Playing fantasy sports can be as addictive as watching "The Biggest Loser."
My own lowest point was when I went to see the Golden State Warriors play the Los Angeles Clippers and cheered when the Clippers' Michael Olowakandi snagged his 10th rebound. I am a Warriors fan, but Olowokandi was in my NBA fantasy team.
It took a team of bullish psychiatrists and several wily girlfriends to remove me from this iniquitous pursuit, which is why I have some sympathy with Cameron Pettigrew and three of his fellow Fidelity Investments employees.
Actually, they are former Fidelity employees, as, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, they were all fired from Fidelity's Westlake, Texas office for playing fantasy NFL during their hours of employment.
Fidelity is the world's No. 1 sponsor of mutual funds. These are, I believe, the folks who tell you in their ads to follow the green line on your way to having hairy gray ears and a condo in Boca. It sounds like a sure thing, but we all know how this 401(k) thing can sometimes work out.
So perhaps you might find it curious that Fidelity frowns on gambling. And fantasy NFL, where money might be involved, is, according to the company, gambling.
"We have clear policies that relate to gambling. Participation in any form of gambling through the use of Fidelity time or equipment or any other company resource is prohibited," Fidelity spokesman Vin Loporchio told the Star-Telegram.
He added: "In addition to being illegal in a lot of places, it can also be disruptive. We want our employees to be focused on our customers and clients."
Righteous words, indeed. However, Pettigrew made some rather human points. "Firing a guy for being in a $20 fantasy league? Let's be honest; that's a complete overreaction," he told the Star-Telegram.
This whole thing started in October when e-mails pertaining to a different fantasy league fell before the eyes of Fidelity management. It was then that they realized that Pettigrew was the commissioner of an office league.
Pettigrew, however, said that managers and leaders played in at least 10 fantasy leagues around the office. This was despite the fact that Fidelity does have a policy against fantasy leagues, a policy that Pettigrew says was routinely ignored.
Even though Pettigrew says he never sent fantasy-related e-mails at work, it all seems to have come down to two IMs that Pettigrew received.
"One of my buddies sent me something about how bad Trent Edwards was playing or something like that," Pettigrew told the Star-Telegram. "So they called me in and talked to me for about 90 minutes on everything I ever knew about fantasy football. They interrogated me as though I was some sort of international gambling kingpin."
Shortly afterward, four league commissioners, including Pettigrew, were fired.
Corporations have many rules. Indeed, I know people in corporations who rather enjoy making up rules and enforcing them.
But perhaps the first rule should be to ascertain whether an employee's private behavior, even if occasionally on company time, actually does adversely affect his work performance. Or whether it might actually help it.
Wayne A. Spring might be wishing he had better privacy settings on his Facebook page.
According to the Associated Press, Spring, in an attack of hubris, madness, or merely Saints fandom, told his socially-networking nearest and dearest that they could come and shoot his TV if the Saints beat the Washington Redskins last Sunday.
Yes, I said "beat," because Spring is a longtime, long-suffering fan of one of the NFL's more spirited and unfortunate franchises.
"I was a Saints fan, but used to be they never could win, and I admit I was a fair-weather fan," Spring told the AP.
The Saints won in overtime, 33-30. And as soon as the winning field goal pierced the uprights, Spring's ears were pierced by the sounds of his ringing phone.
Around a dozen equally sane Saints fans turned up with beer and guns. The resulting video has already caused something of a stir on YouTube. So please enjoy the merriment and the fact that Spring, who owns a medical staffing company, will apparently be watching the Saints on a small black-and-white screen this weekend.
Sometimes, it seems, electronics just don't get the respect they deserve.
Donte Stallworth, wide receiver for the Cleveland Browns, recently served 30 days in jail for the DUI manslaughter of 59-year-old Mario Reyes in Miami. Stallworth's blood alcohol level was 0.126, far in excess of the legal limit.
Last Thursday, the NFL suspended him for the upcoming season.
Stallworth officially accepted his suspension with good grace. His public statement read: "Regardless of the length of my suspension, I will carry the burden of Mr. Reyes' death for the rest of my life."
It continued: "I will use the period of my suspension to reflect, fulfill my obligations, and use this experience to make a positive impact on the lives of those who look up to NFL players."
However, Stallworth appears to have a Twitter page, twitter.com/D_Stallworth18. It links through to a MySpace page that appears to be his. NBC's respected ProFootballTalk also confirms the Twitter page to be his.
Indeed, since Stallworth's tweeting was first revealed, neither he nor his PR handlers have done anything to refute the suggestion that the Twitter page is his. So let's assume this is, indeed, the work and thoughts of Donte Stallworth.
If there's one thing we know about Twitter and other forms of networking socially, it is that they can bring out the real person from behind the slightly less real one.
So it was instructive to waft over to the Stallworth Twitter to get a sense of the depth of his remorse.
Here's what he tweeted Thursday after his suspension was announced: "I'M A LITTLE WOUNDED, BUT I'M NOT SLAIN; I WILL LAY ME DOWN 4A WHILE 2 BLEED, THEN I'LL RISE & FIGHT WITH YOU AGAIN" -John Dryden"
Indeed, he is not slain. But Mario Reyes is. So perhaps some might find Stallworth's choice of literature to describe his own painful predicament more than a little, well, unfortunate.
Reyes' family is mourning his death. While Stallworth, who is currently in home confinement but allowed to work out, is using Twitter to communicate publicly with athlete friends such as the Los Angeles Clippers' Baron Davis and the San Diego Chargers Shaun Phillips, as well as celebrities such as Kim Kardashian.
Indeed, in this period of reflection, Stallworth reflected last Wednesday, to both Phillips and Kardashian, on, well, hair: "new hair doe is the shit <----do u n camp SP... i see ya Kimmy... looks good, for how long??"
Stallworth's tweets are full of LMAOs and LOLs.
So perhaps you will wonder with me whether it is entirely wise for Stallworth to use the public forum of Twitter to reveal something more of his character and current mood than perhaps might suggest a period of somber reflection.
As one Twitterer offered his fans just recently: "please be safe & make smart decisions!!! LOVE YALL GOODNIGHT".
Oh, yes, that was Donte too.
But he continued, offering tweet after tweet that can only make people admire him more.
Take this from Sunday: "a quote 4 YOU!! "Those who have few things to attend to are great babblers; for the less men think, the more they talk" -Charles Montesquieu".
I think I'm going to think about that.
Alright now, you know-it-alls, show-it-alls, and tell-it-alls. It's time you people learned a little discipline, a little social decorum, a little good old fashioned discretion.
So here are the rules. No more Twittering. No more friending. And definitely no more updating people on your latest moods, feelings, lovers, and hangnails.
Yes, in what seems like a concerted effort on the part of traditional culture, two highly similar organizations, the Marines and the NFL, have decided to fight back against all the careless talk.
They have each reportedly begun to ban Twitter and Facebook.
Let's start with the Marines. According to CNN, a Marine Corps order has made the Corps' feelings known with characteristic subtlety: "These Internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user-generated content, and targeting by adversaries."
The enemy is lurking, Facebookers and Twitterers. Leave now.
The Marines' ban is supposed to last a year, after which time, presumably, it will be reassessed. And the Corps is extremely concerned about worms, Trojans and other items with nefarious purposes infecting its space.
However, this ban is not without its awkward strategic moments.
The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, has, as of Tuesday, 4,423 followers on Twitter. (He's following Katie Couric, but not Bill O'Reilly, by the way.) Will he, too, fall under a Marine-style ban if it becomes military-wide?
This picture of the Marines did not come from Facebook or Twitter. Honest.
(Credit: CC Sister 72/Flickr)There is, indeed, some doubt as to whether the ban has actually been enacted.
Thanks to Admiral Mullen's Twitter feed, I lucked upon a feed called Milblogging, which collates important military news and information.
It referred me to Wired.com, which quoted Price Floyd, the social-networking czar of the military, as saying that no decision had yet been made on a military-wide basis.
So have the Marines created an advance party before everyone else? It appears so.
Which leads us to the pioneers, at the NFL. The New York Times informs us that certain NFL teams appear to be chop-blocking social networking square in the back of the knees.
At the beginning of training camp, Green Bay Packers players were apparently told that they would be fined $1,701 (the NFL maximum) for texting or tweeting during a team function.
The Miami Dolphins do have their own Twitter page. But coach Tony Sparano, according to the Times, told players to lay off the tweets in order not to create additional distractions.
It's quite enough with NFL players taking guns to clubs (Plaxico Burress), organizing dog-fighting rings (Michael Vick), mowing down and killing pedestrians while drunk (Dante Stallworth), and showering strippers with cash and Cristal (Pac Man Jones). Who needs more socially dubious distractions?
But here's where the Marines and the NFL are very different.
Even though there are those who believe there are no secrets anymore, one can at least imagine that evildoers might scour the Marine personnel's personal sites for nuggets of information or vulnerability.
On the other hand, some might think that NFL players' behavior in tweeting from the locker room, the sidelines or even during games (as the Bengals' Chad Ocho Cinco threatened to do before the NFL said no) is just plain rude.
Yes, they might inadvertently reveal an ankle injury. But not half as much as they reveal their lack of class.
But an NFL player's career can be painfully short.
The average running back lasts perhaps three years. And very few players have contracts that guarantee them much more than this year and the next. So perhaps it's unsurprising that some players want to market themselves in any and every way they can in such a cynical environment.
One that is epitomized surely by college football coaches, some of whom have decided to tweet during games for one sole reason--to find a neat way around the NCAA rules regarding contact with recruits.
This behavior shows that the "here's what I'm feeling right now" culture is not confined to players, but to their bosses, too--if it suits their purposes.
Organizations that are based on values such as discipline and secrecy are not exactly well-suited to social networking.
It will be fascinating to see how they deal with this social phenomenon as time goes on--if they really manage to deal with it at all.
When you hear an NFL coach uttering the phrase "screenplay," you expect he has a scowl on his face and his team is 3rd and 7.
However, according to The Times-Picayune, New Orleans Saints' head coach, Sean Payton, has had a full-contact drill with his artistic side and penned an outline for a movie screenplay.
Because it's such a fine idea, or because he has just the right connections, Payton has hired famed Hollywood agents CAA to fulfill his dream of Oscar contention. Which might come slightly sooner than Super Bowl contention.
You will, I know, love the story. It revolves around a little boy whose grandfather gives him a special refurbished Xbox with whizzo magical powers.
This Xbox can control the outcome of NFL games.
The New Orleans Saints. Might their poor play last season suggest they were already controlled by someone's Xbox?
(Credit: CC JaseMan/Flickr)
Negotiations between sports-governing bodies and TV channels are often rather beguiling.
While News Corp.'s Fox, for example, built the fourth network with the NFL its most sturdy pillar, other channels seem to fall in and out of favor.
Now Comcast, which owns some channels and controls a seemingly infinite amount of cable, is threatening to remove the NFL Network from every last strand of cable because it feels that the NFL is not quite playing ball.
Comcast has never liked the 70-cents-per-subscriber fee that the NFL charges for the its total football network, which occasionally shows a live game or two but otherwise offers quite a lot of talking about football.
The NFL seems to have gone to the Federal Communications Commission to complain that the NFL Network isn't offered as part of Comcast's standard sports package, while Versus (oh, yes, those wonderful NHL playoffs are coming!) and the Golf Channel, both owned by Comcast, are.
Comcast, on the other hand, would dearly, and understandably, like to get hold of NFL Sunday Ticket, a channel that allows those who got out of places like Cincinnati and Tampa to still enjoy their home team's games live. Currently, they can do this only on Direct TV.
Naturally, both sides are offering some necessary roughness, as the current NFL Network-Comcast deal expires May 1.
Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen offered this long bomb to The Wall Street Journal: "In the palace of truth and justice, all these channels probably belong on a sports tier, but the leagues are not willing to do that."
Yes, not the Palace of Auburn Hills. The gilded Palace of Truth and Justice.
"Yo, how many of you can make it to my place Thursday for the NFL Network Game? I got Direct TV."
(Credit: CC Monica's Dad/Flickr)However, Steve Bornstein, chief executive of the NFL, offered his own strike down the middle, despite the close attentions of a ruthless safety or two: "Some cable operators talk out of two sides of their mouths...One minute, they say it's about the price, the next, they're saying it's about access to Sunday Ticket."
Is he suggesting someone might not be telling the truth? A personal foul, surely.
Will the FCC turn out to be the referee on this one? Will the two sides reach a hard-fought, swimmingly reasonable compromise along the lines of, oh, I don't know, the Camp David agreement?
When so much money clasps its hands around a beloved national sport, it's sometimes easy to forget that people just want to watch the games they want to watch without hooking up woks on their roof or cables around their wallpaper.
Strangely, the former commissioner of the NFL, the weirdly somnolent Paul Tagliabue, believes that baseball got something right, specifically concerning the way it launched their MLB Network. Cable had first dibs on out-of-market games. Then MLB Network appeared as part of a basic digital package.
I know that many people have never understood why the NFL gave exclusive rights to Direct TV for its Sunday Ticket. I mean, it's not as if you have to wok your chimney to watch other important events--like "American Idol" and "Dancing with the Stars"--happening elsewhere.
I know you'll tell me that it all has to do with money. But one might have thought that there would have been a far larger market out there if the out-of-town games were offered across multiple platforms.
Look, I'm a San Diego Chargers fan. I don't live in San Diego. I have cable. Ergo, I spend a lot of winter Sundays in sports bars.
Please, wealthy people of commerce, will you sing from the same playbook and help me improve my diet and my lifestyle? Thank you.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about an unfortunate employee of the Philadelphia Eagles, Dan Leone.
Leone was upset that the Eagles had allowed Brian Dawkins, their nasty (in a good way) defensive back, leave for the Denver Broncos.
He adorned his Facebook page with feelings: "Dan is ******* devastated about Dawkins signing with Denver...Dam Eagles are Retarded."
He was fired.
"I thought he was losing a yard of pace myself. But I wouldn't have dared put it on my Facebook page."
(Credit: CC Post406/Flickr)Now Dawkins has decided to honor Leone's Facebook faux-pas. He has offered Leone his two tickets for Denver's visit to Philadelphia, a game at which Leone will, no doubt, be greeted with garlands of flowers and chants of "for he's a jolly good fellow".
Dawkins modestly told the Philadelphia Daily News: "He was one of probably thousands and thousands of Eagles fans who felt that way. That didn't surprise me, that someone said that on their Facebook. It did surprise me that he was let go, though. That really did surprise me."
Brotherly love. It never dies. It just occasionally leaves Philadelphia.
You don't normally associate negative emotions with Philadelphia sports.
In the City of Brotherly Love, they believe in affection, even when the circumstances don't warrant it. Criticism knows no place in Philadelphian hearts and bars.
So perhaps it was odd to the management of the NFL's Philadelphia Eagles that one of their stadium operations workers, Dan Leone, seemed a little upset when the Eagles allowed defensive back Brian Dawkins to sign for the depressingly hapless Denver Broncos.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Mr. Leone posted this on his Facebook page: "Dan is ******* devastated about Dawkins signing with Denver...Dam Eagles are Retarded."
And this is what it feels like when the Eagles fail to make the Super Bowl.
(Credit: Cc Pimp Exposure)He received a response by telephone from the Eagles: "We've decided to let Dan go to Denver, too. Or to Miami, or Pittsburgh."
Yes, I paraphrase. And yes, Leone was fired. There was no agent to soften the blow or get him a deal to man the west gate with another team.
"I shouldn't have put it up there," Leone confessed to the Inquirer. "I was ticked off, and I let my emotions go, but I didn't offend any one person or target a specific individual."
He apologized "20 million times." But the Eagles merely showed him their talons.
Oh, why is it so hard to forgive humanity's foibles when they become featured on Facebook?
Last November, Wayne Burdick was on a cruise ship docked in Miami when he suddenly said to himself: "I wonder how my beloved, infuriating, ugly-quarterbacked Chicago Bears are doing?"
So he got out his wireless card, opened his laptop, unleashed his Slingbox and began to pray. Surprisingly, the Bears beat the Detroit Lions 27-23.
As his ship sailed to the Caribbean, Wayne Burdick's heart was lighter than Joaquin Phoenix's sense of humor. On his return, his pockets were lighter too.
Because AT&T sent him a bill for $27,788.93. You know why it did that, don't you? Yes, it accused him of truly egregious behavior. No, not watching the Bears, but roaming.
Mr. Burdick channeled his best Mike Singletary and spent much time roaming around the customer service departments of AT&T. Even though he could prove that he was on that cruise ship and therefore still technically in Miami, he succeeded only in getting the bill down to $6,000.
So he contacted the "Chicago Sun-Times". With the paper's intervention, AT&T decided that Mr. Burdick must have been receiving an errant signal.
Either that, or he must have been pestering them so much and persuaded a newspaper to take on the case that perhaps it would have been an errant signal for the company to pursue the matter further.
A few people came to my house today to watch the Baltimore Ravens steal an NFL playoff game with their usual display of vomit-forward video game violence.
When I say 'people', some, including my friend Ali, were not as fascinated with the game as with checking their friends' breast-feeding pictures on Facebook. So Ali grabbed my MacBook (black, seeing as you ask) with the intention of anti-socially networking.
She tugged at the power cable in order to plug it into the MacBook and seemed to be having trouble. After several attempts she was still not successful in making the magnetic connection with the cable port.
Because her frustration turned to grunting louder than that of Ray Lewis in Surround Sound, I turned to see that she was trying to put the cable into the wrong side of the machine. When I suggested she try the other side, she looked at me as if I was her parole officer. Then she declared my MacBook "stupid" and "discriminatory."
I confess I've never considered the plight of the left-handed laptopper, even though I have some left-handed tendencies myself. Ali said her PC had ports on the right and had never encountered such wrong-headed one-sidedness.
So in the interests of her satisfaction and the ability of several hard-working people to enjoy the game, I made her a cup of strong tea, took control of the MacBook and went online to examine the essence of left-handed computing. I found deep discussions about laptop left-handedness. I also found left-handed keyboards, and many examples of the left-handed mouse.
I was even reminded that golfer Phil 'Lefty' Mickelson is not, actually, left-handed. But I failed to find a MacBook with the holes on the other side.
Now I have no idea if many deeply creative, Mac-passionate left-handers out there secretly suffer every day of their lives with this spatial awkwardness. Could it be that some even suffer from a troubling form of MacLefty Tourette's? But perhaps readers might share their discomfort in this most curative of subjective forums.
I wonder if Steve Jobs left-handed or right-handed. I can't say I've ever noticed. I'll ask Ali. She's bound to know.
