The Football Fan's Manifesto (8 page)

The truth of the matter is that every fan base is annoying to those who are not members of it. For followers of the aforementioned nationally prominent teams,
convening with their fellow fans is simply a matter of tracking down the bar where they congregate to watch games. Others don’t have it quite so easy. In fact, to walk around in a Texans jersey is to be stared at like you were some kind of freakish oddity, as though you were wearing a garment made of syphilitic penises. Which is weird, because everybody knows that’s what Bills jerseys are made of.

Since you’re now separated from the core of your fan base, any time the team visits your adopted city (or comes within three hundred miles) it’s your solemn obligation to make it to the game. They need you to be the drowned-out voice of praise amongst an overwhelming chorus of hate. As you might expect, the experience of the fan at an opponent’s stadium is a drastically different one from being at the home field. Bottles of urine will be hurled at you, for starters.

IV.1 You Can’t Have a Tailgate of One

The human mind, conditioned over the course of millennia spent enduring without football, is hardwired to seek out the comforting presence of others. It made sense to need people when humankind was floundering aimlessly in search of purpose. Neighbors, friends, and loved ones provided welcome relief to the existential crisis that wracked a sports fan without a real sport.

With football now discovered and flourishing, the elusive purpose has been found, yet our dependence on the acceptance of others lingers. We could perfectly exist on our own with our TV and our shrines to our favorite team, content to interact with other fans only on gameday. A shame that we remain victims of an outmoded primal urge that one day evolution will hopefully expunge. Until that day comes, we are bound to deal with our cumbersome need to belong.

Satisfying this biological need entails a circle of friends,
presumably of the drinking-buddy sort, maintaining at least tenuous relations with our relatives and, because the species demands it, finding a mate and starting a family. Anyone can tell you it’s far more work than it’s worth, but you really have no say in the matter.

The rigmarole to starting and keeping these relations in place is a trying one. Among the tedium you’re facing down are the tasks of getting an education, holding down a respectable job, and keeping a good faith effort at personal hygiene. Some part of every fan would be content to be the bum with a bottle of booze sleeping on top of a warm grate. But society dictates that this is not an acceptable lifestyle, and before long, you will want to feel embraced by your peers. That, and among the homeless it’s getting increasingly difficult to stake out a good vantage point near storefront TV displays come kickoff. You’ve got to be on your game about that.

In the end, it’s a lot to put yourself through for what amounts to be a great deal of aggravation most of the time. The people in your life will give you hell, but on some level, you’re going to need them around. The social circle isn’t all bad, after all. It helps to have a support system in place for the times when your favorite team falls tragically short, or even more miserably, nowhere close, and you need someone to talk you back from the ledge.

Now if you could only get one of them to make a goddamn beer run for you. And get out of your face for three hours a week.

4.2 Make the Game Part of Your Game: Picking Up Women

There’s no drunken hookup like a random celebratory football fan hookup. Both man and woman are feeding off emotion, wanting to extend the high of a win or mollify the low of a loss. And people naturally become more attractive if they’re fans of your favorite team.

Some fan bases are more attractive than others. A fan of the Jaguars, Packers, Vikings, Ravens, Texans, Rams, Steelers, Lions, Colts, Titans, or Browns? Then the pool of attractive ladies among your crowd is pretty thin. The odds aren’t working in your favor. But then, beggars can’t be choosers. Or so they say. Nevertheless, don’t despair, no matter how many times you may be striking out. It makes you look meek, which translates to tragically undesirable in a football crowd.

Football, of course, is a team sport, and so too is hollering at chicks. Both require intense calculation, a high threshold of pain and ass-slapping. The first among your needs is a quality wingman, whom you are free to consider your lineman. Or your blocking back, depending on what kind of offense you’re trying to run or which you consider less homoerotic. That wingman must excel at occupying the edges, picking off any of the friends protecting your desired woman’s blindside. If your wingman can also lie really convincingly on your behalf, you might want to give him the franchise tag.

Given a clear shot at your target, bring forth the full
force of your charms. Draw from the same well of energy you use to get drunker and louder during the playoffs. If you won your fantasy league title last year, now’s the time to let her know. Women respect success in all its forms. Did you recently place high in a
Madden
tournament? You should keep a few screenshots of final scores in your wallet. Good as pussymagnets, those.

Though this interaction is offensive in nature, you must be defensive in temperament. The picking up of women is like the delicate dance between a defensive back and a receiver. You must think of yourself as the cornerback. You try as best as you can to keep up with receivers, anticipating their moves, pressing them off the line and back into the bar, all the while making sure not to make contact before the time is right. Strike too soon and you’ll draw a flag, which in all likelihood manifests itself as a kick to the balls.

Many times you will be called upon to be a wingman yourself. You are part of the team after all, and any carry you get is countered with time spent on special teams. Be prepared to give up your whole body for the cause. You’re springing your man for a score. All you had to do was get pancaked by a three-hundred-pound defensive lineman, or, more literally, the three-hundred-pound friend of the targeted girl.

It can seem so intimidating, this sordid little routine. Luckily, Internet dating can be an attractive alternative to this
danse macabre
. Best of all, Internet dating is quickly losing its stigma as a refuge for the awkward and the ugly.
That means one thing for you: searching diligently for women wearing your favorite team’s jersey in their profile picture. A tattoo of the team logo is also acceptable. Like information on a team’s roster, facts can be embellished in your profile. If elfish receiver Antwaan Randle El can be listed at five foot ten, there’s no reason you can’t list your income as “over $250,000.”

Should you succeed in sealing the deal, celebrate in a manner not unlike you do after a team score, replete with “good game” ass pats and spilling beer on her. Then give a wide berth to the girl you hooked up with at the bar for the remainder of the season. Good as fandom lays can be, relationships can seldom take bloom in that setting. Before long you find the intensity rarely matches the energy that first drove you together. Or the drunkenness.

4.3 Convenient Conditioning for the Football Fatty

It’s no secret that the sedentary, gorging lifestyle of the average football fan isn’t the healthiest to which you could subject yourself. Minus a concerted effort at proper personal care, the constant ingestion of greasy food and the endless supply of alcohol—all done while sitting on your ass—could turn a healthy, svelte individual into Jared Lorenzen in the span of only a few months.

Caring about one’s appearance has commonly been derided in fan circles as the mark of the effete, but it’s important to have self-respect. Especially for trash-talking purposes. A fan base full of lardasses opens itself up
to easy mocking from the supporters of other teams, not to mention endless inquiries as to whether they plan on finishing a food item.

Moreover, as much as unwatchable sitcoms on CBS may have convinced you otherwise, you can’t be a slovenly mess and hope to attract a good woman who puts up with you. No, you’ve got to put forward a modicum of effort to keep yourself semi-presentable. That or become obscenely wealthy. Your call.

Should you decide on fitness, a few simple strategies, easily incorporated into your regular sloth-filled routine, can produce dramatic results.

Utilizing these small measures, you’ll keep yourself from becoming an unsightly amorphous blob, instead staying a charmingly paunchy glutton. No one wants the clap of their thighs to overmatch those of their hands.

IV.4 The
Diner
Quiz for a Post-Post-
Diner
Generation

The 1982 Barry Levinson film
Diner
is best remembered for the scene in which a young man gets his girlfriend to touch his penis by concealing it in a popcorn box at the movies which later served as the inspiration for the Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg song “Dick in a Box” (as seen in that movie with Daniel Stern).

A more critical segment for our purposes occurs later in the film when Eddie, played by Steve Guttenberg, subjects his fiancée, Elyse, to a rigorous examination of her football knowledge. Nothing much, just 140 or so questions on arcane gridiron facts. Elyse hangs tough, but in the end finishes with 63 percent correct, falling just short of the 65 percent mark required to pass. If this strikes you as draconian, you clearly married out of desperation, intoxication, or on a dare. Maybe all three. Gauging the football acumen of a potential mate is an all-important determinant in the courting process. Otherwise, your betrothed may be a concealed non-sports-fan, one who has merely cannily constructed a clever façade until the ring gets on her finger. You’d be stuck. Maybe even for months before the divorce was finalized.

That said,
Diner
is a Hollywood movie and, as such, gets several critical details glaringly wrong. For one, quizzing football fans on stats and trivia is a largely pointless tactic. Stats are only important insofar as they can help our fantasy teams. Slavish reliance on statistics for sports enjoyment is the realm of baseball dorks. It’s all they have.
Without statistics, baseball would have nothing but the overbearing crush of nostalgia and wacky mascot races. And if they could quantify nostalgia, they’d get Bill James to create a stat for it in a heartbeat.

Football, on the other hand, is chiefly about emotion, often frighteningly intense and wildly erratic emotion. That’s why you must craft your test on personal experience over objective truths. This may seem to feed into the perception that football is not as intellectually stimulating a sport as others, but that ignores a categorical fact: FOOTBALL’S JUST PLAIN AWESOME, DOUCHECANOE. WOOOO!

Therefore, asking her for descriptions of the first game she attended, how she became a fan, and the most painful loss she ever experienced is more revealing and instructive than whether she knows which college some random player attended. If you’re concerned that such queries will be more difficult to score, fear not.

IV.4. A THE FOOTBALL MANIFESTO MATE-MATCHING METRIC

The first order of business is figuring out where you’re going to conduct this examination. Any number of forbidding, intimidating venues could conceivably work, though there’s a certain amount of jolting verisimilitude to setting up a table on the 50-yard line of a high school football field and having friends, acquaintances, coworkers, and ex-boyfriends fill the stands. Or, you know, if you want
to make it racy as opposed to clinical (the NFL would not approve), you could always opt for an actual classroom and her in a naughty schoolgirl outfit. One thing
Diner
got right was the refusal of bathroom breaks during the proceedings. The last thing you need in a significant other is someone who’s going to drag you out of your seat during a two-minute drill. Unlike in the movie, you should be as generous as possible with any water she requests. You’re really going to want to test that bladder. A nearby slowly dripping faucet is a nice touch.

In many ways, you have to look at this like it’s a football tryout. Most football players who reach the NFL have the physical attributes to excel. The same is true with potential spouses. It’s character issues that determine who flies or falters. If you’ve gotten to this point, you should have some sense of what the person is like in the sack, so that needn’t be part of this examination. Besides, once you get married, you won’t be getting laid anyway, so you might as well figure out how much suffering you should expect beforehand. Consider this the wifely Wonderlic.

A composite score will be produced based on performance in eight football-pertinent fields:

1. Trash-talking: Demand she write a thousand-word essay on why hers is the best team in the league. If that team is not your own, immediately dock her points. Score for creative use of invective and cheap slurs. If she writes in all capital letters, you probably met her on the Internet. If that’s the case, just be happy a woman showed up.