All Hail The Pathos Of The NBA Draft Lottery

Jack Kerouac. The Beat writer, known to most of you as the guy you read a ton in college before selling all his books for cash midway through the first year at your first job, turns out to have been a closet fantasy baseball fan. This makes a certain amount of sense: Obsessive minds tend to gravitate toward obsessive hobbies, and fantasy baseball is, at its best, a borderline psychotic activity. (I say this with love in my heart and a full-throated plea of "guilty.") But his embarrassment about it — and his insistence on hiding it from his "cool" friends (most of which he was having sex with, I might add) — severely damages one of my theories about fantasy sports: There's absolutely nothing dorky about it at all. (Or, at least, it's not any more dorky than actually being a sports fan.) For some reason, the idea that it's "dorky" to be in fantasy sports continues to fester, and I always thought it was because studio analysts and professional/retired athletes loved to make fun of people who played. (Until the networks realized how much money was in it, anyway.) But apparently people have been thinking this for decades. Next thing you know, someone's going to inform me it's dorky to own this DVD set. The more you know, I guess.