What Price (Fantasy) Glory?

 

My fantasy football league is switching to an auction style draft this year.  Instead of selecting professional football players for our respective fantasy “franchises” in a pre-determined order, each fantasy  “team owner” will have a chance to bid on each and every available player, each using an equivalent pool of imaginary money.  I am a little uncomfortable with the auction format, as it brings the fantasy “team owner” too close to the unacknowledged shadow side of professional sports, which is the symbolic master/slave relationship between “real-life” professional sports franchise owners and their players.  The mind-numbing salaries paid to these players by their “owners” does nothing to destabilize the master/slave relationship, in fact, it chains them ever more tightly to their “owner”, as it is only in the “owner’s” keep that the players can ever amass the vast fortunes that in turn provide a false sense of liberation to the player. 

 

Of course, a professional football player is theoretically able to walk away from the lure of those millions of dollars in a way that really existing slaves never could, at least without risking life and limb.  But of course, they almost never do, and the rare exceptions, Robert Smith leaving the Minnesota Vikings to pursue a medical degree, Pat Tillman leaving the Arizona Cardinals to “fight terrorism” in the US military, simply prove the rule.  Smith and Tillman answered a higher calling, and in doing so found an authentic state of liberation, in direct contrast to the false liberation of professional football’s obscenely inflated slave’s wages.

 

It will, then, be with a sense of trepidation that I engage in my first fantasy football auction draft.  The lighthearted fun of picking players for my fantasy squad, “Dr. Thunder”, transposed now into the auction format, with bids defining an attendant price for each and every player, including zero dollars for the undesirable players, has too much the trace of the really existing slave auction.  The price of entry into my fantasy league has never seemed so high, a price which has nothing to do with the seventy-five really existing dollars necessary to join league play (although I complain about that too).