreds of dollars just to spend more time intently watching large sweaty men in tight pants.

Another issue entirely.

I think the low point came when I made a slightly lopsided trade with the boss's son, a big time Packer fan. In my defense, he was seven years old, plenty old enough to check the headlines. It's a money league! If you're dropping $50 for the right to compete, you better bring your A game. It's not my fault the little cheesehead traded a top tier receiver for a crippled Green Bay running back. Not. My. Fault. It was the capitalist in me. A bad knee was lemons, so I made lemonade. Or sold him a lemon. Pick an analogy and run with it. Anyway in the long run I was doing the kid a favor. Think he'll ever forget to do his research again? He will be ON that carfax.com report, and you know it. Thanks to me.

3.) Redemption

Okay, that might have been slightly ethically questionable, but all's well that ends well. This ends with me in a Renaissance. Now is the time of a more open me. I've come full circle. I'm back to being the nice guy who helped round out a league. It's all for fun, I keep telling myself. Winning doesn't really matter. It's all about the friendships you build over the friendly contest. In fact, in the spirit of such friendly competition, if and when I win a third straight title, as a consolation prize, I'll auction to them the rights to one of my unborn children so their inferior little gene pools will at least have a shot at a title in the next generation.

I'll even throw in a picture of my junk, a memento for their computer's wallpaper. Give the degenerates something to aspire to.