The Football Fan's Manifesto by Michael Tunison Page A

nearby.
    There is no such thing as victory cake. Neither is there first-down cake. Nor blocked punt returned for a touchdown cake.
    Don’t pee into a soda bottle. Getting up once in a while to visit an actual bathroom burns fat and is a much more sanitary option. At the very least find a large bush. Sure, peeing into the bottle saves time and provides you a projectile to chuck at a Titans fan, but it’s disgusting. And likely causing you to put pee-soiled hands on your other food articles.
    Limit yourself to one pound of wings per quarter . Any more than that and you’re talking more hot meat injections than Jeff Garcia.
    For every lineman who scores, waddle in place for five minutes. If one fat guy can move his ass for a little bit, surely you can do the same. You can even reward yourself with some jumping-jacks cake after you’re finished.
    Gastric bypass surgery. No one said you had to do it the honest way.
    Utilizing these small measures, you’ll keep yourself from becoming an unsightly amorphous blob, instead staying a charmingly paunchy glutton. No one wants the clap of their thighs to overmatch those of their hands.
    IV.4 The Diner Quiz for a Post-Post- Diner Generation
    The 1982 Barry Levinson film Diner is best remembered for the scene in which a young man gets his girlfriend to touch his penis by concealing it in a popcorn box at the movies which later served as the inspiration for the Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg song “Dick in a Box” (as seen in that movie with Daniel Stern).
    A more critical segment for our purposes occurs later in the film when Eddie, played by Steve Guttenberg, subjects his fiancée, Elyse, to a rigorous examination of her football knowledge. Nothing much, just 140 or so questions on arcane gridiron facts. Elyse hangs tough, but in the end finishes with 63 percent correct, falling just short of the 65 percent mark required to pass. If this strikes you as draconian, you clearly married out of desperation, intoxication, or on a dare. Maybe all three. Gauging the football acumen of a potential mate is an all-important determinant in the courting process. Otherwise, your betrothed may be a concealed non-sports-fan, one who has merely cannily constructed a clever façade until the ring gets on her finger. You’d be stuck. Maybe even for months before the divorce was finalized.
    That said, Diner is a Hollywood movie and, as such, gets several critical details glaringly wrong. For one, quizzing football fans on stats and trivia is a largely pointless tactic. Stats are only important insofar as they can help our fantasy teams. Slavish reliance on statistics for sports enjoyment is the realm of baseball dorks. It’s all they have.Without statistics, baseball would have nothing but the overbearing crush of nostalgia and wacky mascot races. And if they could quantify nostalgia, they’d get Bill James to create a stat for it in a heartbeat.
    Football, on the other hand, is chiefly about emotion, often frighteningly intense and wildly erratic emotion. That’s why you must craft your test on personal experience over objective truths. This may seem to feed into the perception that football is not as intellectually stimulating a sport as others, but that ignores a categorical fact: FOOTBALL’S JUST PLAIN AWESOME, DOUCHECANOE. WOOOO!
    Therefore, asking her for descriptions of the first game she attended, how she became a fan, and the most painful loss she ever experienced is more revealing and instructive than whether she knows which college some random player attended. If you’re concerned that such queries will be more difficult to score, fear not.
    IV.4. A THE FOOTBALL MANIFESTO MATE-MATCHING METRIC
    The first order of business is figuring out where you’re going to conduct this examination. Any number of forbidding, intimidating venues could conceivably work, though there’s a certain amount of jolting verisimilitude to setting up a table on the 50-yard line of a high school football