Nov. 2020 - Fantasy Presidential Election League
Fantasy football season is in full gear and I hate it. It’s like playing the lottery, with each digit slowly released over a long weekend, players sweating and swearing like there is anything we can do about our team. And yet Americans can’t get enough fantasy sports.
Something else is going on right now which you may have noticed. . . it is election season. I hate this too. So. . . because the third law of thermodynamics says that two wrongs make a right, what if we combined fantasy football and presidential elections to create the FPEL?
I don’t mean that we draft from the remaining 2020 presidential candidate pool. The first two picks would have a distinct advantage, (although there are sleeper picks. Howie Hawkins and Jo Jorgensen actually belong to real parties (Green and Libertarian) which is more than we can say for Kanye West and his “Birthday Party.”
Instead, we draft past presidential athletes and then engage in a series of debates (adult-beverage enhanced) to determine the greatest athlete among them. Of course quote master Theodore Roosevelt gives us the league motto:
It is of far more importance that a man should play something himself, even if he plays it badly, than that he should go with hundreds of companions to see someone else play well.
Wait, now that I think about it, T.R. seems to be mocking fantasy sports (but supporting the Half-Life way.) Maybe this whole thing is a bad idea. . . Oh well, it’s too late and my deadline has already passed. Let’s consider our FPEL draft candidates:
John F. Kennedy won a varsity letter at Harvard for swimming. . . perhaps worth a late-round flyer, certainly better than the hacking golf games of Obama and Trump. (Although Obama was said to throw a mean elbow in Whitehouse pickup hoops and his brother-in-law coached Oregon State’s hapless team.)
Before becoming President, when Grover Cleveland was a sheriff, he actually hanged a man. But I guess that’s not very sporting. I’m not taking him.
Surprisingly, Richard Nixon gives some interesting ammo for the argument. A bad football player at Whittier College, nevertheless he once designed a football play and sent it to George Allen, the head coach of the Washington Football Team. But most impressively, Nixon was an avid bowler, which the movie buff will remember is immortalized above The Dude’s bar with this photo:
Reagan did not play an organized sport, but was said to have saved the lives of 77 people as a lifeguard. (Of course in Lifeguard statistics in the 20’s, you were given credit for a “save” if you told the swimmer to wait 30 minutes after eating.) And Bill Clinton was said to jog up to three times a week, sometimes to McDonalds.
You can’t talk about presidential athletes without again mentioning T.R. He was famous for all kinds of hijinx, including boxing with his cabinet members and wrestling a bear, but he also tried to ban football! If he had won a third term, gator surfing might have become the national pastime.
Now we get to the upper end of the draft. Dwight Eisenhower played football at West Point in 1912, famously failing to tackle the great Jim Thorpe. (That’s a negative defensive point.) Gerald Ford was center on two national championship teams at Michigan, and was his team’s MVP. (He too gets negative points for his inability to descend a staircase without tripping.) GHW Bush played first base for Yale in the first two college world series, and even more impressively, celebrated his 85th birthday skydiving.
But here is my number one pick, (don’t tell anyone in my league.) Sure the guy gets negative points for inventing the word, “strategery,” but really, it all boils down to one pitch—the first pitch in the World Series in Yankee Stadium after 9/11. You may remember that time, we all thought a terrorist was behind every corner, hiding in the upper deck with sniper rifles or parachuting in with TNT strapped to their chests. Huge pressure, the weight of a nation, the President wearing a heavy bulletproof vest under his FDNY coat, cockily striding to the mound. . . and throwing a strike before a unified country. Winner of the FEPL:
FEPL Top Draft Pick
And apropos of nothing, why the Kardashians will never be President.
See the 1:13 Mark in the Video
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Tim