Read The Football Fan's Manifesto Online
Authors: Michael Tunison
IX.5 “Can You Please Sign My Newborn?”: Autograph Hunting
Try not to be alarmed at the news that athletes do not much care for you. In fact, they’re plenty freaked out with obsessive fans and have personal security prepared to deal with you. Yes, the glorified idols of sport upon whom you lavish your near-heroin-addiction affection have better things to do than to curry your favor. They have commercials to film for the latest edgy iteration of Gatorade. If it’s Peyton Manning, he has a spot to film for every consumer product known to man.
Indeed, NFL players have nothing but disdain to show when you find them in the public sphere. Usually, when this happens at all, it’s at one of the many Cheesecake Factories, Best Buys, Olive Gardens, or paintball courses that dot the suburban hinterlands surrounding the city they play in. Because most famous athletes live the secluded lifestyle you would expect of any obscenely wealthy individual, yet have tastes that adhere to your average fifteen-year-old male.
But surely there must be a way to get them to warm up to you and give you a measly signature? Outside of getting bilked at autograph shows, these are your best bets.
Be their server at the Cheesecake Factory.
Slip them what appears to be a copy of the bill. After the player foolishly commits his John Hancock to the piece of scrap paper, kindly turn in the uniform you stole from the nineteen-year-old you trussed up outside the restaurant and beam the smile that only comes via the sense of pride from a job well done.
Lay a sob story on them.
Because nothing works on a ball of kinetic energy like a good play on the sympathies. Actually, the player will likely cave to your demands to avoid the blubbering you’re subjecting them to. Either way, success!
Tell them autographs are part of a video game.
There’s nothing outside the playing field that athletes respect quite like the gaming world. Get them to think it will advance the cause of their online
Call of Duty
profile and players will sign your week-worn drawers, if need be.
Berate them horribly.
As NFL coaches have evinced for decades, football players respond to nothing like infantilizing techniques that rob them of their basic humanity. Now you can turn the denial of their worth to your gain.
Get a hot girl to do it for you.
If there’s a tactic no NFL player can elude, it’s that of the impossibly attractive female decoy. Sure, it’s expected, but hot girls tend to get what they want from athletic mental midgets. And book-writing mental midgets, if memory serves.
IX.6 Pester God to Intercede on Your Team’s Behalf
Priggish religious types like to chide football fans by saying that praying to God to beseech Him to make their favorite team win is a disgusting perversion of faith. “God has much more important things to deal with,” they cry. “He doesn’t concern Himself with who wins a measly old football game!” Disregard their sanctimony. Those people are probably all Lions fans who long ago swore allegiance to a dark master in hopes of getting even one win. In fact, no single act works better for increasing your team’s chances of victory than groveling to the Man Upstairs. But, mind you, only if it’s done properly. God is a stickler for details, because apparently He is in them.
Once you’re ready to get started, douse yourself with a bit of holy water. If that’s in short supply, beer is a fine
substitute. Just make sure it’s not a shitty brand, like any of the ones that advertise on NFL broadcasts. Anyway, be sure when praying to face the direction of your team’s stadium. Muslim readers may refuse to do this because they are supposed to be facing Mecca, which may explain why NFL teams with a large Muslim fan base do not win very often.
His Godliness gets roughly forty-three million requests from sports fans each day, though half of those are from baseball fans asking Him to cut short their miserable lives. Still, that leaves a very high volume of pleas for intercession on behalf of real sports teams. How He ultimately decides on whom to favor is anyone’s guess, though I have an inside source (lots of angels are habitual snitches) who says it boils down to the sheer number of quality pleas he gets from each side. God is very democratic like that. So whenever your team loses a critical game and you didn’t get down on your knees and cancel out a rival fan’s prayer, you’re directly responsible for your team’s failure on the field. And you’re going to hell. And believe me, it’s worse than it sounds because every other demon is a Steelers fan. Which kind of makes it like earth.
At the same time, God doesn’t like to be bothered by the same people every single week, so you might want to space out the number of requests throughout the season. Saving them up for a playoff run isn’t a bad idea. Above all else, you must exercise restraint. Beg the big guy enough and you’re gonna find yourself on the Do Not Bless list.
In a pinch and finding God to be unresponsive to your recent begging, take it up with Satan. He does have a much better return-on-request rate. Unfortunately his price tag is a bit steeper—it’s usually your soul, and probably carrying out an evil task like a bridge-bombing of some sort, meaning you can only go to him once every so often (unless you’re a fellow collector of souls like Al Davis). So you might want to save him for a Super Bowl or a conference championship game or something else important. You wouldn’t believe how many Giants fans’ souls he got before Super Bowl XLII. How else do you think they won that game? Sure, Satan loves the Patriots, but he’s a guy who puts business first.
IX.7 Fortifying Your Conversations with the Power of Football Clichés
Getting a proper handle on the culture of football requires you to inject a number of phrases Romanowski-like into everyday conversation, as though dropping a mention of the Wildcat Formation into a discussion of health care reform were a perfectly normal thing. Besides supplementing the usual bouquet of expletives, these sayings help pad out your otherwise flabby speech with the added muscular oomph of sport talk. That doesn’t mean you need to belabor the terminology of
X
s and
O
s, telling your friends to run slant and go routes to find the bathroom and asking your girl for some better weak-side penetration. Well, maybe give that last one some thought.
Granted, these sayings are entirely devoid of meaning,
but they’re a staple of football discourse. Employing them incessantly makes you sound knowing, even when what you actually know about the game could fit on the top of an end-zone pylon. As with everything, it’s all about pulling off the act. As a bonus, you’ll find these phrases to be very versatile in their usage, applying to situations outside the obvious football context, which only serves to further decrease the time you’ll have to spend conversing coherently with others, the bane of any intense gridiron fan.
In some cases, they are familiar toss-off expressions used by players, coaches, and team executives; in others, they’re the redundancies and hollow prattle often employed by television announcers. Feel free to borrow liberally from either school of NFL parlance; it will let others know that you are a fan of varied tastes. A pigskin polyglot, if you will.
“At the end of the day…”
How It Is Used:
A preface to any statement of fact that you feel could benefit from an empty sense of gravity.
It’s a useless and meaningless saying, but you won’t find a player or coach in the NFL who doesn’t toss this one out after every thought in need of verbal underscoring. For example: “Yes, we just lost by five touchdowns at home. We had some plays that didn’t go our way, but, at the end of the day, we’re still the same fifty-three guys who have to go out there each week.”
Use Outside of Football:
“Look, I know I drove us to financial ruin, cheated on mom, got her brother arrested and her sister killed, lost the house in a poker game, and sold you kids into slavery, but,
at the end of the day
, we’re still a family.”
“It is what it is”
How It Is Used:
A blanket statement of resignation; an unhelpful way of answering someone asking for specifics.
Reporter: “Today you surrendered eight plays of 20 or more yards. The opposition had more than 300 yards rushing by the end of the third quarter. Then their backups scored another three touchdowns on you. How would you describe the play of the defense today?”
Athlete: “It is what it is.”
Use Outside of Football:
Nosy person: “You’re squatting in a closed Domino’s Pizza storefront, subsisting on the cheese from discarded pizza boxes, and selling your blood for smokes? Really? Is this what you’re planning to do with yourself? You call this living?”
You: “It is what it is.”
“Taking it one week at a time”
How It Is Used:
A response to any request for speculation in regard to the outcome of future events.
The NFL is an environment in which the entire landscape of the league can change on a week-to-week basis
and the slightest boasting gets inflated into bulletin board material. With this in mind, players and coaches don’t enjoy engaging in hypothetical discussions. You should do the same.
Use Outside of Football:
Overbearing parents inquiring, “When’re you getting a job?” Easy: “Lay off, ’rents, I just graduated and
I’m taking life one week at a time
. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.” The girlfriend carps: “When are you going to settle down and marry me?” Your winning rejoinder: “You can’t live your life that way. When it happens, it happens.
Gotta live your life one week at a time
.” Before long, you’ll see how far speaking fatalistically can get you and just how easy it is to make Ramen noodles (very easy!). At least Bill Belichick will find you relatable.
“Football move”
How It Is Used:
A term with a meaning impossible to pin down, which doesn’t stop referees and announcers from using it constantly when detailing a ruling on a fumble, interception, or incomplete pass.
After catching a pass, a receiver or a defender is required to make what is commonly referred to as a “football move” before he is considered to have possession of the ball. If the player loses control of the ball prior to making this “football move,” the pass is considered incomplete. However, the exact definition of this term is cryptic at best. Conceivably one could stand in place after catching the ball for an hour, drop it, and have the play considered an incomplete pass. What actions then meet
the requirements of a football move? A certain amount of steps taken after the catch? Or is it more a matter of type than degree? Perhaps there’s an especially football suggestive motion that a player has to perform? Maybe striking the Heisman pose.
Use Outside of Football:
That said, allow uncertainty to work to your advantage when employing this bit of gridiron legalese. If someone calls dibs on something, take it anyway and note that they neglected to make a football move with said item. While they try to make sense of the bullshit you just fed them, you’ll have at least a few seconds head start toward the door.
“To throw someone under the bus”
How It Is Used:
To malign a teammate’s or a coworker’s poor performance in public.
In the esprit-de-corps-fueled world of the NFL, loyalty is treasured above all, unless, of course, you’re a superstar. Then anything goes. It is therefore considered very bad form to single out a teammate’s performance for blame, no matter how glaringly obvious it may be to everyone involved.
Use Outside of Football:
Adopt this attitude in your own life. If your wife points out a recent transgression you’ve committed to another couple, immediately accuse her of throwing you under the bus and undermining the camaraderie of the family. She’ll learn her lesson when she sees how much that comment hurts her value on the swinging spousal trading block.
“Trickeration”
How It Is Used:
A colloquial way of describing a trick play, which is defined as one that employs laterals, reverses, fake-reverses, the Wildcat formation, flea flickers, harp seals, flaming hoops, a fold-up table for three-card monte, shimmery sound effects, George Lucasonian levels of CGI, and Antwaan Randle El.
It’s not so much the actual term trickeration that begs for kidney punches so much as it is the disgusting overuse of the suffix “eration” appended to nouns. Now the act of “cooking,” once so froufrou sounding, becomes “cookeration,” which is a much more macho if grammatically abortive term. It’s like applying barbecue sauce to a carrot stick, seemingly out of place and maybe vaguely disgusting, yet not quite as embarrassing as just eating the carrot stick.
Use Outside of Football:
By prostitutes who have yet to master noun endings.
“Sense of urgency”
How It Is Used:
A popular idiom often heard in sports broadcast booths to describe when a team is feeling pressure to perform well. Try to puff up your own dialogue with inflated variants of common expressions.
Use Outside of Football:
Announcers are never content to say what they mean, not when they have the opportunity to employ high-flown expressions that don’t mean anything. It sounds foolish until you try it for yourself. You’ll be surprised at how consequential your life suddenly sounds. For instance, instead of saying you don’t
know where your next month’s rent is coming from, say that you feel the sense of impending privation. Doesn’t that already sound better?
“If you’re…, you have to be…”
How It Is Used:
A way of describing someone in the third person, in which the speaker asks the second person to put themselves in the place of the third person and then tells them what their mental state would be in such a scenario.