Tony Kornheiser: Shut Up About Your Fantasy Team
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by user 'skers 'pert
'twas the first monday night football of the season, and my good friend says to me 'you have to write something about tony's fantasy team', an urge I thus far resisted, for reasons made plain by the end of this article. But the time has come.
Tony K: no one cares about your fantasy team. In fact, I barely care about my own fantasy team. It is, after all, called fantasy football. Fantasy... as in, not real, intangible, incorporeal, wishful, nonexistant & distinctly seperate from reality. Unimportant to the play on the field!
Let me back up, on the off chance that there happen to be readers on a sports fanatic wiki who for some godawful reason don't watch Monday Night Football. Like maybe you are doing some sort of missionary work in a war-torn foreign country, you good samaritan you. Or maybe monday is the day for your post-weekend roundup of your stable of hookers, you nonsamaritan. In either case, what you've missed this year on MNF is Tony Kornheiser, that Canada-and-penguin-lovin' bald scamp from Pardon the Interruption, constantly referring to players on his espn.com fantasy team. I know now, for example, that Jake Plummer and Donovan McNabb are his QBs. Santana Moss is one of his WRs. did I want to know these things? of course not. What possible use could I have for this information? is ESPN working on some sort of promotional edition of Trivial Pursuit?
Here's the thing- playing a game is fun. Going to a game is fun. Even sitting on the couch and watching a game on tv is pretty fun. Listening to a game on the radio is even fun in that nostalgic, so-this-is-how-grandpa-did-it sort of way but hearing someone tell you about a game is miserable. Even a football game. If I miss the game for some unforgivable reason (more likely the aforementioned missionary work than a stable of hookers, I promise) the last thing i want to listen to at work the next day is some dude talking about awesome that long pass at the end of the half was and that's with football, the finest of all games. It gets worse.
Ever have some clown recite the action of every hand of poker he won at his buddy's the night before? torturous. The US military should be having these guys croon into the ears of Gitmo prisoners. As soon as I hear "so here comes the flop..." that's exactly what i do, flop to the ground and fake a seizure, frothing at the mouth for all i'm worth to escape that hellish conversation.
Not that i have anything against poker, mind you - good game. Better than fantasy football, in fact, which brings us back to the man of the hour, Tony K. Because Tony K is pulling a 'poker-guy' on the least-pleasant of all games to hear about. Unless they are an owner in my fantasy league, the outcome of a guy's fantasy football game, even a pseudo-celebrity's like Kornheiser's, has NO IMPACT ON MY LIFE WHATSOEVER. The addled prattle of widows in Hobby Lobby talking about plastic flowers has the same impact as Tony talking fantasy football.
Tonight was the worst occurrence of all: they gave us an actual SCREENSHOT of tony's starting lineup from this weekend. What's next? analysis of his bench by Micheal Irvin during halftime?
Remember when i started this article talking about resisting the urge to write this article? It's because Tony Kornheiser has forced me in my next point to do the very thing i so despise: talk about my fantasy team.
If you absolutely cannot resist talking about your fantasy team due to an unhealthy addiction to make-believe world, I advise that old standby of elementary-school teachers taking their kids on field-trips: the buddy system.
Every monday morning, my boss comes up to me within a few minutes of my entering the workplace and I play the priest while he gives his fantasy confession. First, we commiserate (we're Bucs fans (woe!)) and then he tells me how well ALL THREE of his fantasy teams did that weekend. We chat for ten minutes or so about the waiver wire, how the bye week screwed us, how we wish to god we could draft again, and then we shut up and go about our respective days and none of our coworkers at the water cooler or in the john have to hear either of us talk about fantasy football.
So maybe, every Monday evening, before they get on the air, Tony K can pull aside his good friend Joey Theismann (ha!) and brag for five minutes about what a genius he is for playing Jake Plummer against the Ravens (SERIOUSLY.) before he subjects all of us to his inanity.
I'm not the only one to write about this, by the by. more:
http://www.fanball.com/buzz/article.cfm?id=7806
http://thesportsfrappe.blogspot.com/2006/09/tracking-tony-kornheisers-fantasy.html
Next time: more on MNF pseudo-celebrities, a platypus, and glove-analysis. You know you want it.
