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This blog was born out of a Dynasty Rankings thread originally begun in October, 2006 at the Footballguys.com message boards. The rankings in that thread and the ensuing wall-to-wall discussion of player values and dynasty league strategy took on a life of its own at over 275 pages and 700,000 page views. The result is what you see in the sidebar under "Updated Positional Rankings": a comprehensive ranking of dynasty league fantasy football players by position on a tiered, weighted scale. In the tradition of the original footballguys.com Dynasty Rankings thread, intelligent debate is welcome and encouraged.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Quote of the Day | March 27, 2008: Life Is Not Always Ascendant

Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, 1986:

"So, like. Whaddaya do?" She has adopted a new sleepy way of talking, as if nothing could bore her more than I do. Again I hear a gull cry. My lip, where Vicki socked me, throbs like a goddamn boil.

"I'm a sportswriter."

"Uh-huh." She parks one hip against the door molding and leans into it. "Whaddaya write about?"

"Well. I write about football and baseball, and players." I take a sip of my sweet, cold float. I actually feel better. Who would've thought a root-beer float could restore both faith and health, or that I would find it in as half-caste a town as this, a place wizened to a few car lots, an adult book store, a shut-down drive-in movie up the road---remnants of a boom that never boomed. . . .

"So, were you, like, a pretty good jock sometime when you were young?"

"I liked baseball then, too, except I couldn't hit or run."

"Uh-huh. Same here." She takes a preposterous puff on her cigarette and exhales all the smoke out her mouth and into the shopping center air. "So. How'd you get interested in it? Did you read about it someplace?"

"I went to college. Then when I got older, I failed at everything else, and that's all I could do."

Debra looks down at me, worry hooding her eyes. Her idea of a big success has a different story line, one that doesn't confess any start-up problems. I can teach her a damned useful lesson in life about that. "That doesn't sound so great," she says.

"It is pretty great, though. Successful life doesn't always follow a straight course to the top. Sometimes things don't work out and you have to change the way you look at things. But you don't want to stop and get discouraged when the chips are all down. That'd be the worst time. If I'd stopped when things went the wrong way, I'd be a goner."

. . .

She has lost interest in me, and I can't blame her. I might as well have speaking French from the planet Pluto. I am not an answer man of any kind. . . .

As I watch her walk out into the lot toward the Ground Zero, her hands fishing in her pocket for a new cigarette, shoulders hunched against a cold breeze that isn't blowing, her hopes for a nice day, I could guess, are as good as mine, both of us out in the wind, expectant, available for an improvement. And my hopes are that a little luck will come both our ways. Life is not always ascendant.


Tags: Richard Ford, The Sportswriter

2 comments:

kobayashi said...

One of my favourite quotes in the last weeks, very useful in this troubled days. And it also has a fantasy face, "something good can come even if your dynasty stud RB is out for a year"

Chris Wesseling said...

Nicely said, Vito. I love that phrase he uses.

I could have left out the rest of the quote b/c the last line is really the best part . . . but even a great line like that needs context.