Text from a friend last night:
“Dude, did you hear the lockout’s over! Sounds like football is back and so is our fantasy extravaganza!!!”
I still have not responded to the text.
Not because I am mad at my friend. (I actually did reply, I just changed the subject without acknowledging the lockout comment.)
Not because I am suddenly adverse to our fantasy football draft day. On the contrary, I’m always game for a 16-hour day of golf, fantasy draft, pizza, poker and whatever else we come up with.
It’s because, well, frankly, I just don’t care.
Something has either changed in me over the past 45 days since the lockout started, or I have been reading too many articles on our downtrodden economy.
Whatever the case may be, I’m downright furious this is such a big story.
I love football. I love the NFL. I love fall Sundays spent watching games and tracking fantasy stats. I love wearing my Chicago Bears hat like Clark Griswold when I put up my Christmas lights in December. I love playfully bantering with my wife’s family in Wisconsin about the Green Bay Packers, the Bears archrivals.
You know what I don’t love?
Billionaires and millionaires arguing over money for an extended period of time. They are the ones really engaged in a fantasy.
I don’t love media types like Rick Reilly, who makes a high six figures himself, writing about the poor players who made $680,000 last season and might have to get a “real” job supporting their family.
I don’t love the Reilly used Brian Schaefering of the Cleveland Browns as his example of someone we should feel sorry for.
Schaefering made $200,000 after taxes last season from his $395,000 salary. He says his family is cutting back – watching their cable and cell phone bills, cutting out weekly date nights.
For dates, Schaefering says, “Now, it’s put the kids to bed and slap in a DVD.”
I don’t love how naive, egotistical and self-centered that actually sounds.
My wife and I do that all the time. $200,000 would be like hitting the lottery for us. We’ve watched cell phone bills and cable bills, grocery bills, and every other kind of bill for every year of our marriage. We’ve been crafty and creative at Christmas and haven’t bought a gift for each other in years.
There have been months we wondered if we would make it.
“If this goes into the season, my wife might start panicking a little,” Schaefering said.
Don’t worry, Brian. After six months of keeping your proverbial head above water, you stop panicking and just start doggy-paddling.
It’s called life. We just try to survive and advance to the next day.
At least, it’s life like 85 percent of America knows it.
Then there are those who don’t even have bills to worry about. Because they are homeless or jobless.
I don’t love the revelry that the owners and players treat this whole spectacle with.
“We can’t work out at the team facility! We can’t sign players to eight figure salaries!”
Meanwhile, the US dollar is falling like a brick from the sky. New estimates show that in 2016, China will surpass America in economic leadership. Gas is hovering near $4 a gallon, higher in some places.
Inflation keeps rising, but salaries for most normal jobs don’t. Unemployment hovers at 9.2 percent of the work force, a figure that has not been that high in nearly 30 years.
We do not really make anything in America anymore.
I suppose that is not entirely true. We make reality shows and manufacture drama.
Mainly, we just consume. We’re obese and in poor health and then wonder why our medical bills are so high.
I don’t love billionaire owners arguing over more billions with millionaire players and I don’t love billionaire owners who scratch and claw for more money after fleecing cities for years by getting taxpayers to foot the bill for stadiums and arenas.
I don’t love the players pretending that this is the only possible profession in life and they are desperate.
I don’t love players who bemoan their medical care in a violent sport that leaves people seriously debilitated and that statistics show will shorten their lives.
Good sir, you chose to play this sport and are paid a lot of money to do so – even the Brian Schaefering’s of the NFL make more in one year than the President of the United States. Who has the tougher job? Deal with the consequences or get out of the line of work.
Miners and steel mill workers deal with some pretty serious stuff, too. They get probably a tenth of a percentage of the health care benefits an NFL player does. NFL players get treatment on their back, legs, arms, ankles, knees and hamstrings. My father has stood on concrete in a factory for 42 years. There’s no trainer ready with a heat pack at the end of the day.
Pensions are not high enough? Tell that to people who work at an auto factory for 35 years only to see it close and their told they have no pension anymore because it was paid out to some conniving CEO who won’t see any prison time but who was paid a 35 million dollars to go away and stop screwing up by lying and cheating.
I don’t love how our entertainment and sports are masquerading themselves as regular people with regular problems.
You are not us.
We do not understand you because you cannot possibly understand us.
You don’t love us. You just want to argue with yourselves about how to split up our money.
Our money is the money paid to companies when we buy their products at the grocery store, that in turn goes from those companies into advertisements during the long commercial breaks during your games encouraging us to buy more of their products.
Our money is the money paid to cable companies and networks to watch your games, which in turn is shelled out in 10-year contracts from those networks and cable companies for the rights to broadcast your games.
Our money is the money paid to go to games, paid to buy $7 hamburgers, $6 nachos and $10 beers at those games and paid to come home with a $100 jersey that was made in China.
Our money is the money that’s in your bank account, in your $10 million home and your $1,000 suits.
So sorry if right now, I don’t love you, NFL.
Sorry if right now, I don’t even care.
worldbetweenlines.com 