An important lesson to remember when trying to establish yourself in the blogosphere is to befriend your fellow bloggers. They can assist with driving traffic to your site, promoting your blog, helping you refine your voice, and offering interesting content to steal. Remember, though, that if you comment on a news story or a viral video you have to credit whichever blog had it first, even if the subject is a news story posted on ESPN.com that a million people will read whether or not blogs write about it. It’s an incredibly lame practice, but you must abide by this item of blog decorum or an disturbing lifelike effigy of you will be burned in Second Life.
Once you’re ready to begin, you can use any number of free blogging programs to get up and running. Try to give it a clever name, preferably something that pokes fun at Travis Henry’s penchant for unprotected sex (at press time, he’s sired eleven kids by ten different woman). Or, failing that, something randomly vulgar. Might I recommend Cris Collinsworth’s Appalling Girth?
If your soul-crushing, non-football-related job places you in an organization run by humorless tightasses, like, say, the Washington Post, you will need to adopt a blogging pseudonym, lest your boss Google your real name, discover your ramblings, and take issue with the post where you called Mark Sanchez a cockharvester seven hundred times in three paragraphs. But what should you call yourself in the blogosphere? There are no ironclad rules, though this is the rare case where something homerific like bearsfn6832 probably won’t hack it. (Unless you’re a woman, then feel free to call yourself something perfectly insipid like Diamondbacks Chick. Sure, it’s a lazy name, but it sends an unmistakable message to the preponderence of single men in the blogosphere that you are receptive to their awkward overtures.) People respect something funny and eye-catching. Or at least an Arrested Development reference. Failing that, just be extraordinarily crude and cruel. To bloggers, they’re the same thing!
If you stick with the blogging game long enough, eventually advertisers will offer you piddling sums to place banner ads that cover half the top page of your blog. And you’ll take it without thinking twice. Because that sum, however miniscule, represents money you made being a fan. And though that amount is far outstripped by the value of the hundreds of hours you spent blogging when you could have been trying to get your masters, it offers a handy excuse to loved ones who allege your blogging is useless. “No,” you’ll say, shoving into their faces the $112 check that represents three months of revenue from the site. “This be a cash-flow machine, motherfucker.”
IX.2: Heed the Officially Licensed Section on NFL Apparel and Merchandise
To fully live the football dream, you must make yourself a walking billboard for your team by covering yourself and your meager possessions in branded gear. Whether that means team bumper stickers dotting your car, sporting teamware head-to-toe, or team-colored tackling dummies in your yard, no one will ever mistake you for a person of rounded interests. Or, worse still, a follower of a rival team.
NFL teams have succeeded in merchandizing every conceivable consumer product on the market, and even a few of the basic elements of the universe. If you look at the periodic table, you’ll notice that the G in the Ga representing gallium is really the Packers’ logo. Be advised to keep it away from the Bears’ logo in cerium.
This army of products is mostly stocked with items lacking in even the most tenuous relation to the sport itself. In most cases, they come in the form of regular household objects like, say, vacuum cleaner bags, a GPS machine, or an inhaler. Naturally, it’s your duty as a fan to fill your home to the point of overflow with these team-themed gadgets. If the team alters its logo or color scheme, unload half of it. Gotta stay current with some of your possessions. The rest maintains your vintage credentials. Sure, usually such changes are a transparent attempt by the team to churn up some quick revenue, but are you really going to deny them that? Without the cash influx, they might not be able to stay competitive! They’ll be forced to sign second-tier free agents. Your team might even end up with Gus Frerotte!
If you follow the trademark rules of the NFL, only officially licensed goods are approved for purchase, but no one without a luxury box has the dispensable income to invest in that much overpriced love. Fortunately, all manner of chintzy crap (sorry, beautiful and imaginative crap) with your team’s logo on it can be found at craft fairs, yard sales, or from shady merchants outside the stadium on gameday. Just because it was made with without a trademark hologram sticker doesn’t mean it wasn’t made with love.
For the handyman, the fun doesn’t stop. In 2006, Home Depot and Glidden began offering a line of team paints that exactly matched the colors of every franchise in the league. Now you can rest easy knowing that the color of your walls and the pants of a bunch of dudes you cheer on once a week are in perfect aesthetic harmony. Now, if you could only find team hair dye to match that of the starting quarterback, you’d be all set. Just kidding. That would be deeply unsettling. I mean, except when you do it.
Your house, your person, your pets: It’s all a blank, beautiful canvas stretching out before you, begging to be splayed over with merch. Look at the options before you for personal adornment: hats, wacky glasses, earrings, watches, shirts, jerseys, wristbands, helmets, foam fingers, hoodies, Mardi Gras beads, socks, sweatpants, belt buckles, fanny packs, concealable bludgeons for beating people with fanny packs, wigs, condoms, prescription soles, hearing aids, license-plate frames, gangsta grills, cock rings, nipple clamps, creepy contact lenses, home pregnancy tests, and ties for your dad. The possibilities are only constrained by your imagination. And the extent to which you have access to drugs potent enough to make you buy this much stuff.
Of all the fan accessories out there, Fatheads are an especially curious case. They are life-size stickers of players that are intended to be placed on your wall. Now, I understand player adulation as well as the next fan, but having a realistic likeness of a guy on your wall, regardless of how great a player he is, is about a step away of having a blow-up doll of him. You might as well go the whole hog at that point.
NFL teams are helpful in that they enjoy shaping your consuming habits for you. Enterprising retailers can enter into sponsorship agreements with teams to have themselves designated the official something or other of an NFL team. For example, Harris Teeter is the official grocery store of the Washington Redskins and the Carolina Panthers (two-timers!). That way, if you’re a Redskins or a Panthers fan and you purchase your frozen pizzas or toilet paper from another store, it’s like you’re aiding and abetting the enemy. I hope that TP you got chafes your asshole, traitor.
If all that’s not enough, there are always credit card companies that offer team-themed cards with predatory interest rates. Yes, indeed: the reputation of sports fans is that of being so blindly devoted that they’ll enter into any deal, no matter how inane, so long as the team’s logo appears somewhere on the object of their fleecing.
But it’s not always about the league exploiting your poor fiscal decisions. On occasion, you can make good on the poor economic straits of players themselves. On more than a few occasions, players from Super Bowl–winning teams of the distant past will auction off their championship rings on eBay. Last year, Larry Brown sold off one of his three rings he won with the Cowboys. A fan who leans toward the aristocratic could parade one of these around, not only affirming his fan cred, but the weaknesses of the player pension system. Double score!
The most contentious debate in apparel etiquette centers on the thorny issue of jersey wear. This rift, if left unresolved, threatens to tear all of fandom asunder. The majority of people attending games find the jersey a perfectly acceptable expression of fandom. However, a rogue band of contrarians insist that the notion of wearing jerseys, replica or authentic, is ridiculous on its face. “What, you think if the team is a man down they’re gonna call you down from the stands?” they chide. Hey, it could happen!
What these tight-assed prigs of the pigskin don’t understand is that jerseys are a vita
l, if, yes, somewhat silly way for fans to connect with the game they’ll never be a part of. Because football pants are otherworldly ugly and helmets obscure vision (though they’re helpful when bottles are being thrown at you by Jets fans), the jersey is the most sensible part of the uniform to wear in a casual setting. So scorn away, you aloof bunch of judgmental taintstabbers. You’re the type of people who take all the fun out of life, like nosy cops and neighbors who can’t take a little celebratory gunfire after a win.
Customized name jerseys, however, are another matter entirely. People who wear personalized NFL jerseys with their own last name on the back are an affront to God and deserve to die in a landslide. Your own name only serves to remind other fans how tragically distant you are from the action. If you are going to customize the name on a jersey, at least have the decency to do it in a way that amuses other people. Unfortunately, the NFL does you no favors in this regard, as the league keeps an extensive list of banned words that can’t be put on a jersey ordered from NFL Shop. When it was revealed years back that former dogfight impresario and quarterback Michael Vick went by the pseudonym Ron Mexico when dealing with a woman who later alleged that he infected her with herpes, fans tried to order customized number 7 Falcons jerseys, but were immediately rejected. Because the league is full of humorless titblisters.
Another frequently spotted abomination is the fan who wears a jersey of a player who is no longer with the team. The only instances when this is acceptable are if said player is a retired star or the player is a longtime fan favorite (at least seven years of service!) with your team who has only left to play out his final few unproductive seasons on a non-contending team. Otherwise, you might as well be proclaiming yourself a fair-weather fan who hasn’t shown interest in rooting for the team in years. You don’t want to be left out when fellow fans are passing out shots, after all.
IX.3: Dress Your Pet, Because They Can’t Tell You It’s Lame
If you had to identify which sports fan base is the most likely to have its followers dress up pets in ridiculous themed outfits, you’d probably guess NASCAR fans. But NFL fans wouldn’t be that far off. Yes, obsession over football is indeed a virulent pathology, one that carries over to everything within sight, animal or car bumper. And there’s nothing a pet-owning sports fan loves more than annoying and possibly terrifying their dearest animal companions by forcibly covering the poor beast in a hand-sewn Giants sweater.
The sad fact remains that thirty-one NFL teams prohibit the admission of any non-seeing-eye animal to their stadium. St. Louis’ policy, however, remains open to goats, though in recent years it has been limited to those with a documented living arrangement with a human. That means, mostly likely, your Vietnamese potbelly pig is staying at home during the big game. Which is a shame, because they’d probably totally get a kick out of an environment where the people are the ones acting like braying animals.
Clothing isn’t the be-all, end-all of pet humiliation, however. There’s still the matter of naming the poor buggers. Mainstream society, misguided though it may be, frowns on bestowing upon your human children sports-related names, ruling out the possibility of a Dolphin4Life or Patsfan 1 for them. You’ll just have to settle with giving them some boring mundane moniker like Joshua or a weird spelling of Jeremy (Jerheme Urban being the offspring of one such couple).
Pets, on the other hand: You can go batshit crazy with them. Hell, that’s the point. Call the thing Purrless Price, Biletnikoff the Dog, or Lil’ Rocky Bleier if you’re so inclined. Whatever charges your phone.
Not all pets are created equal. Each demands its own specifically discomfiting costume or theme forced upon it.
Fish—Fish add a cool, almost sensual presence to any room. Some people even consider them seductive. And in spite of what you’ve been led to believe, fish are surprisingly good companions. However, fish, it should be said, make horrible football fans. You can’t dress them in anything! You can’t color the water in the tank to correspond with the team’s or you’ll kill the little scaled shits. The best you can do is get a little decorative scuba man with the team’s logo on it. That’s it. Fuck fish. They’re not team players.
Ferret/Lizard/Spider/Ant Farm—Who owns these? They’re the pets of contrarians and contrarians have no place in football. They should belong on the writing staff of Slate, which coincidentally has no business writing about the NFL. But that doesn’t stop them from churning out mind-curdling pieces on why the loss of the force-out rule is actually good for receivers. In other words, screw these pets.
Snake—Giving the mice you feed them the name of the next opposing quarterback the team faces is a nice touch.
Turtle—The lesson of Entourage, other than that it became unwatchable after its second season, is that turtles love rare sneakers, ornately designed Yankees hats, and unkempt goatees. This makes them sympathetic to baseball douches and therefore unsuitable to football fandom.
Horse—If you’re wealthy enough to own a horse, you can probably buy a team. Make sure to save a luxury suite for me, you rich asshole.
Dog—Well, for starters, you should probably eschew starving them, beating them, and breeding them to fight one another to the death. Glad we had this talk, Michael Vick from the year 2006.
Cat—The NFL is a league that generally appeals more to dog owners than to insular cat people, though that won’t stand in the way of crazy cat ladies, who will collect enough cats to fill a fifty-three-feline roster of her own, replete with uniforms.
Bird—Taking into consideration the fact that birds aren’t particular fearsome, there sure are a lot of teams named after them. That bird better be something imposing, like a falcon or other predatory bird, and that falconer’s glove better be in team colors. Unless you like the Falcons, then it’s kind of self-explanatory.
Monkey—Echoing the point from the previous item, somehow there are five goddamn lame-ass bird teams in the NFL and yet not a one named for a monkey. Knotty racial connotations might have something to do with it, but that doesn’t stop the Redskins from hanging around. You and your monkey should protest the league office. If the project doesn’t work out, he can still bring you beers. Just make sure he doesn’t open them first. You don’t wanna know what surprises he’ll have waiting for you.
IX.4: The Mystery of Trash-Talking
Fandom, at least in the ideal, consists of more than simply showing up every week to the stadium, to the bar, or to the couch blanketed in team apparel and getting shitfaced. No, with great intoxication comes great belligerence. You’ve got to put that animosity to good use. But because swinging an awl to an opposing fan’s faceplate is an arrestable offense in most states, you’ve got to do your damage with your words. Nasty blunt instruments of locution that devastate an enemy fan’s will to live, or at least invokes his will to chuck a brick at you. Eliciting either response means you’ve gotten under his skin.
Trash-talk, like any martial art, must be executed with extreme discipline and well-honed precision. Solely screaming, “FUCK YOU, COWGIRLS FAN, YOU’RE A FUCKIN’ LOOOOOOOSER! I HOPE TONY HOMO BREAKS HIS HURT PINKIE OFF IN YOUR BUTTHOLE!” accomplishes nothing but to reflect poorly on you. Except that Romo line. That one was all right. Effectively unnerving comments go past the generic and get at something personal. And because fans don’t care much for their own lives, that means you must mine the personal lives of the players for caustic remarks.
Calling Plaxico Burress “Plexiglas” inflicts little damage when compared to riffing on the reports of numerous police calls to his home regarding domestic abuse. Perhaps a better substitute is “Smacksaho Her-ass?” Preferably said while aiming gun-fingers at your thigh. Everyone who’s seen an Eagles game knows Andy Reid is a free-floating planetary mass that draws McRibs into his gravitational field. But he’s also a horribly inept parent. Be sure to identify any Eagles fans being arrested on game-day as either Garrett or Britt. Santonio Holmes got busted for marijuana possession, but he also exhibited his penis on the Internet.
Commence cheers for the Santonio Dong Rodeo whenever you see a Steelers fan sporting his jersey. Marshawn Lynch boasts of his Beast Mode persona when in front of a microphone, but behind the wheel of a car he is a hit-and-run-machine. Therefore, running down Bills fans doubles as social commentary.
Because so much of trash-talking is based on how teams are faring at the point of their contest, their head-to-head histories, the rap sheets of their players, and how bumpkin-like their fan bases are, it’s impossible to predict how any one team should approach verbally tearing down another. The best way to zero in on what riles the enemy is to listen to them, observe their fan message boards to find out what they dislike about their own team. Then hammer on them like Larry Fitzgerald on the mother of his children.
Before proceeding with reckless invective, there are several incontrovertible laws of the smack of which to be aware.
IX.4. A THE LAWS OF TRASH-TALKING
1. To every perceived slight to a team there is an equal, or more likely excessive, countervailing blow. Essentially, this falls squarely under the “don’t start no shit won’t be no shit” principle. Let not a foul word about another’s team escape your lips lest you be prepared for things to get out of hand. Beer bottles, for instance. They get out of people’s hands in a hurry.
2. A fan who pleas for civility or tries to rat out a trash-talker to security is to be counted among the snitches. And, as the saying goes, they are to receive stitches. Anyone who attends an NFL game expecting a polite, deferential atmosphere is, at best, mistaken, and, at worst, developmentally disabled. Have a thick skin or stay home. And don’t try to hide behind your kids, saying you expected it was an atmosphere friendly to their virgin ears. Horseshit. Don’t try to impose your rigid morals on football fans. I’m sure there’s something great on ABC Family right now if you can’t take it.
The Football Fan's Manifesto Page 19
