Not a Draft Dodger (Chapter 2), Part 1

Part one, as promised.

I confidently clicked the submit button. The interface took some getting used to, but once I had it figured out, posting was a breeze. All I really needed was a spell check and a View Source button so I could check my HTML. I spent two days researching my topic, a couple of hours writing, and that was that. It was relaxing to have one steady check, direct deposited into my savings account within 48 hours of each weekly post.

I looked up to see Nadia, my Ukranian housecleaner. She narrowed her clear blue eyes at me and turned away. I didn’t understand the look, because we’re generally friendly, even flirtatious at times.

“You are asshole,” she said in an accent that resembled that of Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle.

“If you show them again, I’ll double your tip,” I replied. I wasn’t going to get up because my ass had fallen asleep, and she’s six inches taller than me.

“Asshole,” she said. I wasn’t worried about her personal feelings reflecting on her job performance. She needed the work.

I sniffed, had a sip of raspberry flavored water, and started researching for next week’s blog.

The following morning, I wake up alone. The apartment is clean, as planned, but it’s someone else’s clean, like a burglar entered my place, and instead of stealing my baseball cards, took a mop to every surface of my place. It’s a strange morning, because for the first day in a while I don’t have any immediate responsibilities. I have nothing to do for 48 hours, and that’s unusual. There’s one appointment that I expect to complete soon. It’s not on my meticulously kept appointment book, copied onto a spreadsheet on my laptop. This one is off the books, and the someone involved is late.

Brian doesn’t appreciate it when I answer the door with a disappointed expression. I look over his shoulder and don’t see anyone else.

“Good to see you too,” he says after brushing past me to find the fridge. I inherited a ridiculously expensive stainless-steel Sub-Zero refrigerator from the previous tenant.

“I couldn’t commit to a girl with a gun to my head, but I’d marry your appliances,” Brian comments. He’s wearing a customized Peyton Manning jersey that has “Field General” on the name plate because on one NFL Network special Manning referred to himself as the ultimate field general. He opens a Heineken Light. I had long ago given up on ridiculing people’s beer decisions. Life was no longer too short to drink cheap beer. It was too short to comment on others’ cheapness.

“What, nothing for me?” I ask, trying to recover.

“Dude, all you had to do was ask,” he replies. Brian’s generally nice enough to ignore my moods.

I was kidding about drinking one of Brian’s beers. I take a Newcastle, perfectly cold and sweating with condensation, from the blue plastic cooler next to the dingy card table.

“You haven’t documented any travel in the past five months,” Brian asked in a quieter voice.

“There’s nothing to document,” I replied. At least now I knew why Brian showed up early.

“You don’t come to meetings anymore.”

“Why would I want to travel? There’s nothing I want to see that I haven’t already seen?”

“What about that weekend with Nicole? Didn’t you bang her in the Jacuzzi?” Brian asked. All a man ever wants to know about is how another man’s wang is performing.

“Brian, Jacuzzi loving isn’t as simple as you think. It involves silicone-based lube and a plan.” I smacked myself in the head. “Why am I telling you this? Right now, I don’t have the need to go back. I like the present.”

“Use it or lose it,” Brian said. That was his standby.

“I don’t need to go back to a cabin trip that was Peyton Manning in the playoffs.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Mediocre at best. Tell me, Brian, how often have you gone back for that game?”

Brian swallowed.

“Probably once or twice off the books, am I wrong? It wouldn’t do for the leader to break the rules.”

“It’s the same every God-damned time. Why can’t Harper just go to the outside?”

Brian referred to the Indianapolis Colt defensive back who stripped Jerome Bettis of the ball, seemed destined for a touchdown on the return, and inexplicably was tackled by the Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback, who was the last man between him and the end zone. Allegedly, Harper had been stabbed in the leg by his wife in a domestic dispute the night before, and that slowed him down enough to be brought down.

“See, the past is boring. It’s like watching the same movie again.”

“Tom still travels. He’s supposed to teach you. You’re supposed to find someone to teach,” Brian says.

“Tom has issues with his past. I can’t make the night I seduced the prom queen better than it was the first time. What’s the point? Bully for me for knowing how to do something that’s useless.”

“You have a rare talent, Larry,” Brian says. “Talented people generally are assholes about it.”

I stare at him. Brian taught Tom in a stand-up comedy class. Months later they met again and Brian offered to teach him something else. Tom learned, and when we met he taught me. It was supposed to be exciting and new. It was a pain in the ass.

“I see that you’ve redecorated,” Brian says, ready to move on.

I had. I moved the couch away from its traditional position in worship of my wall-mounted flat-screen 65-inch plasma TV. In its place I put my garage-sale card table. It even had gaudy giant fake playing cards adorned on the green felt top.

“This is,” I say, gesturing to the table and then to the uber TV, “where we play today.”

If it weren’t already on a weekend, I’d declare that the NFL Draft should be a national holiday. The entire country gets into a tizzy over the Super Bowl, and most of them only care about the commercials. The breaks during the game are often as tedious as the game itself.

The NFL Draft, on the other hand, is reserved for the die-hards. No casual fans of the league would watch a minute of it. How does it work? All college players three years after their high-school graduation are eligible. This arbitrary rule has withstood some serious legal challenges. Teams draft in opposite order of their finish from the previous year. The perpetually crappy Houston Texans have the first overall pick, while the Super Bowl Champion Pittsburgh Steelers select 32nd and last in every round.

There are seven rounds to the draft, with 32 teams picking per round. Other than free agency, there is no other way to add new talent to your team. With a few exceptions, all drafted rookies are in effect cheap labor for teams. Veterans make more than double a rookie’s salary, so some teams will have as many as a dozen first-year players on their 53-man roster. General managers are made and broken on this weekend.

While players from every round have contributed to Super Bowl-winning squads, the focus is on the first round. Each team gets 15 minutes to make their pick, and because of the intense spotlight, they generally take a lot of the time. In the 2005 draft the first round took almost six hours. If your team traded out of the first round, you might not see your team’s first new players for a third of a day.

That’s right. Seven rounds are completed over two days. The first three unfold on Saturday, with the rest playing out on Sunday. After that, teams line up the remaining players to fill out their rosters.

Oh yeah, this is a media event as well. One thousand press credentials were handed out for this year’s draft. More than three thousand fans will enter Radio City Music Hall to witness. Maybe one year I’ll make the trek to NYC for the event, but I think that it’s like most football games, in that you’ll probably have a lot more fun and spend a lot less money if you just watch it at home.

I don’t write as much as I used to on the NFL, but I contribute to the blogosphere. Six of my closest friends are coming over to play poker and watch the draft. Most likely the party will be over before the first round is complete. I agreed to host because last year I had six beers and at least four different kinds of hard liquor and ended up throwing up in a serving dish and all over my friend’s carpet. He is now divorced. Home-field advantage is critical in the NFL playoffs, but on draft day, it is a must.

The party will be a who’s who of NFL obsessives. We have Brian, who despite watching his Colts choke again in last year’s playoffs, remains confident that one day, Peyton Manning will hold the Lombardi Trophy. He wouldn’t talk to me for two weeks after Vanderjagt’s last-second field-goal attempt went so amazingly wide. Brian’s mood improved when the Colts signed Adam Vinatieri, the kicker from the Patriots who had kicked the winning field goal in all three of their Super Bowl victories.

Desmond enters a few minutes later, wearing a Michael Vick jersey. He has been an Atlanta Falcon fan since they wore those hideous silver pants. His family used to have season tickets when the team played at Fulton County Stadium, now a parking lot for the former Olympic stadium that now hosts the Atlanta Braves. He protests the new football stadium, the Georgia Dome, because it’s a domed stadium in one of the warmest NFL markets in America. His protests died when I found him a pair of tickets to last year’s season opener on Monday night. The Falcons won that game, exorcising the demons of an NFC Championship game defeat to the Philadelphia Eagles. The rest of the season was a rollercoaster ride and the team finished 8-8, out of the playoffs. Due to a couple of trades the team wasn’t due to make a selection until the middle of the second round, or seven hours after Desmond’s arrival.

Desmond also throws me some work from time to time.

After Desmond I will greet Vince, who cheers for the Chicago Bears. I promised Vince a mini keg of Warsteiner in exchange for him bringing chicken wings. The bulging tray of wings encased in aluminum foil is larger than Vince’s oversized head. I promise to put them in the oven later. Vince has never been to Chicago. He once admitted that he likes their black jerseys. The Bears wear navy blue, and have done so since they were founded.

Vince owns and runs an excellent sushi place. I met him at a networking gathering and helped him get his Web site off the ground. In exchange, I get all the wasabi I can eat. Having him make chicken wings was kind of like asking me to write a Chinese menu. He’s a nice guy and almost never notices when we make fun of him.

Phil is a lawyer but we still like him anyway. He is a Vikings fan but refuses to wear a jersey ever since the team traded Randy Moss to the Oakland Raiders last offseason. He’s divorced and seems to be doing fine despite spending most of his time taking care of his two daughters.

Joseph is from Kansas City but he’s been in Atlanta for nearly a decade and I reckon that one more Mike Vick-led playoff run will turn him into another Falcon fan. He just had his second novel published. The New York Times called it vapid. Joseph won’t talk much today but he somehow manages to get inside information on player movement days before the general public. I have to admit, though, that I’m afraid of his wife. He always has the poker face going, but if I were him, I’d have a permanent shit-eating grin on my face.

Tom is a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers. He’s a native Pittsburgher but hasn’t lived there since he went to college. After I got over the Nicole weekend, he was a very helpful wingman. He’s a CPA but has a dangerous look that attracts the females looking for the bad boy. How do I prove that Tom is a life-long Steeler fan? He owns a Bubby Brister jersey. Most Steeler fans would go old school with someone like Franco Harris or Terry Bradshaw, or celebrate their recent success with a Troy Polamalu or Ben Roethlisberger. Until the Steelers won the Super Bowl less than three months ago, they hadn’t won a title since Tom was seven.

My one guest who hasn’t arrived yet is starting to worry me. She’s late.

Because the first round has so much dead time between picks, we decided to play poker to fill in the gaps. It’s an incredibly low-stakes game with a ten-dollar buy-in. Most people spend more on gas and beer than actual poker.

There’s no time in a man’s life when he feels completely mature. I’m the youngest guy in the room and I have no problem in following my cohorts’ lead in ogling the attractive nearly naked women on the playing cards we use. Vince loves playing no-peak games, which means you can’t look at your cards at first. This game is better suited for the kind of cards you buy at the grocery store.

“Penalty shot,” Phil says. Phil introduced the concept of the penalty shot in 1998 when he hosted a NFC Championship party. His Vikings hosted the Falcons and were huge favorites. When the mostly Atlanta crowd started getting out of hand, Phil started assigning penalty shots of pepper vodka to calm them down. It was not successful, and his Vikings lost in overtime.

Pepper vodka tastes like grain alcohol filtered through a dead yak’s ass. It gets you drunk in a hurry, which is bad when you’re trying to remember that a flush beats a straight and all you can see is a smiling topless woman. We’re in the midst of a long Texas Hold ‘Em game and I have a flush. Unfortunately the last two cards to come up give Phil a full house. I lose maybe a buck fifty on the game but it seems like more.

“I wasn’t going to raise until you raised,” Phil says in his somewhat smug manner. I have a comeback but he has a full bottle of Absolut Peppar.

“Nice one,” I mumble as I look at my dwindling stack of chips. The draft started fifteen minutes ago, at high noon mind you, but a lot of the suspense had ended. All offseason it seemed inevitable that the Houston Texans, who owned the number one overall pick, would draft Reggie Bush. Bush won the Heisman Trophy, given to the top college football player, last season and was getting hyped nearly as much as the latest Tom Cruise summer movie. Bush was fast, untacklable, and despite sharing time at running back at the University of Southern California, destined to be a star. The Texans insisted that they were considering another guy, but no one was buying it.

Joseph called me two hours before it was announced. “The Texans are taking Mario Williams,” he said. I didn’t ask about his source.

The night before the draft, the Texans signed the other guy. It was madness. After I researched the subject I saw that it wasn’t character or money that steered the Texans away from Bush. They actually just liked the other guy better. Mario Williams, the ‘other’ guy, was a defensive end from North Carolina State University. The team went 7-5 last year, so he couldn’t have been that good. He was one of those players who excelled at those drills that every player must perform for scouts. Let me give you an example. One of the benchmark measureables for an NFL draft prospect is his 40-yard dash time. Most plays in the NFL don’t go beyond a few yards, and straight-line speed is generally useless when the action tends to resemble a train wreck in slow motion. But guys like this formerly anonymous defensive end run fast and look great in shorts and end up with 26 million dollar signing bonuses. I nearly piss myself when I get a buck a word.

The New Orleans Saints are on the clock and from what we hear, the New York Jets are trying to trade up.

My stack grows as I slow-play my way back to respectability. I have to go all-in a couple of times, but we are down to the last three players in our mini-game and I think I might end up winning. Brian’s bluffs aren’t working and Phil keeps getting crap cards. Generally in a low-stakes game like ours, if you get good cards, you win.

The Saints predictably take Bush. Phil and I both have a pair of aces, but my Jack kicker beats his nine. My stack is nearly equal to his. There’s a knock on the door.

“Are those the strippers?” Phil asks. I start to sweat.

“I’ll get it,” I say, mucking my cards. I doubt that a suited seven and five will help my cause.

I answer the door.

To be continued. . .