Thread da Windmill

That would be the name of my Fantasy Golf team. Yes… that’s correct, fantasy golf. “Team” is a bit of a misnomer as there’s really no team at all, but I don’t know what else to call it. Oh wait, yes I do… “Fantasy Golf waste-of-fifty-dollars.” Yeah, that sums it up nicely.

You may ask, “Why the hell would you play fantasy golf?” Well, I am finding myself asking that very question weekly. Every Tuesday I am e-mailed by Yahoo to set my *line-up* for the start of each tournament on Thursday. Well, since the fourth week of the *season* I have dreaded the roughly 5 minutes I have to spend doing so. I was kicking ass for the first two weeks and then fell to Earth in week 3 and have not recovered since. In fact, the only fun I have really had with this was picking my name, which is a tribute to my mini-golfing past.

Traditionally, fantasy baseball and football have been excellent and enjoyable wastes of money for me. I’ve never done well with the football, but I’m pretty good with the baseball, particularly in the league I run where I can influence my team’s extraordinary success thru backdoor secret functions available to any league commissioner.

So, the 2005 fantasy sports year was a windfall for me. I won two baseball leagues and followed that up with 2nd and 3rd place finishes in two football leagues. In the past, I’d take my baseball prize and waste it on a losing football effort, but I thought this year I’d spend it on some other waste of money instead. Since the acquisition of an Xbox 360 continued to elude me, I decided in December to spend that cake on a new 60 gig iPod Video.

As a sidebar, I have bucked the trend of you white headphone wearing iPod-o-philes in favor of higher quality black Sony ear-pluggy things that are definitely destroying my hearing. Like a stethoscope of evil those things, but they offer the concept of bass. Those cheap iPod buds don’t grasp that concept. My plugs also match the sleek black iPod, so again, no white for me. I am the iPod iconoclast! Don’t get me started on how easily the damned thing is scratched. It’s already been well documented and I was aware of it going in, but my gawd, you look at the thing wrong and it gets a new scratch. Overall, a huge waste of money, but since I won that money, I don’t care so much.

To continue on, I inexplicably end up winning more cake in those two football leagues. Amazing, because I am not a commish in either league! Then again, I won the CBS Sportsline baseball league without being commish, but I guess even a blind squirrel finds a nut once and a while. So, what to do with the unexpected football prizes? Well, what didn’t cover my losses in other football endeavors – no, no hard-core gambling here – I put towards this here fantasy golf thing.

“It was an impulse buy! Near the register!”

My friend Jay had been bugging me to join up the past two years and I finally gave in. Something about how interesting it was and that he did well at it without knowing jack about golf. I was caught in a moment of weakness between the end of football season and the start of baseball season with a few extra fantasy bucks burning a hole in my pocket. Yeah, with that line I am daring you to leave a comment.

Anyway, the basic idea of this thing is to pick eight golfah’s each week for your *team.* You then start four of them and can swap the four reserves in and out for each round over the four day tournament. There are three tiers, or pools, from which you choose your players. Pool A is the superstar types like Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson and you pick two and start one. Pool B is the middle guys and you pick four and start two. Pool C is the scrubs and you pick two and start one. You can only play a player 10 times for the whole season, which lasts gawd knows how long and why the hell am I wasting my time describing this crap…

It turns out, it isn’t interesting and I suck at it. I pretty much gave up after week 3 and started picking the same dudes as the Yahoo RotoWire.com Expert every week. I am somehow screwing that up because the guy is way ahead of me too. In fact, out of 34 people in our particular pool, I am sitting at 25 right now. Not really moving up or down either, but the real goal is to luck into winning a week so I get my money back. If I can do that, I’ll put this mistake behind me.

Thankfully, it wasn’t as if I was talked into playing Fantasy Auto Racing. Yeah, I did that for free last year and that’s only slightly more interesting than this due to bonus points for crashes… kidding, but that would make it interesting. I suppose I could have also opted for Fantasy Bass Fishing. Yeah, that’s right, it exists people. If you ever hear that I’m doing that, stage an intervention. I think they may have a kit for that, but if not, take a bat (Nerf if possible) to my noggin.

Next year, I’ll donate my fifty bucks to the Jimmy Fund and focus my golf fantasies on Natalie Gulbis.