Living in a Dream World

I haven’t written anything on here for a while. I blame Fantasy Football. And that isn’t a joke. I am an unabashed fanatic when it comes to American football. There’s one particular team I root for, but I’m supremely interested in the goings-on of each and every franchise. I’m always visiting Yahoo! Sports, SI.com or ESPN.com to gain bits of information about players, teams and coaches. I visit blogs, much like this one, dedicated to football. It’s actually quite ridiculous when you think about it.

But I love it just the same. I can’t get enough of football. I love everything about the sport–except perhaps the amount of money the men playing it receive. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with an athlete earning millions of dollars to play the sport I love and they excel at. I only have a problem with them making tens of millions of dollars.

But I digress, a huge part of my football jones is playing fantasy football every year. I think of myself as a fairly knowledgeable person when it comes to sports of any kind, but Fantasy Football has brought my knowledge of football to skyscraper-level heights. I know more about the third string wide receivers of a team I have no rooting interest in whatsoever than I know about my family tree. And that’s no exaggeration! I’m not one of those types of people that starts dozens of fantasy football teams every year, but when I do get my two teams started (two is the ABSOLUTE limit after a six team fiasco years ago) I dedicate massive amounts of time to scouring the internet for news about the players I have, the players my opponents have, and even the players that NEITHER of us have because if some obscure player breaks out and has a nice season (statistically speaking) you want to be the guy that picked him up and used him to claim victory.

During football season I probably dedicate nearly as much time to fantasy football as I do to the craft of writing. It’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s undoubtedly true. I also dedicate copious amounts of time to watching football and sports news programs on television. It all adds up to create my least productive time of the year writing-wise.

The problem is that this year–as I’ve mentioned–is going to be my most productive year yet as far as getting my work out there for people to see. I have writing assignments lined up at this moment, and I’ve found myself putting them off from time to time as I minimize the Word document so I can spend a few more minutes tweaking my fantasy football rosters. This is a serious problem.

However, I think the first step in solving any problem is realizing it’s there. At times in the past I’d put everything I was doing with my writing on the backburner whenever an interesting or enjoyable distraction crossed my path and thought nothing of it. Fantasy football is something I really enjoy participating in, but I know that to be a successful writer I need to take a step out of the fantasy world and move back into reality.

As hard as that might be…

The Olympics

I’ve been watching quite a bit more than I thought I would. When they first started I thought I might watch a little bit of the swimming because I was vaguely interested in Michael Phelps and his pursuit of the most gold medals ever (a mark he’s already reached and surpassed) and I figured I’d try to catch a few of the “Redeem Team’s” games for USA basketball. But NBC is doing a great job of switching things up and giving viewers a glimpse of multiple events. Immediately following a Michael Phelps race, we cut to the Chinese national men’s gymnastics team doing their routine on the rings or the parallel bars, or a clip of Togo winning their first ever Olympic medal (a bronze in Canoe/Kayak), and I find myself drawn in.

Not because I have a vested interest in Togo or Chinese men’s gymnastics, but because watching these amazing athletes strive for their dreams is riveting television. And they really are amazing athletes. I see the American basketball team all the time in the States, and I’ve seen and heard enough about Michael Phelps to realize he’s one of a kind. But the Chinese men’s gymnastics team did things I didn’t think were humanly possible during their routine. I literally couldn’t tear my eyes from the screen. And then, by extension, NBC did a terrific job of incorporating the slim chances the American team had to beat these juggernauts of gymnastics by cutting to the team preparing for their next event. So by the time swimming was over and the network went to gymnastics for the duration, I wanted to keep watching.

And I guess there’s also the fact that I love an underdog. The Chinese are apparently some kind of gymnastics gods walking among mere mortals. And when I look at the medal count online, the Chinese are also dominating the field when it comes to earning gold medals (although the US has a slight lead in total medals). So when faced with odds like that, it was easy for me to root for the United States gymnastics team to beat the Chinese. They didn’t, of course (had the lead and lost it), but for a team that wasn’t expected to medal, earning a bronze was a nice accomplishment. And even though the US team was disappointed in their inability to beat the Chinese, they were gracious and still pleased to earn another piece of hardware for their country.

What those guys do is incredible, by the way. I keep thinking of Batman and Robin training in the Batcave. Batman and Robin are always listed as “world class gymnasts” in their “list of powers”. Now I finally know what that means. And it is awesome. Is it realistic to let go of a bar, flip and twist three times over in midair and then grab the bar again at the last possible second all without losing any shred of momentum? Not for you or me, no. But for these guys it’s possible. They do it all the time.

So basically, I like what I’ve seen so far. Michael Phelps has me watching more swimming. Men’s gymnastics has me watching women’s gymnastics (USA placed silver in that, second again to the Chinese). And the events I wanted to watch are so good that they’re allowing me to find hidden gems I had no interest in before. And I still haven’t been able to catch USA basketball yet.