Behind college dorm room doors and across the suburban wasteland of America, physically inadequate, nearsighted sports-geeks gulp Surge late into the night, filling their heads with arcane statistics, squinting their washed-out faces in the pale blue glow of computer monitors tuned to ESPN.com. What is the upshot of this obsession? The past decade has witnessed the terrifying ascendancy of fantasy sports leagues. In fans’ never-ending quest to live vicariously the feats of their demigod athletes, the sophistication and prevalence of fantasy leagues had already devolved to absurd depths of obsession and decadence. But just this past month, we hit a new low.
Currently setting the standard for the ultimate in sick depravity, a group of cross country runners from Nashville last month launched “Fantasy X” (www.angelfire.com/tn3/trx/fxc/fxchome.html). That’s fantasy cross country, where you select your own team with $200,000 in “scholarship money,” picking from the best NCAA D-I athletes to form a killer squad of harriers. Cross country runners, already obsessive-compulsive sociopaths by requirement of the sport, have taken this obsession to a new level and insidiously broadcast it to the unsuspecting masses of D-I wannabes or has-beens, crippled or otherwise, over the Internet. Naturally, when I found out about it from a chat site, I joined up.
This past weekend having been a down one for many East Coast teams, my ranking dropped from fifth to seventh (out of nearly 40 teams), as fantasy players who had stacked their teams with perennially overrated West Coast burnouts?runners from Stanford, that is?all picked up a few points. Seventh?still respectable, considering I made my selections after only a modicum of research, and lacking the vast archive of twisted esoterica that others surely brought to bear?and which I would have myself four years ago.
Despite the dubious ability of some scrubs from Nashville to run a legitimate fantasy league?I suspect the fact that the current top five teams are from Nashville either to involve some sort of collusion or to be the product of a single sick running junkie forming multiple teams?the league is seemingly well organized, with weekly e-mail updates, results and news from big meets and even some reasonably insightful commentary, on occasion.
So who is privileged enough to run with the best on the seventh-ranked Black Squirrel Harriers of Washington, D.C.? It was only through some inside info?relatively easily obtained?that I was able to pick up some steals, seriously undervalued runners like Georgetown’s very own senior Mike Smith, recently given some well-deserved press. Redshirting almost all of last year, Smith wasn’t even on Fantasy X’s radar, so I picked him up for the minimum amount of a cool 10 G’s. And what does he do? He goes out and scores me a hot 36 points, taking third place in the mud at the Great American Cross Country Festival in North Carolina. Thanks Mike!
Unfortunately, a little more research and slightly less cronyism in my picks would have done much good. Instead of Northern Arizona first-year Mint Henk, who in high school was a New England hill course dominator, I could have picked up his Lumberjack classmate, Nurani Sheikh. Sheikh, in outkicking Smith for second place, would have contributed a hot 45 and catapulted me nearly to the top of the rankings. Ah, such as life. Nurani Sheikh, I hardly knew ye.
And so it goes with fantasy leagues, where the line between reality and, um, fantasy is tenuous and blurry at best, and post-modern and creepy at its horrible worst. Real results and statistics are twisted and recontextualized into a completely made-up world, a world that quickly becomes off far greater concern to fans than the real teams’ results. But with the introduction of Fantasy X, at least it gets more misanthropic psychos off the trails and tartan and back into their basements in front of computer screens where they belong.
