Salon.com > The League

What fantasy football taught me about guys

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:01:00 +0000

Three rounds into my fantasy football draft last week, my co-manager and I were cruising. We'd snagged Kansas City Chiefs running back Jamaal Charles, Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Roddy White and Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Mike Wallace, in that order, when we made a critical error. Under time pressure, we failed to double-check that we had the right player highlighted in Yahoo's fantasy system and accidentally took Carolina Panthers quarterback Derek Anderson. The deep boneheadedness of wasting a fourth-round pick on a quarterback I wouldn't have even considered as a backup was a new kind of agony for this fantasy newbie. In an effort to move beyond narrow, team-based rooting -- and an experiment in guy culture -- I decided to kick in $50 and help run a team, and to take FX's fantasy-football sitcom "The League" as my guide.

“The League” actually makes frat boys endearing

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 12:01:00 +0000

We are neutered animals. Our culture's insistence on "healthy" or "professional" communication and "appropriate" language and behavior -- at work, in public, at home -- reduces us to soulless shadows, mumbling polite clichés to smooth over each exchange. We ask our children to please say please, we thank our bosses for offering us the opportunity to remain underpaid for another month, we tap out increasingly warm and friendly e-mails to co-workers, we thank the surly cashier at the deli for offering us the opportunity to pay too much for a crappy sandwich, yet again. The scope of emotional behavior that's considered acceptable by mature adults these days ranges from Mildly Satisfied to Ever So Slightly Grumpy (but only due to lack of sleep rather than some fundamental contempt for life).

No wonder online comments sections have revealed an enraged, tearfully sentimental, depressive, effusive, resentful, anxious populace, feverishly passionate about every shred of trivia that crosses its path. Unable to express the depth of our emotion in any other context without being considered unhinged, we're left to pour our volatile, crippling emotions out to total strangers on the Internets.

In defense of the aging frat boy

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:29:00 +0000

Little-known fact: Frat boys get softer and more lovable as they age. The very traits that make them so odious when they're young -- their masters-of-the-universe overconfidence, their high-fiving, wedgy-giving bluster, their myopic unwillingness to consider other people's feelings -- are replaced by self-doubt and dread in the face of middle age. As cocky dudes and swaggery ass-slappers reach their 40s and 50s, their exaltation in trivia like online poker and fantasy football leagues and who rolled whose ball hairs into a joint back in the day starts to look obstinately coltish instead of flatly uninteresting. Their ogling of hot-bodied younger women feels more understandable as aesthetic appreciation rather than self-deluded horndoggery. Their unrelenting mutual derision -- the "Eat me's" and the "Screw you, butt nuggets" and other faintly homoerotic allusions -- can be greeted as a particularly aggressive flavor of nostalgia, rather than a clear reflection of frustrated homosexual urges.