Everything But Poker

Most of my sports allegiances are a direct product of my dad’s influence. He grew up in Pittsburgh, so I grew up following the Pirates, Penguins and Steelers. There really were no other options – not that I fought it. He raised me in Los Angeles, and so we also followed the Clippers because they were the cheapest pro basketball ticket in town — my dad has since been accused of child abuse a number of times. But as the years progressed, my brother and I took sports fandom to a level my dad never considered. From desperately following off-season free-agent signings to holding mock drafts in the back seat during long road trips, we gave Pops a first-hand account of how the next generation would follow sports.

Well, now it’s finally happened. He’s sick and tired of sitting on the sideline while we squeeze all the possible entertainment out of an early December Raiders-Bills game. That’s right, he wants in our fantasy football league.

When he asked my brother to be included on the initial league invitation e-mail list, his only concern was that he didn’t know enough players. Three hours and 52 e-mails later, knowing enough players was the least of his concerns. One or two QBs? Points-per-reception? Three keeper picks with a pick forfeited in next year’s draft concurrent with the round in which the keeper was drafted this year? He wasn’t sure we were still talking about that same sport – it was like watching Ron Burgundy after he jumped into the bear pit. He was scared, alone and mortified at the mess he had just gotten himself into.

So the Big Bear came running back to his cub, a little startled by what this strange new world threw at him. I agreed to co-manage a team with him, help him through the draft and usher him into this new era of football fandom. No longer, I promised, will your Sunday football-viewing end at the conclusion of the Steeler game. Now you too can obsess over the Cowboys’ under-use of Felix Jones, the everlasting power of Brian Westbrook, the doomed fortune of Dwayne Bowe and the glory that is fantasy megastar Andre Johnson. Now that Sunday night Browns-Bears game looks a little more interesting since you are starting Braylon Edwards and the other team has Matt Forte, huh?

Needless to say, he was hooked. I showed him the Yahoo! Sports setup, how the draft works and explained why understanding the number of roster spots and point distribution were imperative to our draft strategy. Of course, he took that a step further and asked me to come over the night before the draft to actually discuss a plan of attack for drafting our team. I assured him that winging it would be sufficient preparation, but I could tell he was still uneasy about the whole process. I took the liberty of naming our team by myself because his best offering would probably something like LA Steelers or West Coast #1’s. That just wouldn’t cut it, but I wasn’t going to subject him to something too obscure, so I settled on Big Dick LeBeau. Authoritative, phallic and undeniably Pittsburgh. He approved.

The draft was scheduled to begin just as the President finished his health care address Wednesday night, so my first order of business was getting my dad’s head straight – I needed a Trash Talk Coordinator to put these idiots to shame. I knew that once we got into the fourth or fifth round, he would lose interest in picking the players so I had to give him something to keep him occupied once the backup running backs and fourth receivers started coming off the board. Plus, considering all the other league members were friends of mine and my brother’s, I knew that no matter how lame his insults, nobody would dare step to my Pops (he’s 6-6, 265). And as I predicted, he took to it like Al Davis to a – well, to a really bad player.

We kicked off the draft with Brandon Jacobs and Randy Moss, then drank the Kurt Warner Kool-Aid in the third round as my dad resorted to his selective memory of Super Bowl XLIII and Warner’s 377 yard, three-touchdown performance. At that point, I took the reins with the drafting situation and let him run wild on the rest of the league in the chat.

He let loose on one guy for picking only Giants’ players and gave another one crap for taking anyone on the Raiders. And best of all, he didn’t even notice that I mistakenly picked Jerricho Cotchery in the seventh round. When the draft concluded and we secured Steeler punter/aspiring porn star Jeff Reed to complete our roster, we looked over our roster and assessed the chat transcript and unanimously decided that our team would take the crown. That is, if Kurt Warner makes it to Week 2.